In War-Fueled Societies, We’re All Zombies

In 2002, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland released a post-apocalyptic horror movie that would redefine the zombie genre forever. 28 Days Later was not only ambitious for its experimental cinematography and reliance on relatively obscure actors, but also because of its critical commentary on violence and militarism. Boyle and Garland have partnered up again for the newest installment in the 28 Days Later film series, with the release 28 Years Later (now playing in theaters). 

There’s nothing wrong with a gross and scary zombie movie that just stops there, but the 28 Days Later film series offers more than jump scares and blood-barfing, fast-moving zombies, which are called “infected” in the films.

Consider the origin story for the virus that turns much of the United Kingdom’s population into flesh-eating “infected”: When a group of activists fail to rescue chimpanzees, humans are exposed to the blood-borne Rage Virus, a virus that causes those who come into contact with it to spiral into a violent rage. Societal collapse ensues. And while the humans infected with the Rage Virus play a part in this collapse, the real culprits are the non-infected humans who imagine that violence can cure all social ills. In 28 Days Later, Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston) soberly assesses the situation: “This is what I’ve seen in the four weeks since infection: people killing people. Which is much of what I saw in the four weeks before infection.”

It’s not unusual for a zombie movie to have political subtext or social commentary. Although Boyle has bristled at referring to those infected with the virus as “zombies,” Garland cited the late director George Romero and his ultra-political 1968 zombie movie, Night of the Living Dead, as inspiration for 28 Days Later.

The newest installment in the series, 28 Years Later, seems to be drawing from the previous installments as well as the work of Romero, offering a challenge to viewers: If we find the violence of the infected repulsive and reason enough to refer to them as non-human or zombies, then what should we think about the non-infected who engage in similar acts of violence?

Zombies have not been bombing Iran; zombies are not the ones committing genocide in Palestine; zombies have not been detaining and disappearing immigrants in the U.S. or suggesting that the blood of immigrants is poisoning the country. All these things have been done by humans, by us. 28 Years Later urges us to interrogate the systems of violence that comprise the background of human life. The movie then encourages us to recognize the insufficiency of security provided by a militaristic society. Life requires more than war can offer.

🧟Major spoilers ahead🧟

In 28 Years Later, the infected have overrun the mainland. The non-infected have responded by creating a highly stratified society, largely based around the defense against the infected. Since the start of the outbreak in 2002, the international community has quarantined the U.K. For the remnant of non-infected unable to escape, they have created a community on an island off the northeast coast of England known as Lindisfarne or Holy Island.

With a pastiche of community life, 28 Years Later introduces us to this community of survivors: We see people wielding bows and arrows and manning wood-fortified walls, accompanied by quick cuts of old films that feature medieval military archers, inviting the viewer to consider the connection between the violence and militarization of the survivors and the violence that came before the infected. Young Fathers’ spooky bass and synthesizer-infused version of Rudyard Kipling’s war poem “Boots” plays during these scenes. Taken together, the point becomes clear: Regardless of who the enemy is or the time period, humans are constantly at war and creating systems of death. There is a blaring refrain from Kipling’s poem that viewers hear over and over during these scenes: “There’s no discharge in the war.”

The narrative centers on 12-year-old boy Spike (Alfie Williams), whose father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), takes him outside of the fortified community to get his first infected kill, a coming-of-age ritual for those living on Lindisfarne Island. Although Spike and Jamie are successful in their mission, with Spike getting his kills, it becomes apparent that Spike is more interested in preserving life than he is in taking it. Spike’s mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), suffers intense delusions as a result of an unknown illness. Wanting to save his mother’s life, Spike decides he and his mother will go beyond the confines of Lindisfarne to roam the zombie-infested U.K. mainland, hoping to find the only known doctor, Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). Jamie warns Spike about Kelson’s macabre treatment of the dead, but Spike decides to find him anyway — even if that requires killing more infected. There’s no discharge in the war.

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Although severely hampered by her illness, Isla tries to show him that there is life outside of the violence of war.

While searching for Kelson, they encounter a Swedish NATO soldier, Erik (Edvin Ryding), who is horrified when Isla — in a moment that transcends the distinction between infected and non-infected, human and zombie — holds the hands of an infected woman in the throes of giving birth. Miraculously, the newborn appears to be uninfected by the virus. Erik, who has been trained to see all infected as non-human, kills the mother and tries, unsuccessfully, to kill the newborn.

The world of the 28 Days Later series is eerily familiar: It is a world oriented toward war against those who are deemed “infected” or “non-human.” In the movie, just as in real life, society is organized around creating militarized safe havens or weapons of war capable of dealing with those deemed to be “non-human.” Both in the movie and the real world, more energy and resources are put toward militarism and systems of death than toward figuring out ways to provide basic human necessities. 

This state of existence is what the late 20th-century philosopher Paul Virilio calls “pure war.” Virilio writes, “[p]ure war is neither peace nor war…” but “military procedure itself in its ordinary durability…” Pure war is about how militarism underlies all of society’s processes. When you pull back the fabric of society, you find technologies that are at their core about social control, a foreign policy built on nuclear deterrence, and a pervasive sense that violence is the only way to a legitimately secure future. So while viewers are right to recoil at Erik’s violent impulses, his response demonstrates how the ideology of pure war has infected all of society. In such a society, there is no discharge from war.

But 28 Years Later is not content to revel in nihilism. Isla and Spike eventually find Kelson, who is living a life counter to the idea of pure war, something that might be considered mad amid a zombie apocalypse. Kelson has spent years away from what remains of human civilization and has been living among the infected. He has created a giant memento mori: a monument made of non-infected and infected bones, reminding all who see it that they must die. 

Kelson tells Spike that the monument is an ode to the inevitability of death. Kelson calls his monument “the bone temple,” which reminded me of a real-life bone temple known as the Capuchin Crypt. The Capuchin Crypt, which is underneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in Rome, has the skeletal remains of more than 3,700 Capuchin friars. Not unlike the film, the crypt features bones arranged into elaborate scenes hosting thousands of pelvises, skulls, and thigh bones. The crypt is open to the public for the express purpose of reminding all visitors that we all must die.

But not only must all of us remember our mortality, we must also remember that each of us has the capacity to love and be loved. Kelson tells Spike that while remembering our death is important, it is equally important that we remember love as well — memento amoris.  

28 Years Later doesn’t offer a neat political program to help us escape pure war. But it does invite us to reflect on death and love, which can be a helpful antidote to violence.

28 Years Later doesn’t offer a neat political program to help us escape pure war. But it does invite us to reflect on death and love, which can be a helpful antidote to violence.

By confronting the reality of our death, we begin to understand that we are mortal, and that should invite us to see that there is a certain solidarity in the universal human experience of life, love, and death. Why resort to short-sighted violence when we know that we will all ultimately meet the same end? Life requires more than militarized safety; it requires love.