By the 1990s, the zombie film had all but disappeared along with the heyday of gory practical make-up effects of the 1980s, with just a few zombie titles appearing in theaters throughout the decade. In the U.S., zombies also became a source of horror-comedy in the 1980s, and directors Stuart Gordon ( Re-Animator, 1985) and Fred Dekker ( Night of the Creeps, 1986) used them to explore the genre for cult audiences primed for a grim laugh. At the same time in Europe, filmmakers such as Lucio Fulci ( City of the Living Dead, 1980), Bruno Mattei ( Hell of the Living Dead, 1980), and Jean Rollin ( Zombie Lake, 1981) built upon Romero’s formative examples of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) by testing the limits of gore and exploitation. Romero’s bitter Day of the Dead (1985) to the comically self-aware The Return of the Living Dead (1985), along with countless others. Zombie films reached a minor zenith in the 1980s, with examples ranging from George A. Whether by intention or convenient timing, the film exploits post-9/11 anxieties felt by the newly globalized world, using a genre that had been largely absent from cinemas for more than a decade-the zombie film, which often uses reanimated corpses to symbolize how human beings were the greatest threat to humanity. Above all others, the zombie film remains the most popular example of humanity processing its uncertainty and innate fear of humanity’s violent limits and faulty infrastructure.Ģ8 Days Later reveals how the western world no longer felt safe and secure, and how perhaps that security was always an illusion. And while such stories were explored prior to 9/11, they became omnipresent in the cultural consciousness after 2001. Films and television shows negotiated these anxieties with hundreds of stories about the apocalypse, post-nuclear wastelands, alien invasions, bioterrorism, and massive pandemics. The world had become an all-penetrating force, resulting in waves of increasing paranoia about the threat of terrorism, war, or environmental disaster, and from them, the lingering threat of an apocalypse that could occur at any moment. Life suddenly became unpredictable, unreliable, and insecure-a condition that was not exclusive to the U.S. No longer were there safe spaces to which one could escape. No longer could someone cut themselves off from the world. Bush to launch an “international coalition against terror” volunteered the rest of the world to take part in the United States’ grief and desire for vengeance. In the aftermath, the rhetoric used by President George W. In his essay “9/11 and the Wasted Lives of Posthuman Zombies,” Lars Schmeink observes that popular culture’s way of dealing with post-9/11 tensions was “rich in critique of the social realities that led to the attacks and/or followed them, as well as rich in negotiations of the feelings of despair, apocalypse, and helplessness.” The attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, were the catalyst for a new form of globalization from which no one could escape. The resulting apocalypse and disintegration of all that is familiar and safe, dramatized in the film with great symbolic effect, contains a foreboding toward the modern world that continues to reverberate. 28 Days Later manifests these social and institutional anxieties into a virus, an unseen threat in the form of an invasive metaphor. Boyle’s film addresses our inability to maintain control in an accelerated world, where the infrastructure’s vulnerability has resulted in insecurity, doubt, despair, and also an overarching rage over its failure. It is also a superb original, building on established genre tropes to capture the new heights of accelerated violence and paranoia that pulse through the veins of the twenty-first century. Danny Boyle’s 2002 film is a zombie reinvention, introducing a fast-paced zombie alternative that, in its frantic speed and unrelenting savagery, better symbolizes how people have an innate fear of the collapse of social order and losing oneself to the inhumanity of rage and violence. It warns that our civilization teeter-totters on the brink of chaos and oblivion, drawing from a recent past and signaling to a dreaded future. It is a reflection of the crisis mentality felt throughout Western culture in the wake of 9/11, though it was written before the historic attack and released in its aftermath. 28 Days Later exposes the impotence of our institutions, both social and administrative, and the bleak realization that people are not as well safeguarded from danger as they believe.
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