28 Days Later

[rm]

I'm going to stop just shy of saying this is an important film. I mean, for heaven's sake, it's a zombie film done by Danny Boyle. BUT, it is important in terms of what horror is (which is utterly different than frightening) and because for a mass release film, it's absolutely an art film in every way and stunning for it. It really made me stop and think about what film is capable of, and even made me wonder the wisdom of that.

I loved it, and I think you should all go see it, but I'm pretty tough, and I feel like I am never ever going to be okay again. Everyone I saw it with was shaking for a good hour after we came out of the theater -- not from the gore, or the stuff that pops out at you and makes you scream, but for the sheer visceral honesty of the world the film presents us with.



Yeah, it's still Danny Boyle, so yeah, that is spray painted on a wall at one point early in the film, but oh my god, you never expected this from him. This is raw, powerful stuff, that's not going to sit well with anyone.

I feel impelled to warn New Yorkers that there's a scene where our hero, having awoken from a coma into a new world where he's yet to see any people, and he doesn't know why, comes across a large kiosk in a plaza, covered with missing posters, home-made, ripped, water-logged, ink bleeding. We've seen those here, and it's a very very hard moment to take, but an important one because what happened here, that wasn't the fucking end of the world, and we'd do well to remember as much.

There is a moment, when our hero goes to his parents house, to find they committed suicide before the virus got them. They are clutching a picture of him as a child. On the back of it, it says, handwritten, "we left you sleeping; now we are sleeping with you. don't wake up."

I almost vomitted during this movie repeatedly, again, not for the gore, but elements like that, you know what it takes to live in this world, and I was left thinking of my childhood nightmares, where it was so much easier to let the monsters capture and kill me, than to live with so much terror. There's some interesting allegory about my life there too -- but not in a film review.

Also a lot of stuff about women, and their place in the end of the world -- a bit heavy handed, but a film about rage and the end of the world, is about simple things.


This is a daring, horrifying movie. Please go see it.

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

I also found Blair Witch decidedly non-scary (although I remain bothered by something in the end of the film, that sat oddly with me for reasons I've never figured out) and I didn't see Signs, but yeah this is WAY fucking scary.

Won't make you not want to be alone in the house though -- just, it'll make you think about a lot of awful awful stuff.

Also, it was shot on DV -- to great effect, but it's pretty murky for it, and might not hold up at all on a small screen.

[kimberlycreates.livejournal.com]

The only thing I liked about Blair Witch was the end - aside from the fact that it was over, it left a lot to the imagination which is scarier than anything you can put on the screen.