Are the fires of Hell a-glowing?

December 10, 2024 5:12 AM

More than two decades after the original film popularized the "fast zombie" craze, we finally have our first look at Danny Boyle's long-awaited return to horror, and one of the best trailers in years: 28 YEARS LATER. Though the trailer's terrifying, cultlike atmosphere and snatches of atavistic violence are intriguing, the real star is the soundtrack: a tinny, 110-year-old poetry reading whose hypnotically repetitive words tromp relentlessly from prim recitation to jangling nerves to a hysterical, nightmarish climax. The poem, Rudyard Kipling's "Boots", was originally written to memorialize (and echo) the wretched forced marches of the Second Boer War (as former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink recites/explains), its grim refrain a verse from Ecclesiastes on the inevitability of death. The howling rendition from the trailer, made by early film star Taylor Holmes in 1915, has long been used by elite SERE training schools to psychologically break recruits. 2spooky4u? There are plenty of alternatives: pioneering composer Kay Swift at age 14 (1911) - the sonorous Peter Dawson (1930) - the melodramatic Eric Woodburn (1935) - the operatic Leonard Warren (1951) - folksy anarchist Leslie Fish (1991) - or cleanse the palette with the goofy Red Skelton parody, "Frogs."
posted by Rhaomi (89 comments total)

The soundtrack on these movies has always been their best feature... the first one introduced an entire generation to the apocalyptic droning of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and used "Black Flag Blues" to create some really goddamn bleak ambiance. Can't wait to see how Boyle fucks with his audience's heads with ambient Ecclesiastic dread!
posted by Mayor West at 5:47 AM on December 10, 2024 [2 favorites]

I'm interested, but I'd rather see a remaster of the original that's somehow watchable; the cutting-edge video technology that looked so amazing in 2002 is rendered as a soupy mess on my TV, which is literally nine years old. I'm glad this new one appears to be shot on film.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:09 AM on December 10, 2024 [2 favorites]

(I could be more interested. The subject matter looks dreary, and honestly I'm pretty over Alex Garland.)
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:11 AM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

I just watched the trailer a few moments before I saw your post and was wondering what the spoken word portion was, so thank you!

Biggest takeaway? It looks like Ralph Fiennes got to use his new ropy ripped bod again after finishing filming "The Return".
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:14 AM on December 10, 2024 [6 favorites]

From the SERE link:

No one who ever attended Navy SERE will forget “Boots.”
posted by Lemkin at 6:18 AM on December 10, 2024

I'm glad there's room for 3 more movies in this series
posted by kokaku at 6:18 AM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

I'm glad there's room for 3 more movies in this series

By current measurements of the density of dark energy, there will be no Big Rip. So 28 Eons Later is still in the cards - though it will need to be set somewhere other than England.
posted by Lemkin at 6:35 AM on December 10, 2024 [3 favorites]

The more I think about it, the more it seems like the massive catastrophe would result in a utopian state due to abundant resources (the result of depopulation) and a tendency for antisocial people to, ironically, be removed from the population by swift violence. People like me (who rely on blood pressure medication to stay alive) would die almost immediately, with or without the assistance of the infected, which might also result in a healthier populace three decades later, as hereditary illness would be much rarer. In this essay, I will
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:49 AM on December 10, 2024 [12 favorites]

I heard it this morning and it really made the trailer shine. The trailer was fine, but this recitation pushed up to great. Thank you for sharing it's identity and origin!

The 28 Days/28 Months later are in my love 'em and hate 'em category. They're fun films to watch, but they introduced the "fast zombie" which really doesn't make any sense. Yes, I know, at first people are infected, so they're not quite "dead" but without the consumption of water (would a zombie know to drink water??) and I guess lack of ingesting water through eating people, a lot of zombies should physically deteriorate into non-threats within a few weeks if not sooner. The human body is a really finicky thing that needs continual input of needed substance to stay fully operational.
posted by Atreides at 7:02 AM on December 10, 2024 [5 favorites]

I always wrote the fast zombie thing off as the virus causing infected people to run their bodies like demolition derby cars: they don't care what happens to them, they just keep going and tearing shit up until they're unusable.

Not a great explanation, but it is a movie about living dead cannibals, so.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:09 AM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

I thought 28 Days Later stood out

I'm not sure that dwelling on the believability of the zombie mechanics is relevant, but I can see that a percentage of people were bound to do that
posted by ginger.beef at 7:14 AM on December 10, 2024

It's entirely not relevant. That's the curse that myself, and many live with. We used to be a proper society with proper monster rules that monsters abided by, properly!
posted by Atreides at 7:24 AM on December 10, 2024 [10 favorites]

"these fucking millennial zombies and their Go Fast attitude"
posted by ginger.beef at 7:31 AM on December 10, 2024 [4 favorites]

I'd rather see a remaster of the original that's somehow watchable

The camera 28 Days Later was shot on, the Cannon XL-1, has a standard definition resolution of 720×576. The film is natively 720p. There's no remastering that would change that.

They could run it through some kind of bullshit AI upscaling, but I gather they don't want to do that, to which I say: GOOD.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:38 AM on December 10, 2024 [12 favorites]

We are probably due for zombies to become part of the zeitgeist again for a while. I've always subscribed to the theory that zombie movies are really about fear of other people, about the idea that other people can be dangerous and stupid.

Humanity seems extra dangerous and extra stupid of late, so another turn with zombies seems well-timed.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:44 AM on December 10, 2024 [16 favorites]

28 Years Later was not only not shot on film... it was shot on an iPhone 15.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:47 AM on December 10, 2024 [4 favorites]

I've never seen any of these films: I like my horror psychological, not jump-scare. Are they actually worth it, or just things folks talk about because nearly everyone's seen them?
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:47 AM on December 10, 2024

Are they actually worth it, or just things folks talk about because nearly everyone's seen them?

The first one is excellent. Very much about loneliness and people banding together and/or turning against each other in the worst of times. It's by Danny Boyle, who also made Trainspotting (and its sequel), 127 Hours, Shallow Grave, Slumdog Millionaire, etc.

The second one (not directed by Boyle) is a little less successful, but still good. Plus: Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Harold Perrineau, Imogen Poots, Idris Elba... Great cast.

While unquestionably zombie/horror films, both of the first two installments are treated as quite serious filmmaking, possibly helping presage the later "elevated horror" trend.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:57 AM on December 10, 2024 [6 favorites]

IMO, they are just zombie movies, so if you've seen The Walking Dead or the Last of Us or any other show that purports to be about zombies but instead is about petty human tyrants fighting one another with guns as part of extremely vague power fantasies, then you will like this one.

That may be a criticism of the movies, but this post is excellent, and the link about the SERE training is wild and would make an awesome movie.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:26 AM on December 10, 2024

Are they actually worth it

I think the first one is worth it. The combination of casting, pacing, choices for sound, and just the general capture of the horror of the situation and other people is effective imo

this introduced much of N. America to Cillian Murphy
posted by ginger.beef at 8:34 AM on December 10, 2024 [3 favorites]

Amazing! I can't wait to see the movie when it comes out.

It looks like "28 Days Later" is still not available for legal streaming in the UK on any service. At least 28 years ago there were video stores...
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:48 AM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

Here is 28 Days Later on Internet Archive.

Grab it while it lasts.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:05 AM on December 10, 2024 [3 favorites]

28 Weeks was good but I found it incredibly depressing. At least 28 Days had a semi-hopeful ending.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:10 AM on December 10, 2024 [2 favorites]

This was a great post, thanks! Speaking of using that poem to psychologically break recruits, I really wish this trailer and your post about it had come out when I was still trying to teach poetry to rural Florida teens. I'd just have played all your links for them in order 'til they got the rhythm seared into their brains and then made 'em write their own Red Skelton versions on a topic of their choice.

It was murder trying to get them to understand. I could not get them to see that there's more to, for instance, a limerick than AABBA rhyme, there's rhythm, too, see, there's these things called feet, see? No. No, they did not see. It was one execrable hash after another with a single spectacular exception. There was this enormous high school linebacker kid who mastered every form and turned in clever poems for each one including a perfect sonnet about some of his proudest moments snapping in half various hapless opponents on the football field. He was the only one. But "Boots" would've worked for all of them, I'm sure of it.
posted by Don Pepino at 9:14 AM on December 10, 2024 [8 favorites]

The camera 28 Days Later was shot on, the Cannon XL-1, has a standard definition resolution of 720×576. The film is natively 720p. There's no remastering that would change that.

Is that why it looks so horrible when you stream it these days? I used to love it so much, and used to have it on DVD, but when I tried to stream it recently, it was entirely unwatchable--an experience similar to KfB's above.
posted by mittens at 9:14 AM on December 10, 2024

Yeah, I’ve watched and enjoyed Days, but bounced off Months, and I will be very cautious about going into Years. The first film worked because the digital video allowed them to use central London locations quickly and easily, the second film was grimdark creature feature. Danny Boyles recent decade in film making has been pretty shabby, so aside from excellent musical choices for trailers, I’m not convinced
posted by The River Ivel at 9:21 AM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

Griffin Newman of Blank Check's joke was that 28 Days looked like it had been shot on a fax machine. That leaning into the digital grit, along with the score and the unconventional (at the time) approach to what the focus of a horror film should be, made that movie seem like it was from another planet. I'm not surprised it's incompatible with our current streaming ecosystem - it seems very appropriate as it's never fit into the cinema landscape.
posted by q*ben at 9:25 AM on December 10, 2024 [2 favorites]

People like me (who rely on blood pressure medication to stay alive) would die almost immediately, with or without the assistance of the infected, which might also result in a healthier populace three decades later, as hereditary illness would be much rarer. In this essay, I will

Once I realized how fast things would be over for me because of my dependence on diabetic medication, my interest in zombie movies (already much depleted) went to basically nil, notwithstanding occasional standout works such as The Last of Us and the surprisingly affecting Schwarzenegger movie Maggie. Aside from those, my attitude toward postapocalyptic whatever is generally, "Yeah, good luck with that.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:26 AM on December 10, 2024 [2 favorites]

Also, my interest in Tumblr similarly dwindled after I came across a thread in which some kids reassured each other that, even though they apparently knew absolutely nothing about biochemistry, if the drug-industrial complex fell, they could probably figure out how to homebrew insulin.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:29 AM on December 10, 2024 [3 favorites]

Is that why it looks so horrible when you stream it these days?

The movie is a 720p digital file. Its low-res look originally read on-screen as "wild new way to see the world" and on old school home video, it was higher than the 480p baseline anyway.

But yeah, in our new high def digital world it can feel a bit like "the buffering on streaming is bad today."

I kind of enjoy the way it looks. It is what it is, in any case.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:34 AM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

Is that a Cillian Murphy zombie rising from the wild flowers at 1:48?
posted by bstreep at 9:42 AM on December 10, 2024 [3 favorites]

At least 28 Days had a semi-hopeful ending.

Debatable. I was expecting the military to bomb the survivors so that their HELLO would be punctuated by fire: HELL*.
posted by SPrintF at 9:45 AM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

Is that a Cillian Murphy zombie rising from the wild flowers at 1:48?

According to Deadline, yes.
posted by ArmandoAkimbo at 9:45 AM on December 10, 2024

They couldn’t wait five years?
posted by atoxyl at 9:46 AM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

I don't really know enough about digital filmmaking and the platforms that we use to watch it on to know why, but I do know that a film I remember being a little otherworldly and weird in the theater in 2003 is, today, almost impossible to even look at on a DVD (and I'm sure I watched it on DVD more than once in the '00s). I presume this is something to do with modern platforms and not to do with changing tastes, as I literally cannot follow the action or tell who characters are from shot to shot now (although I am willing to entertain the idea that my brain is simply not any longer "trained" to interpret video quality from two decades ago). In any case, it's too bad, because I think a lot of new viewers who would have enjoyed the original will probably not enjoy it today. I hope that modern phone video technology ages a little more gracefully!
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:48 AM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

The first one launched the zombie craze of the aughts. I'm not saying other projects weren't already in motion, but after 28 Days Later came out in 2002 you quickly get Kirkman's Walking Dead comic (shamelessly stealing the film's hospital opening for its first issue), then Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake and Shaun of the Dead in 2004, and Romero finally getting money to return to his series with Land of the Dead in 2005.

It's a taut film, and one that I still think about a lot. The depopulated scenes of London were novel and incredibly effective at the the time, and the third act—nearly wordless—is close to perfect. Unlike a lot of what came later, 28 Days Later isn't a power fantasy at all. It's a movie that rejects society and humanity, that wants you to ask, "who's really the rage-infected monkey, here?" I felt cleaner at the end of Requiem for a Dream than I did at the end of this movie!

But: coming on the heels of 9/11, it also tilted the conversation very much towards fatalism and dissolution. Zombie movies were not really about "petty human tyrants fighting one another with guns" in the 1990s; they were primarily about how gory you could make the special effects. Slow zombies were made for skewering conformity and consumerism, and could be overcome with cooperation. Fast zombies were terror made flesh, overwhelming and unstoppable. Later stories combined that with the power fantasy of being one of the few human survivors in an apocalyptic world, and that created tropes that have reverberated through our politics over the past two decades in a lot of weird, mostly negative ways. It will be interesting to see if the new movie tries to account for any of that, but I definitely don't expect it to come down in favor of the guys with the guns.
posted by thecaddy at 9:57 AM on December 10, 2024 [14 favorites]

oh my. that trailer looks great. off to add to my watch list!
posted by supermedusa at 10:08 AM on December 10, 2024

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. Homebrew Insulin is my new band name.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 10:18 AM on December 10, 2024 [4 favorites]

I thought the first movie was very well made & affecting, but somehow i didn't appreciate them messing with the zombie myth (same as making vampires beautiful). Once i wrote an essay on the meaning of zombies (the truth behind the myth is something else). On the whole, the return of zombies in pop culture at this particular moment is not a good sign. At all.
posted by graywyvern at 10:19 AM on December 10, 2024 [2 favorites]

The first one launched the zombie craze of the aughts. I'm not saying other projects weren't already in motion, but after 28 Days Later came out in 2002 you quickly get Kirkman's Walking Dead comic (shamelessly stealing the film's hospital opening for its first issue), then Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake and Shaun of the Dead in 2004, and Romero finally getting money to return to his series with Land of the Dead in 2005.

Also definitely inspired World War Z (novel 2006, movie 2013). I'd also be willing to bet that I Am Legend (2007), though based on a 1950s book, was not fully greenlit for production until after the hollywood exec types saw the 28 Days money rolling in.
posted by Atreides at 10:39 AM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

I'm...

I think I finally figured out why this movie (and zombie movies in general, and even horror movies in general), and Warhammer 40K, and a lot of horror novels, really don't ring with me. I mean, when I was younger, I devoured ahem a lot of Clive Barker stuff, but the one that I kept coming back to was Cabal.

As I get older and the world gets darker and more and more people hate me and get elected using me and my tribe as scapegoats and distractions just because I'm me, I find myself looking more and more for hope. There is none in so many of these things. There's just anger and sadness and misery and rage. Hope in them exists just to be taken away, ripped away at the last moment. I'm not saying I want life to be a Disney movie, but the denial of hope, that crippling bleakness, is the part that makes me hate it.

And Cabal, for all the horror in it, ends on a hopeful note. Yes, Midian is destroyed, Baphomet is broken, but the tribes live, and Boone has been given a quest to find redemption from his fumbling and mistakes by finding a new place for them to live. There's a chance.

But Jason and Freddy and the Ruinous Powers will always return, and the virus will never go away, and your fight, your work, your hope was meaningless and useless. Can I be allowed to be tired of it and want hope to win sometimes?

(I mean, I know people are sick of hearing me mention it, but in my current work in progress, there's a lot of crap that happens to the main character, and some of it is really tough, but she will be rewarded for her faith and her hope. Because I'm so tired of grimdark and want more noblebright.)
posted by mephron at 10:41 AM on December 10, 2024 [15 favorites]

I appreciating you sharing your worldview and how it informs what you watch. And if it works for you, cool.

But that's a pretty blinkered, limited view of horror. Although horror generally looks at dark things, plenty of it is at least dimly hopeful, a fair bit of it has measured optimism, and some of it is full-on, nakedly optimistic. It's far from being all grimdark. Even the stuff that's ostensibly pessimist is not necessarily trying to bum people out, but can be making a case for how people can/should do better.

It's like Gene Siskel always said, "A movie isn't about what it is about; it is about how it is about it."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:44 AM on December 10, 2024 [2 favorites]

Just for one example, as noted above 28 Days Later has an optimistic ending.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:53 AM on December 10, 2024

DirtyOldTown, maybe it's just the stuff I keep finding, but so much of the recent stuff I see on streaming seems to have "Horrible things happen to people and the people that do it get away, sometimes laughing" as a summary.

Can you give me the name of something that's got a kind of optimism on it? I'm willing to try, but I really don't think I can go through some of these things looking for an optimistic feeling anymore.
posted by mephron at 10:55 AM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

I can, but because to discuss tone is to set up inferences about endings, I will do that via MeMail.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:58 AM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

I always wrote the fast zombie thing off as the virus causing infected people to run their bodies like demolition derby cars: they don't care what happens to them, they just keep going and tearing shit up until they're unusable.

In Train to Busain, you see zombies break limbs, and then keep on on coming, broken arms flapping away. So, in that one at least, they're running to destruction.
posted by Spike Glee at 11:00 AM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

Also definitely inspired World War Z (novel 2006, movie 2013).

I cut a sentence about that from my earlier comment, but it's really interesting to me that Max Brooks' original novel is a history of the zombie war, and it's one of the stories that shows resiliance and teamwork with other people and groups as the only successful response to a slow, inexorable crisis. It was trying to push back against the themes of 28 Days Later as well as some of the early prepper mindset in Brooks' own Zombie Survival Guide, and it used slow zombies as the threat.

The movie went with fast zombies.
posted by thecaddy at 11:18 AM on December 10, 2024 [15 favorites]

As noted above 28 Days Later was pretty excellent, but I really didn't like its influence. While it carried off its seriousness well, I felt like its followers in Dawn of the Dead, The Walking Dead, etc weren't so much "serious" as "humorless." 28 Days was thematically dark to make a point, the others seemed to take bleakness as a mostly aesthetic choice, and that feels miles different to me. I've always found the older camp horror of Romero, Barker, and Carpenter really fun, but the 2000s ushered in some tonal shifts to the genre that I still have a hard time enjoying. Just not my style.

Maybe I just got old and boring? Nah, I'm still cool. It's the zombies that are wrong.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 11:20 AM on December 10, 2024 [4 favorites]

(shamelessly stealing the film's hospital opening for its first issue)

ACTUALLY (pushes glasses up nose) they BOTH stole from the book Day of the Triffids, where the protagonist woke up in a hospital after the catastrophe.
posted by emjaybee at 11:45 AM on December 10, 2024 [18 favorites]

Jodie Comer is in it? I'm there.

(I would have been anyway, because I'm the opposite of over Alex Garland and Danny Boyle is doing just fine by me lately, but Comer is amazing.)
posted by rory at 11:49 AM on December 10, 2024

The original Boots recording, on a two-hour loop. If you need it.
posted by pjenks at 11:58 AM on December 10, 2024 [3 favorites]

Atreides: Yes, I know, at first people are infected, so they're not quite "dead" but without the consumption of water (would a zombie know to drink water??) and I guess lack of ingesting water through eating people, a lot of zombies should physically deteriorate into non-threats within a few weeks if not sooner.

ISTR that being the premise of 28 Weeks Later: the virus burned itself out after a few months as the island of Britain was quarantined and the infected dehydrated / starved to death and the reservoir of potential hosts dried up. Then the Americans arrive and duly screw the pooch.

The Last of Us actually had their fast zombies catching and eating animals (including humans); I assume they drank from puddles too. But the writers waved a lot of practical objections away with "it's a magic fungus" so at a certain point you have to suspend disbelief.

Honestly I found both of those more believable than The Walking Dead. That rotted dessicated half-corpse dragging itself across the park has to obey the laws of thermodynamics at some point, doesn't it?
posted by xthlc at 12:17 PM on December 10, 2024 [4 favorites]

The first one is one of my favourite films. I'm not sure US Americans can identify with how much more horrifying the localisation of this horror film was. He wasn't chowing down on Twinkies to get back to his maw and paw; he had a Tango and Maltesers and needed to check on his mammy. I was right along side him, Jesus, Cillian, get another Tango for me, the green one please.
posted by Iteki at 12:18 PM on December 10, 2024 [4 favorites]

Btw, references to it being in 720 are off, the article above says that while 720 was available on the camera, they filmed at 480. I streamed it at Christmas, it looked like arse. I have the DVD here and will want to re-watch in the run-up, I'm wondering if DVD to projector might be best output, or do I need to like, use CRT plugins like for retro gaming emulation?
posted by Iteki at 12:22 PM on December 10, 2024 [4 favorites]

The Last of Us actually had their fast zombies catching and eating animals (including humans); I assume they drank from puddles too. But the writers waved a lot of practical objections away with "it's a magic fungus" so at a certain point you have to suspend disbelief.

Yeah, but the story told in the movie 28 Days Later and The Last of Us is not about the 'zombies'. They act as occasional bits of terror, but the main story of 28 Days Later is the rogue army dudes keeping the zombie (surprise that is useful to the heroes) and threatening to enslave the lady and kill the guy and The Last of Us is just a story about the two heroes single-handedly wiping out every encampment of crappy humans that they come to.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:22 PM on December 10, 2024 [2 favorites]

Btw, references to it being in 720 are off, the article above says that while 720 was available on the camera, they filmed at 480.

Oh that's wild! Which article was that? I missed the link.

I had always heard/assumed 720, because of the camera, but if it's 480... there is literally no reason to bother with anything beyond a DVD anyway.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:29 PM on December 10, 2024

That rotted dessicated half-corpse dragging itself across the park has to obey the laws of thermodynamics at some point, doesn't it?
Yes, this is my issue with the whole ambulatorydecayedflesh tradition. Large portions of the muscle animals use to move their limbs around have been torn away, so exactly how is this working for the zombie? Bones don't just move by themselves; they have to have intact ligaments and then they have to have sufficient non-shredded muscle to move the bone. You can't just wale away on a body 'til it's missing 50% of the flesh on the skeleton and expect the thing to keep shambling along to the next plot point. Although it is true that I got so fed up with Walking Dead that the moving corpses were all I watched. I fast forwarded through all the dialogue in the last several seasons and only paid attention to the shambling hordes scenes despite the fact that none of it made any sense. I liked the fashions, and I liked thinking how it would be to be a 40-hr-week Walking Dead zombie extra as a career. Live in ATL with the awesome music and food scenes, get to vote for Stacey Abrams, wake up every day and put on bloodsoaked burlap and a missing-jaw prosthetic and head on down to the workplace. Fun!
posted by Don Pepino at 12:33 PM on December 10, 2024 [3 favorites]

28 Days was thematically dark to make a point, the others seemed to take bleakness as a mostly aesthetic choice, and that feels miles different to me. I've always found the older camp horror of Romero, Barker, and Carpenter really fun, but the 2000s ushered in some tonal shifts to the genre that I still have a hard time enjoying. Just not my style.

This is an interesting discussion. By far my favorite zombie movie is Return of the Living Dead, which is both campy fun and thoroughly bleak. I feel like this says something about how each of us prefers to process bad stuff in the world.
posted by atoxyl at 12:34 PM on December 10, 2024 [2 favorites]

There is an amateur attempting to make a 1080p version (sorta) of 28 Days Later.

Bless them and their efforts and they do seem to have done cool things in the past... but I do not see a real difference between the before and after screenshots. It's notable though that they're not really focused on a true upscale, they're trying to use the tools for a version that tries to reduce noise and artefacts when the film is shown on a bigger screen.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:40 PM on December 10, 2024

Can you give me the name of something that's got a kind of optimism on it?

Not zombies, but Station Eleven is great if you like your post-apocalypses with at least a salting of hope.

I also spotted Zombie Cillian. I think his near cadaverous appearance in Oppenheimer primed me to spot the cheekbones a mile away.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 12:54 PM on December 10, 2024 [2 favorites]

Oh, and I’m mostly interested in the new film. I still have a fair bit of time for Garland and Boyle, I’ve generally loved their combined work. Really hope they can stick the landing, though, and not go the “and then someone flips out and kills everyone” route which has been in about 4 or 5 of their films.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 12:58 PM on December 10, 2024

For me zombie movies are mostly dumb and boring, but I liked 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later just fine. They did something different with the genre at least.

Note to studios: this is how you cut a trailer. Focus on the song, or in this case a very appropriate poem, and give us glimpses of the story. You don't even need dialogue! Most trailers these days are a 2.5-minute summary of the entire film, spoilers included.

28 Years Later was not only not shot on film... it was shot on an iPhone 15.

As that linked article says, there are a few features that have been shot on iPhones, but with those they didn't use any different lenses--just the wide-angle lens of the iPhone. With this they obviously used film lenses, so would've had to have rigged special modded iPhones to fit the lenses. Which makes me wonder why go through the hassle of that, why not just use an Arri digital camera? But I guess the iPhone 15, and Apple, are the unspoken stars of the movie. That's the ultimate product placement: it's in every shot.
posted by zardoz at 1:03 PM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

I've been thinking about mephron's comment all afternoon: "Can I be allowed to be tired of it and want hope to win sometimes?" Because what I find is almost exactly the opposite: I want something so bleak it feels like real life, the hopelessness of life...but typically filmmakers are not willing to give that to you. The closest they can get is a sneer. It's not nihilistic enough. Cruelty, wanting to rub your protagonist's and your audiences face in filth and despair, feel to me as though the writer or director hasn't fully grasped what powerlessness feels like. That power relationship--or, more crassly, knowing the writer or director is getting off on hurting us small little creatures--to me expresses "more of the same" rather than a true existential bleakness. So I think I've given up on the same kind of movies but for slightly different reasons!

Also, I'm always here for complaining about The Walking Dead. I tried a rewatch recently and was surprised to remember how quickly things began falling apart for that show. It was much sooner than I'd remembered, when it got stuck in its "here are some people trying to live a different way--oh whoops, no, they're living the WRONG way, and now we have to go to grim and silent battle with them." I think I could've watched the show forever if they'd had a "supply run of the week" format, battling the environmental terror of the zombies, but what a waste.
posted by mittens at 1:16 PM on December 10, 2024 [4 favorites]

I want something so bleak it feels like real life, the hopelessness of life

New season of Severance lands on Apple+ in a few weeks!
posted by rory at 1:42 PM on December 10, 2024 [3 favorites]

they introduced the "fast zombie"

Just as a point of order, fast zombies date back to at least 1985's Return of the Living Dead.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 1:45 PM on December 10, 2024 [2 favorites]

I want something so bleak it feels like real life

mittens, I wouldn't go to horror for this, I'd send you straight to Romanian New Wave drama.

Have a go with the films of Cristian Mungiu (R.M.N., his latest is on Hulu; he's the most universally acclaimed filmmaker from Romania), Radu Jude (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is free on Mubi, which has a free trial, or for rent; it's my vote for best film of the year) or Ioana Uricaru (her film Lemonade is largely in English and is free on Plex).

These films are bleak in a way that reflects a disappointed optimism mixed with frustrated powerlessness, as opposed to just nihilism or pessimism.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:47 PM on December 10, 2024 [4 favorites]

Must we drag Tinky and LaLa into this? They've seen enough horror worshiping the Sun Baby.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:50 PM on December 10, 2024

Praying that Simon Pegg and Nick Frost also rise up in that field.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 1:57 PM on December 10, 2024 [3 favorites]

Just as a point of order, fast zombies date back to at least 1985's Return of the Living Dead.

I think there are a few earlier precedents but yeah that’s probably the best known. Of course RotLD zombies also talk.

Anyway it’s more that 28 Days followed by the Zack Snyder Dawn of the Dead made fast zombies the trend for the zombie wave of the 00s.
posted by atoxyl at 2:06 PM on December 10, 2024

All these comments about bleakness...one of the main reasons I like these kinds of movies is the weirdly reassuring feeling they give that things could be so much worse.
posted by gottabefunky at 2:43 PM on December 10, 2024 [3 favorites]

ACTUALLY (pushes glasses up nose)

ALSO they're only "zombies" if they're supernatural animated corpses from Haiti. Otherwise they're just sparkling cannibals.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 3:40 PM on December 10, 2024 [10 favorites]

I thought that was Twilight.
posted by No-sword at 3:44 PM on December 10, 2024 [4 favorites]

I hadn’t realized this was supposed to be a trilogy, so that cut into my enthusiasm a smidge. On the other hand, the towers of bone they’re walking through at the end of the trailer, and the title for the second film being the Bone Temple? Hmm.

As mentioned above, World War Z was a pretty great book, and an utterly pointless waste of that novel as a movie. The template for adapting that book already exists: Band of Brothers. Open each vignette with someone sitting in front of a camera, talking about the event they were connected to, then cut to the event happening. Of course, that’s the kind of thing that would be better as a single season (like Station Eleven) and need an ensemble cast, not a giant Hollywood star sucking up all the screen time.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:10 PM on December 10, 2024 [3 favorites]

I always wanted the template for a World War Z film to be Ken Burns' The Civil War.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:27 PM on December 10, 2024 [6 favorites]

I still want to see it done 100% anthology style. A different cast and a different director every week.

Give me the Battle of Yonkers on the Cross-County, dammit!
posted by thecaddy at 4:42 PM on December 10, 2024 [2 favorites]

(I don’t care that Brooks put it on the Saw Mill! I want the Cross County Center mall in the background!)
posted by thecaddy at 4:45 PM on December 10, 2024

For a lengthy, four-part essay on 28 Days Later and sprinting zombies, see The Running of the Dead (part 2, part 3, part 4), by Christian Thorne. He describes fast-zombie movies as being a vivid depiction of Hobbes' state of nature:

That is how a movie can give you a crash course in seventeenth-century political philosophy, at least at the level of your gut. Fast-zombie movies offer up emotional lessons in Hobbesean thought, forcing you to contemplate the state of nature more effectively than Hobbes ever managed to, simply by bringing it to life before your eyes.

posted by russilwvong at 4:57 PM on December 10, 2024 [1 favorite]

'Revolt of the Zombies.' 1936

'Z Mom'. 2024
posted by clavdivs at 5:00 PM on December 10, 2024

I'd be remiss if I didn't offer a shout-out to Black Summer. This series featured fast, rage-filled zombies that were frightening in part because they appeared so human. Crazy, pissed-off humans, yes, and for that reason seemed more readily comprehensible than shambling masses of bloody giblets. A relentlessly tense series that never allowed the protagonists to escape from hard choices.
posted by SPrintF at 5:18 PM on December 10, 2024 [3 favorites]

My buddy did some stunt work in Black Summer! And I'm going to see him and eat tacos tonight! And I will share with him the love of a random internet stranger for Black Summer.
posted by ginger.beef at 5:41 PM on December 10, 2024 [4 favorites]

I read some wag make the point that birds would simply devour zombies little by little. You'd have a bunch of very well fed birds and human skeletons. Can a zombie move (fast or slow) without muscles?
posted by SoberHighland at 6:10 PM on December 10, 2024 [4 favorites]

pretty much every zombie I've seen would have been better without the zombies. Return of the Living Dead may be the one outlier.
posted by philip-random at 7:28 PM on December 10, 2024

I like the Santa Clarita Diet take on zombies. I was gutted when the series was cut.
posted by phigmov at 9:09 PM on December 10, 2024 [5 favorites]

On a side topic: Leslie Fish, mentioned above for her rendition of "Boots", actually has done musical arrangements of a number of Kipling poems. There's a whole album, Our Fathers of Old (link is to a full-album playlist on YT), and a few that weren't on that album, including the aforementioned "Boots" as well as "Cold Iron". Many of them are really good!
posted by adrienneleigh at 12:51 AM on December 11, 2024 [2 favorites]

pretty much every zombie I've seen would have been better without the zombies. Return of the Living Dead may be the one outlier.

I'm trying to imagine someone seeing a post about Phish and dropping by just to leave "pretty much every Phish album I've heard would have been better without Phish" the internet is truly wonderful and exposure to All the Opinions is really the best part
posted by ginger.beef at 7:15 AM on December 11, 2024 [3 favorites]

I like the Santa Clarita Diet yt take on zombies. I was gutted when the series was cut.

One of my favorite shows of the teens was I, Zombie, such a fun show with an excellent cast.
posted by Atreides at 7:18 AM on December 11, 2024 [4 favorites]

I really appreciate the various linked renditions of "Boots". Holmes, though... goddamn. Better than most of the horror movies I've watched lately.
posted by McBearclaw at 10:00 AM on December 11, 2024 [3 favorites]

The soundtrack on these movies has always been their best feature... the first one introduced an entire generation to the apocalyptic droning of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and used "Black Flag Blues" to create some really goddamn bleak ambiance.

Psssst.... It was East Hastings/Dead Flag Blues.

Also, 28 Days Later gave me nightmares which have, off and on, continued to this day. I will be lining up to see this, however.
posted by jokeefe at 8:40 PM on December 11, 2024 [3 favorites]

I've had Leslie Fish's rendition stuck in my head for the past few days. Except, it's in a major key and it's about the Wikipedia edit war over Boops boops.

Sea sea sea sea bream of the Atlantic
Sees sees sees sees with its big round eyes
Boops boops, Boops boops, Boops boops in a bucket
There's no discharge in the war!

7.6.11.5, IP banned forever more
4.11.7.10, public wifi, try some more
Boops boops, Boops boops, Boops boops in a bucket
There's no discharge in the war!

posted by dustletter at 8:26 AM on December 14, 2024