Night 30: 28 Days Later

Every generation gets the Zombie it deserves.

Say goodbye to the lumbering, slack-jawed meat puppets of yesteryear, with their quaint but crude methods of ingestion and transmission. No longer must we suffer the indignity of being partially eaten or even killed before we turn to the Dark Side. The Undead have become The Infected. Zombies have gone viral, baby, and they attack with the quickness of Usain Bolt. All it takes is a drop of their blood in an unprotected orifice and then no coctail of drugs in the world can save you.

We have 2002's 28 Days Later to thank for this shift in the zombie paradigm. Sure, other films contributed to the movement, but nothing codified on quite the same scale or budget. This is also due to the generational cred the film's creators carried with them into its making. Director Danny Boyle could have stopped at Trainspotting and earned himself mention in any survey of postmodern cultural touchstones. The same could be said for writer Alex Garland, whose first novel The Beach (subsequently filmed by Danny Boyle) was the cult book of 1996. The pair has gone on to collaborate twice more--on the aforementioned Beach and an underrated sci-fi thinker called Sunshine--but nothing so far has cohered quite as well as their first.

I'm actually not a very big fan of zombie movies. Very few of them frighten me, and so most fail to meet my criteria for quality horror. With that said, I think 28 Days Later is about as good as a zombie film can hope to be. Thanks to a talented cast headed up by the ice-eyed Cillian Murphy, the characters are sympathetic and believable. They are also quite savvy and make blessedly few of the stupid mistakes that plague so many of these movies. Boyle's trendsetting choice to shoot the film with digital cameras gives 28 Days the grainy and aptly blown-out look of war footage. The final third loses focus, and turns a bit gung-ho, but all in all I was about as satisfied with this film last night as I was when I first saw it in the theater.




Well, folks, here endeth the official term on my 30 Days of Night(mares), though I'm sure I'll be feeling its effects for weeks to come. Thanks to those that bothered to read along. I'm sure I missed a few horror films worth watching (The Others, in particular, probably deserved a spot on this list) and would love to hear from anybody who has one in mind. Should you care to continue sampling my bloggerel, you can continue to check back here at Hinterzone where, from time to time, I'll continue to add reviews of films, books, and music. Also, please visit me over at Portecho, my other blog, where (Halloween fixations aside) I will focus on computers, electronics, and and bits of home entertainment technology.

Scorecard (out of ten skulls):
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My psychological status:
Finished

Night 29: The Devil's Backbone

Tired of more misses than hits, I've decided to close out my selections with two known quantities. First up is Guillermo Del Toro's best film so far, The Devil's Backbone. Many will question that designation, citing Pan's Labyrinth, but I personally feel this earlier film is much tighter, more affecting, and better acted. There's no question it is more frightening.

Set during the closing years of the Spanish Civil War, The Devil's Backbone tells the story of a little boy named Carlos who enters an orphanage under the assumption that he is merely waiting there until his father returns from the front lines. We know better, of course, giving Carlos a poignance and a pathos that immediately connects him to the viewer. Inside the orphanage, a Gothic mystery unfolds and envelops Carlos, inexorably forcing upon him an encounter with the ghost of a fellow orphan. Though the war is mostly a distant backdrop, an unexploded bomb in the courtyard serves as an ominous and ever present reminder. It's these types of details that make Del Toro's films so memorable. Raised by a devout Catholic grandmother (who twice tried exorcism as a means of banishing his fascination with all things dark and monstrous), and obsessed with comic books, Del Toro developed a keen appreciation for the power of culturally-loaded iconography. His films tap the deep well of myth and history that flows beneath every story ever told, enriching what might otherwise come off as melodrama with the elan of allegory. The Devil's Backbone is a film almost completely devoid of the usual horror tricks. Much of it is filmed in broad daylight and once the ghost is sighted, the camera does not turn away and try to sneak up on us from behind. We are forced to face our fears head on. The longer the camera lingers on the ghost, the more our simple aversion turns to a strange and morbid attraction. Through Carlos, we become participants in the story and vested in the outcome. As with only the best of all horror films, fear becomes less of desired side-effect and more of a transformative rite of passage, through which we reach a more vivid understanding of the world.




Scorecard (out of ten skulls):
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My psychological status:
Engrossed