![]() Also our government’s inability to deal with things like BSE, Foot and Mouth. Danny was particularly interested in issues that had to do with social rage - the increase of rage in our society, road rage, and other things. “Lots of stuff was happening in this country that felt like the right kind of social subtext or social commentary that you could put in a science fiction film. “t was just a paranoid story coming out of the paranoid time,” Garland said in the same Filmmaker interview. Not having the money can be a problem or it can be a kind of freedom, and for us it was a freedom.”Īlthough Boyle had brought Garland’s novel to theaters with The Beach, the two really hadn’t worked much together, but they clicked on the underlying themes of 28 Days Later. “We wanted it to be just ordinary people. “Normally making a a huge budget, but we wanted to keep the budget down to about $6 million, and we did that because we didn’t want any stars in it,” Boyle later told Filmmaker. After flirting with the Hollywood system, this down-and-dirty zombie flick was Boyle’s way of getting back to basics. But by the time he prepped 28 Days Later, he seemed to be in a slump: His Trainspotting follow-up A Life Less Ordinary was largely dismissed and The Beach had bombed - partly because it was DiCaprio’s first film after Titanic, which put unreasonable expectations on the movie. The celebrated English director had launched onto the scene thanks to the Hitchcockian thriller Shallow Grave and then delivered one of the decade’s most zeitgeist-y films with the addiction drama Trainspotting, both of which helped make a young actor named Ewan McGregor a star. Danny Boyle wasn’t necessarily the director you’d think of to help launch that resurgence. But the early 2000s saw a resurgence in the genre, sparked largely by 28 Days Later and Resident Evil, which were both shot around roughly the same time in 2001. Why was it a big deal at the time? Coming out of the 1990s, zombie movies weren’t very fashionable. ![]() 28 Days Later meant to chronicle the end of the world, but it ended up opening an exciting new era in mainstream genre films. That doesn’t end up working out quite like they imagined, and Boyle’s intentionally low-grade digital cameras capture every horrifying moment along their bruising odyssey. Jim teams up with some other survivors, including Naomie Harris and Brendan Gleeson, eventually making their way to what they believe will be safe haven from the virus. (Few who have seen 28 Days Later will forget this fearsome bit of graffiti: “Repent The End Is Extremely F***ing Nigh.”) Bad news, Jim: While you were sleeping civilization has been decimated by a virus called Rage that has turned humans against one another, creating a bleak post-apocalyptic scenario. The Britain-set thriller starred Cillian Murphy as Jim, a regular bloke who wakes up in the hospital following a coma. “In my mind, it was this sort of punk film,” Garland once said. theaters the previous November - the film rethought the horror genre and proved to be a chilling post-9/11 commentary at the same time. Released on June 27, 2003, in the States - it had hit U.K. Viewers can argue about whether 28 Days Later is technically a zombie film - people aren’t dead, they’re just infected by a virus that makes them seem zombie-like - but just about everyone agrees that it’s one incredibly scary movie. Initially, I was working with Andrew Macdonald, who I still work with now actually, and I said to him that I had an idea for a movie about running zombies.”Ģ8 Days Later was his first produced screenplay - The Beach had been adapted by frequent Boyle collaborator John Hodge - and, right out of the gate, he’d come up with a classic. It just looked like a lot of fun, really. “I had been writing novels up until that point,” Garland recalled in 2016, “and just the idea of a collaboration seemed very attractive to me. But that transition from author to big-screen auteur first materialized when director Danny Boyle was making The Beach, which inspired Garland to think about a future in movies. A former novelist who wrote The Beach, which got turned into the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, the 51-year-old writer/director penned the screenplays for some of the smartest and most interesting sci-fi films this century with Sunshine, Never Let Me Go, and Dredd before stepping behind the camera for Ex Machina and Annihilation. There may be no more exciting genre filmmaker working right now than Alex Garland. Welcome to This Week in Genre History, where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the Grierson & Leitch podcast, take turns looking back at the world’s greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.
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