Remember When We All Got Mad About Fast Zombies?

28 YEARS LATER is announced, and the rage zombies will return.

On some level it feels inevitable - Danny Boyle is returning to the zombie world to make 28 Years Later, which might be the first film in a trilogy. It’s coming quite early - 28 years from 2003 would be 2031 (or I guess 2030, since the movie came out in the UK a year before it hit American theaters) - but the announcement has sparked a lot of excitement. Alex Garland, who wrote the original, is returning and he’s writing a sequel. Boyle will direct 28 Years Later but not the sequel. It’s not clear who will be doing that.

Also not clear: what’s the plot. Does it take 28 Weeks Later, the Boyle-less sequel, into account? Nothing says modern horror legacyquel like ignoring a sequel, so they might just do that. But on some level it seems like they would need to keep the sequel in mind, as the original film ended on a happy note that seemed to spell the end of the rage zombie threat. It was 28 Weeks Later that saw rage hopping over the Channel and infecting the Continent.

Whatever it is, that’s what it’ll be. I know that once upon a time I would write something like this up and include a whole bunch of opinion, all of it premature, but these days my attitude is, as the kids say, let em cook. Boyle can be hit or miss, but he’s usually interesting, and Alex Garland has become one of my favorite filmmakers of the past decade. Is this a cash in? Maybe! Do they actually have a strong concept? We’ll see! I’m hopeful.

But this has gotten me thinking about 28 Days Later, and the way I was so deeply torn when I first saw it, way back at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival (by the way - the film festival cut, I believe, did not have the alternate ending which was attached to US prints. The alternate ending came after a weird “But what if?” title card, and then showed Cillian Murphy dying). The movie was undeniable - the opening was a scorcher, especially back at a time when I didn’t know what it was going to be - but the running zombies drove me nuts.

I wasn’t alone. Edgar Wright poked fun at the concept in Shaun of the Dead (the best zombie anything of the 21st century), and it was something fans argued about in the nascent days of the internet. It’s important to remember that zombies as we know them were pretty much completely invented by George Romero, and his take on them was that they shambled. After all they’re dead, they’re all messed up. It makes sense that they would shamble; the horror of the Romero zombie was not that they could chase you down, it’s that they traveled in these packs that would overwhelm you. You could bob and weave around zombies for so long, but eventually they would close in on you due to their ever-growing numbers.

Running zombies added a boost of excitement to the concept. I guess for some folks the idea of a slow moving cannibal corpse wasn’t enough, they needed to be track stars, screeching as they came at you. To his credit Boyle said his rage infected people were not zombies but, come on, they were zombies.

At the time this felt so important. You have to go back to 2003 and realize that nobody made zombie movies. They were a deep niche, usually far too gross for your standard horror fan and definitely too gross for the Friday night date crowd. Rotting faces tearing chunks of blood-gushing flesh off sweating and frightened people - this was not mainstream. For many years zombie movies were the most hardcore of the hardcore; they were sometimes called gutmunchers because, well, the zombies munched guts.

But 28 Days Later changed that. It was a hit. A smash. And all of a sudden everybody wanted to do zombies. Which might have been cool, if everyone didn’t want to do fast zombies. I mean, they remade Dawn of the Dead as an R-rated fast zombie movie (and unfortunately for a hater like me, Zack Snyder did a good job and I could not deny it). It seemed at the time as though the classic zombie was a thing of the past, eliminated in favor of a quick creature aimed at the short attention span MTV generation.

What’s funny is that the real danger was something no one could see coming. While fast zombies had their moment, the general zombie revival led to the adaptation of the comic book The Walking Dead. That opens with a scene that one could say, if one were being uncharitable, was a blatant rip-off of the opening of 28 Days Later. And it was, indeed, a blatant rip-off of the opening of 28 Days Later. But that show didn’t have fast zombies - it was full of classic, slow moving shambling corpses.

Victory! And the violence and gore on the show was absolutely up there with some of the nastiest stuff we had seen in the classic zombie films - American and Italian - of the 70s and 80s. What a bizarre victory - the spirit of Romero had triumphed.

But what happened next is the twist - somehow, and I honestly do not know how, The Walking Dead became the favorite TV show of your Aunt Joan. After a couple of seasons everybody else fell away from the series, which had become repetitive and was clearly just misery porn, but a hardcore contingent of aunts, grandmothers and assorted middle aged ladies made the series a continuing hit. The series and its seemingly infinite variety of spin-offs; I believe there are 238 different Walking Dead series on AMC currently.

The Walking Dead somehow, and I hope that when I die God shows me exactly how this happened, drained everything cool and fun and edgy about zombies. Zombies became kind of a bore. This pains me to say, because I was a bona fide zombie freak growing up. I sought out the most unpleasant Italian gutmunchers, which was a bridge for me to all kinds of Italian horror, including giallo. And yet even I found zombies simply played the fuck out.

When you’re in a cultural moment things can seem more important, more loaded than they are. It’s funny to look back at 2003 and think about how much vitriol was spilled over the question of fast versus slow zombies. It mattered so much at the time! But in retrospect it didn’t matter at all, because the whole zombie thing became lame maybe ten or twelve years after Boyle’s film debuted.

Now, after so many years dormant, it seems like zombies could be coming back. And whether they’re fast or slow isn’t going to matter to me - what I am going to care about is whether the movie is any good or not.