Full Transcript for 28 Years Later: Everything You Need to Prep!

And the mini DV tech is very interesting because that was basically consumer level technology, like not thought of as like a pro sin camera exactly, and it gives you this very grainy, very textured look that I think is it's weirdly divisive. Now. I've seen people talk about it when when watching the film on you know, twenty twenty five television say why does this movie look like shit? I have to say, like, at the time, on the big screen, it felt more real because of the mini DV. It felt authentic and almost more documentarian. 00:03:44 Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, I think it felt like that kind of shaky cam but pre Jason Bourne. And it was very horror and also obviously our biggest zombie movies up until this point, and zombie kind of of. 00:04:01 Speaker 3: Media in general. 00:04:03 Speaker 2: Are the Sam Rami movies and those were obviously made on especially Evil Dead. 00:04:09 Speaker 3: Oh no, yeah, sorry, we have the Georgi ra Merra. 00:04:12 Speaker 2: Movies obviously beautiful, Night of the Living Dead, everything else. 00:04:16 Speaker 3: Then we have Sam Raimi's Evil Dead and those both. 00:04:19 Speaker 2: Movies were made with a low budget, with you know, limited technology, limited money. So this continues that trend, honestly, and as we will get into the sequels, continue the trend of kind of then expanding out that world in that budget. But yes, twenty eight days later, let us begin, in classic British fashion, twenty eight days later begins thanks to the horrific reality of animal rights activists, something that for some reason British people just like really get pissed off about. There's a lot of them, there's a lot of bit's interesting. Yeah, there's a lot of animal testing in England, so definitely this is kind of a leftover of that kind of There was a lot of anti nuclear protests in England, learn a lot of direct action groups in the eighties and nineties who were breaking into animal testing facilities. 00:05:05 Speaker 3: So I thought that was. 00:05:06 Speaker 2: A really funny kind of time capsule moment. And when that very direct action group breaks into a testing facility. They accidentally unleash the rage virus on the world thanks to as far as I could tell, a chimpanzee who has been forced to watch videos of riots, violence and cars being set on fire. 00:05:25 Speaker 3: He's really going. 00:05:26 Speaker 2: Through it, yes, that poor chimpanzee. And they do try to warn him, they say, hey, come on, guys, this guy's got the rage virus, but she doesn't listen. She's got to let him free, and so the virus begins and it's. 00:05:44 Speaker 3: Not going well. 00:05:46 Speaker 2: But we don't learn very much about that until twenty eight days later. Wink Wink, Silly and Murphy's bike courier, Jim an that's a very London job as well to be a bike career. 00:05:58 Speaker 3: Jim wakes up in. 00:05:59 Speaker 2: A deserted hospital on the bank of the River Thames and takes a now iconic and still very impressive, impressive empty

walk for like fifteen minutes runtime through a deserted London and the abandoned kind of landmarks like Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. 00:06:18 Speaker 3: And Oxford Tree. 00:06:19 Speaker 2: It's unbelievable to kind of see what they were able to do. 00:06:23 Speaker 1: It's really really impressive. If you watch the director commentary or have written any interviews about this. 00:06:29 Speaker 3: Mm hmm. 00:06:29 Speaker 1: Boyle talks about how they did it. They had to collect these shots over the course of several weeks at very early in the morning, mostly weekends. We would be the least traffic, and they would just kind of hold up whatever traffic there was, so silly and Murphy could kind of walk across frame. They'd get the shot with nothing in the background. Crazy, then the world would start up again. Really really impressive. 00:06:51 Speaker 3: Yeah, I think about that a lot. 00:06:53 Speaker 2: And also like this was this was actually movie was made pre nine to eleven, so. 00:06:58 Speaker 1: They during the film. Yeah, so they were. 00:07:01 Speaker 2: Able They were basically able to shut down Whitehall to They bought a bus that they turned over in front of Downing Street, which is where the Prime Minister lives, and they were able to just quickly do it, get the shot in thirty minutes of him walking past, get it away. It's like really kind of crazy, almost like gorilla filmmaking, like Werner Herzog does, but in a kind of genre space. Interestingly, as well as we get more into like the infected and the notion of the monsters in this movie, they are also not your average zombies at this point, so as the viewer and Jim learn that there has been kind of a complete societal collapse thanks to a number of very fun world building techniques like these kind of missing flyers and torn newspapers, and Jim ends up being attacked by the first human rage virus victim that we meet, and he's terrifying and at the time completely original. Kind of monsters were not originally intended to be zombies. It was kind of this new idea of a rage infection. But Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, whatever they wished was kind of superseded by the fact that this would reinvigorate the entire zombie movie and also zombie media genre, because after this, you get the Walking Dead comic, you get the Walking Dead TV show. Zombies become the genre, you get the Dawn of the Dead remake. A great movie, and it's a really interesting thing because. 00:08:33 Speaker 3: This movie is, as you said, you know, it. 00:08:36 Speaker 2: Does not necessarily look like the most high definition kind of like restart of a full subgenre, but there was something raw and authentic and scary, and before we got on MIC, we were actually talking about, you know, movies that scared us and blow which project came up. And I think this is in that same space where if you were young enough, you could have watched this and been like, oh my god, like is this real? 00:08:59 Speaker 3: You know,

is this real? Like that thing? Yeah. 00:09:02 Speaker 2: So Jim he is about to be killed by the infected. That would be the end of his story, but he is saved by two survivors, Nomi Harris, who, by the way, this movie has like an unbelievable cast list truly h Selena and Noah Huntley's Mark, who squirrel him away inside a shop on the now destroyed local high street. Soon, Jim convinces them to go on a mission to his parents' house in Deptford, which, by the way, is like really fast stupid mission. 00:09:28 Speaker 1: Wow, So how far? How far is that like walking? 00:09:32 Speaker 3: Okay, So if you're on like. 00:09:33 Speaker 2: Waterloo Bridge area and you're going to like South London, I mean walking, you're talking about like two or three hours like minimum, and I would think actually longer. He gets there quickly realizes that his parents killed themselves. Rather than kind of face down the rat the infected, we see. 00:09:49 Speaker 3: Him watch a home video of them. Again. 00:09:52 Speaker 2: I feel like this is a very bleak kind of depressing take on zombies that would go on to be very influential on like what we see in The Walking Dead and what we see about the way that humans react to these horrible crises, and the kind of fact that a lot of times humans are the more dangerous factor. During an attack on the house by the infected, Mark is killed rip Mark, and he's killed by Selena because he gets wounded, and she is just like fuck you, shoots him in the head and. 00:10:24 Speaker 1: She just goes crazy on him. Well I think she does. 00:10:29 Speaker 2: She not. 00:10:30 Speaker 1: I think she hacks him up with him hicks him up. 00:10:32 Speaker 3: With it incredible even better, That's that's I'm used to. I'm so used to American zombies now that she becomes the most. 00:10:40 Speaker 1: I mean, that is a heartbreaking moment where he says like he's like, hold on, just get wait a second, let me see if I turn because he's got the bite, it's bleeding on his arm. 00:10:48 Speaker 3: Yeah, and he was protecting them too. 00:10:50 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:10:51 Speaker 2: She just like hacks him up ruthlessly and then turns to Gym and says you are next, like, I will do that shit if you are big, you no question. And now the roving survival party is down to two. Not for long though, as they are joined by two more survivors, Brendan Gleeson's Frank again unbelievable and young British actor and my former roommate Meghan Burns. Yes, this was Hannah. 00:11:19 Speaker 1: Hannah. 00:11:20 Speaker 3: Hannah was my roommate. 00:11:21 Speaker 1: She was also a very cool a musician. 00:11:23 Speaker 3: Now she she. 00:11:24 Speaker 2: Was a very cool musician called Betty Curse, and I met her through my lovely friend Charlotte. And now Meghan is actually a band manager in. 00:11:33 Speaker 3: Her own right. But yes, she's very young in this movie. 00:11:38 Speaker 2: He was handpicked by Danny Boyle and has like a really kind of scary and cool role as it rolls

out for a young actor. 00:11:46 Speaker 3: Because things get really messed up from here. 00:11:49 Speaker 2: Frank has heard a broadcast from Manchester claiming that there's some military barracks and they're safe and there's potential cure, and so they decide that they're gonna head to Manchester again very far. I feel like this is one of the things that I would encourage in a zombie apocalypse and in a zombie in general. I was like, don't be trying to like go really far. It's gonna end up. You're gonna end up in trouble, but hilariously, their journey is actually not that bad. And again another really famous sequence there is where we get the drive through the moat that empty motorways England, which are just like essentially like our highways, but we don't have them in every city. They kind of join. They're like the veins of England that join all the cities together. And these were TV shots that were again those kind of like pause the traffic, get what we can move on, and that is some of the most impressive. 00:12:47 Speaker 1: London to Manchester, how long? 00:12:49 Speaker 3: Oh baby? On a train because I don't drive. 00:12:55 Speaker 2: Oh a drive is like a solid four hour drive okay, and. 00:12:59 Speaker 3: The train it's like I've done, like it's been like three hours. 00:13:02 Speaker 2: I would say, Holy, you could drive in in maybe like three hours if you were driving really fast and there was no traffic. And somehow they do manage to make it to Manchester in one piece in Frank's taxi. But once they arrive there, the barracks seem empty and we get this. Really I love this moment because it's so movie ish, but it's also like you can so imagine it happening. 00:13:27 Speaker 3: Frank right, Frank sees it at barrack's empty. He's pissed off. He starts kicking the wall and. 00:13:33 Speaker 2: Like a blood a drop of blood from an infected who's like on the wall, like falls. 00:13:39 Speaker 3: Into his eye. 00:13:40 Speaker 1: Oh that's so crazy. 00:13:42 Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm like, it seems like it would never happen. 00:13:44 Speaker 2: But if you've ever got like a splinter under your nail or something that should never have been there, you're like, okay, I could, I could see it. And a last Frank, he's dead because you can't survive. You've gotta be killed. That's the only option. And now without Frank, who was you know, kind of in the know that something strange was going on, Jim, Selena and Hannah are left at the whims of Christopher Eggleston, another fantastic British actor, as Mayor Major Henry West, who has been broadcasting his claims of a cure in a safe place in order to lure women to the barracks so that in his greater plan he can basically be like, I need to repopulate the country. But really he means like you're going to be my sexual slaves. 00:14:30 Speaker 1: For mean some type exactly. 00:14:33 Speaker 2: Very like he must spread his seed and obviously that's terrifying. I remember this reveal feeling so like shocking,

yes when I first watched it, and I think something that's really interesting about it is that it leans very heavily into something that, as I kind of mentioned earlier, the Walking Dead and these zombie projects that World War was he would kind of lean into, which is, yeah, the zombies are bad, but the humans are oftentimes worse because they can control their behavior, but they. 00:15:06 Speaker 3: Choose not to. 00:15:08 Speaker 2: So Jim is obviously less than happy about that, and along with another soldier who agrees that who disagrees and won't go along with the plan, is sentenced to death. But thanks to an argument between some of the kind of ever fracturing group of soldiers who are like incredibly hungry, who are under the watchful eye of this insane man, Jim is able to escape and we get this moment again, another moment that I think about a lot, which is he sees like the trail of a plane in the sky and it kind of reinvigorates him to remember that, like, if there's a plane in the sky, the world must be going on somewhere, and he is able to essentially lure away West Freeze an infected soldier that they'd been keeping prisoner, which I always think, like, okay, so they were experimenting on the prisoner, so maybe at some point there was some truth to the idea of the trying to find the cure. But then they realize, like, we don't know what we're doing, so let's just like assault some women because that's fun and there's no laws, and they get into the car make at their escape, and I really this moment is such a classic horror moment, which I think is really funny because the rest of the movie is very unconventional. But essentially we end up in a situation where West is actually hiding in the backseat of the car, so you think that they're safely away, and then he pops up shoots Jim. But then Nomi Harris's Selena makes a great move where she kind of throws the car back by breaking it and flings him through the back window, and he's he's killed. Allah, you know the t Rex and Jurassic Park. Now the infected is helping and he's going. 00:16:52 Speaker 3: To become the next meal. 00:16:54 Speaker 2: And hilariously, watching this movie, I was surprised by how much of it I kind of did remember or what really stuck with me. But the final sequence I think is the thing that to me really defines this movie, which is another twenty eight days later, we joined Jim's He's recovering Selena and Hannah and they are in a small cottage. Yeah, and it's kind of this very cozy English like off tract. 00:17:22 Speaker 3: You I would say, like the Cotswolds or something. But I also, like, I am from London, so I have. 00:17:28 Speaker 2: No idea, like I am not good at geography, even British geography. But you know, somewhere I would say, like somewhere that a rich person would probably have like a weekend home, and every time Nabors visit there, the locals would be like Callipiste off because the locals are probably like miners and shit. And they kind of see a plane fly over and we see them unfurl this huge banner that says hello, and the pilot seems to spot them, offering up like hopeful ending for what would become, you know, one of the bleakest kind of big budget smash. 00:18:07 Speaker 3: It's the movie was made for you know, very. 00:18:10 Speaker 2: Very very very minimal amount of money and ended up going on to make in England. It made you know, it was relatively successful. The movie was cost eight million dollars. In England it made six million, which is pretty good. But in America it made forty five million, and soon you know it would go on to make over eighty million dollars. So yeah, that's twenty eight days later. It's a very good movie. And it hasn't been streaming for a very long time, but very long series of rights issues. But it is currently streaming for free with ads on Pluto TV, and you can buy it or download it on demand wherever if you are in it's so inclined. Twenty eight weeks later though, it's streaming on. 00:18:58 Speaker 1: Hulu and Cormond's favorite. 00:19:00 Speaker 2: It's her favorite. She thinks it's really good, okay, so twenty eight weeks late. This is very interesting because they choose to begin during the original outbreak in a small English town this time, I would say more like, I don't know, like Burnley or somewhere. 00:19:14 Speaker 3: I think my family's from up north, so I'm guessing. 00:19:17 Speaker 2: But where Robert Carlile's Don and his wife Alice are surviving alongside some neighbors. It's kind of a fractured survival. But interestingly, something that they continue. Here is kind of this establishment of like an old school technology, the way that you know, videotapes, stuff like that. We see that in twenty eight days later as Jim watches the video of his family. We've seen it in the trailers for twenty eight years later where the kids are watching videos of the Teletubbies. 00:19:45 Speaker 3: So I think that kind of low. 00:19:47 Speaker 2: Technology is being brought back in the new one, which I really love. 00:19:52 Speaker 3: But their kind. 00:19:54 Speaker 2: Of very shaky safety is put at risk when a young born he starts knocking at the door. His wife cannot ignore the young boy because they have children and they don't know where they are. 00:20:08 Speaker 3: And Don is like, please. 00:20:10 Speaker 2: Don't let in this kid, like we know how this is gonna go down. The kid gets let in, the infected take over the house, and soon I have to say Don not a good husband, because he leaves his wife like he just wither quickness without the quickness, like she's eaten in the house. 00:20:32 Speaker 1: There is at least some true anguish that crosses his face, but he hesitates for like half a second and then he is like sorry, babe, yeah out yeah. 00:20:44 Speaker 2: He's like he's like I can't do it, My love, like it's not happening for me. 00:20:48 Speaker 1: I'm gone for the boat. 00:20:48 Speaker 3: I gotta go for the boat. 00:20:50 Speaker 2:

And then I think that we get something here that is a really interesting Again, these are movies that I think are very shaped by the technology of the time and also the way that you could utilize technology that was just becoming accessible to kind of lower budget filmmakers, because we get that instantly recognizable drone shot where even if you haven't seen this movie, you probably have seen Robert kyle Le running across the grass the kind of British countryside to. 00:21:16 Speaker 3: Get to the boat. 00:21:17 Speaker 2: He's got a drone shot following him. It's super surreal and shaky, and yes, he gets to the boat and he embarks on a new journey and we'll join him there twenty eight weeks later, Bae. 00:21:31 Speaker 3: Imagine that. I love the way that they use. 00:21:33 Speaker 2: The actual timing in the movies is never endingly hilarious to me. So in a classic Hollywood sequel move I feel Here. The film introduces us to an England that has essentially been taken over by NATO after the seeming starvation death of the effect infected where they couldn't eat enough, they've started to die out, and the US government is now essentially trying to rebuild Britain along with its NATO partners, and keep the rest of the world safe, keep the infected inside Britain if there are any left, and work out stuff like. 00:22:21 Speaker 3: What happens to their dead bodies and. 00:22:23 Speaker 2: How you know, basically classic science stuff, and something I didn't get to mention in my recap of the first movie that I forgot twenty eight days later does fit in to something that we have been calling the Jurassic Park Coralie, which is like, look, man, if you think they say that the first one is a science fiction movie, but in the first five minutes they basically explained the science, so maybe it is. This one is definitely more interested in that wider post apocalyptic science fiction horror kind of mash up. The tone is very different, and in the NATO safe zone we meet Don's kids, Tammy and Andy, who have somehow survived. Good for them, young Imagen Poots here she is in many movies that you will see and only seems to be getting into more now, another great British actress, and they end up Tammy and Andy somehow being the first children let into this zone that they call District one. 00:23:24 Speaker 3: Rose Byrne doing a very funny American accent here like she's she's too. 00:23:30 Speaker 2: It's just there's something about it that sounds like very like I'm an American doing a military like serious voice. And she's very angry because she's like, wait a minute, why are their kids here? 00:23:45 Speaker 3: We don't know what to do with kids. 00:23:46 Speaker 2: We don't know how kids are going to respond to what we're doing here. 00:23:50 Speaker 3: And this time I can tell you where they are because they're in the Isle of Dogs, and. 00:23:54 Speaker 2: They've essentially militarized that the Isle of Dogs to turn it into a little kind of safe zone slash.

Honestly, yeah, in prison, because that is. 00:24:04 Speaker 1: This is the answer to iraq anxieties. And oh the movie that's that's explicitly about how bad America and its Western allies are at occupy places. 00:24:19 Speaker 2: Yeah, and how dangerous those occupations are. And soon, in an incredible twist, they are reunited with their dad. 00:24:27 Speaker 3: Love that that's a that's a. 00:24:29 Speaker 2: Dons Mac and I don't know how Don ended up there, but good for him. And he immediately lies about how the mom died, which I think was like painfully real for anyone who maybe has a dad who's not the most truthful person. And we then kind of start to meet the different characters here we have uh the incredible Again, this is another movie with just an unbelievable cast. Like you have Harold Pernu as a sniper, you have obviously Rose Burnt, we have Jeremy I know who we meet here, Rener Hives stand up, They're they're here, They're I'm sure he would have loved to be in the sequel, but I will be intro I don't think that's happening for him. 00:25:11 Speaker 3: Tammy and Andy as they. 00:25:13 Speaker 2: Are children and they were out of the country during the original outbreak, which makes me think they don't really understand how serious this is. They decide that they are just gonna sneak out. They'll fun adventure, have some good always a good. I feel like again, if children can sneak out of your like DMZ kind of like protection Zone, probably not doing very well. 00:25:34 Speaker 1: No, No, I don't think you're a very high security of the area. 00:25:38 Speaker 2: I think this again speaks to me about like kind of the the trappings of this do feel like a bigger Hollywood sequel. You add the kids, just like you add kids you can make it a PG thirteen, you know, or make it if it's in America, it can still be r rated. But now there are kids that people can relate to. It's very terminated to in that way, and they have a very child life like. 00:26:00 Speaker 3: Reason for leaving. 00:26:02 Speaker 2: They want to find a picture of their mom and they want to get family pictures from their home. So they head home. But bad news because their mom, Alice, she's not dead. Whoops, whoops, Sorry, dad. 00:26:18 Speaker 1: You you got some explaining to do. 00:26:22 Speaker 3: Inside their house they. 00:26:26 Speaker 2: Saw saw die. She's delirious and just like completely out of it. And just then sadly the Jeremy Renner has snitched on them. They bring them all back to District one and their mom is quarantined and tested, and we find out, in a you know, hopeful for the society, not maybe so great for Alice, that she seems to be an asymptomatic carrier of the rage virus. Now, I think it's very interesting because I don't think in most zombie movies that when they just don't tend to use that kind of language that we can understand, you know what being an asymptomatic carrier of like a cold is it's not this kind of. 00:27:17 Speaker 3: Ellie all in all out

immunity. 00:27:19 Speaker 2: There is a kind of granular nature to how they represent the zombie apocalypse here that does feel real, that does feel more like something that could happen. And obviously that comes from the way that Doyle and I mean Boil and Garland approached it in the first movie and introduced us to this notion that to them wasn't even a zombie movie, you know, it was this race virus. But of course this kind of running zombies, these violent zombies, would take over pop culture for the next like fifteen years. Incredibly, I now understand why Tammy and Andy are not making good decisions because Don decides that he is is gonna go on an unauthorized visit to Alice bad idea, begging her to forgive him. 00:28:05 Speaker 3: Then he kisses her. 00:28:06 Speaker 2: Come on, come on, guy, like, look around you crazy? How do you think that this infection is spread by bodily fluids? 00:28:18 Speaker 3: My friend, that's why they bite people. 00:28:20 Speaker 2: He immediately gets infected then brutally kills her, which like, what the fuck, bro, this is I didn't realize, I think, and you know, Calm and actually touched on this before we came on, but I didn't realize actually that under until I rewatched this for this recap under the trappings of kind of the bigger budget, bigger scope horror movie, it's still very much has this kind of thread of like male violence, just like the first. 00:28:51 Speaker 1: Movie for sure, and even the way they shoot, even the way they shoot Carlisle during the attack when he kills her, they show is they close up in on his face. It's very quick and they do it several times, and he's got like this most like demonic, you know, infected kind of rage grin like on his face. But they really don't do that. It's not previous movie at all or with any of the other zombies that much like during an attack like person make it intimate and personal like that. 00:29:21 Speaker 2: Yeah, and even and also it makes you feel like, well, he could have just done it, because we get that moment at the end of twenty eight days later when Jim comes and saves Selena and Hannah. He kills the soldiers so violently that at first Selena they don't know, yeah, he is infected, And we get that moment here where even though we knowed On is infected because he kissed Alice you see a violence in him, and a recognizable kind of male violence that feels very real. And just like every fucking zombie man who gets bitten and doesn't tell people and goes crazy, he creates like essentially massive outbreak. He's killing refugees, he's killing military people. Then there every single person he bites, you know. I think the general understanding in fandom is like, if somebody was a zombie and everybody bit too people, it would only take like seven days for the world to be overtaken. And we see this happen in a microcosm here in District one. 00:30:22 Speaker 3: And while Doyle refuses, good job Jeremy Renner. 00:30:28 Speaker 2: To kill all the refugees and people who are still trying to survive, which is what the government and his bosses want, that does start to happen. 00:30:38 Speaker 3: Chaos ensues. 00:30:40 Speaker 2: I think you made a brilliant point, actually, Jason, that I hadn't even really kind of thought of. 00:30:44 Speaker 3: This is definitely. 00:30:48 Speaker 2: A statement on kind of the idea of over militarized occupations. And it's very interesting with that read because we start to see as Doyle is trying to help people escape, innocent, uninfected people other for snipers, are just shooting at them, and they end up killing these family members, and Doyle ends up deciding he's going to shoot his own men in order to try and save them, and it ends up being Scarlet who saved Tammy and Andy because she considered that perhaps there is a world where they continue the genetic possibilities of finding a cure and another survivor, Sam, and then we get this horrifying moment, which again I think, to me, I. 00:31:39 Speaker 3: Just think is like. 00:31:42 Speaker 2: A very ahead of its time moment, and honestly, I feel like, now if somebody did this in a movie, they'd be like just just true political. But they essentially have the air force firebomb the entire sub district one, which was where there were survivors, where there was research, where there were animals, there was a potential of a new society there. But it doesn't work, and we end up with Flynn Harl Perrino flies as helicopter to Regent's Park, very famous, kind of near to one of the sixth forms. I tried to go to. Beautiful park, gorgeous, beautiful, lovely flowers and arrangements, and it's just one of those brilliant green spaces that we get in London. I spend a lot of time hanging out there as a teenager, and he's like, broa, you gotta infect the others. Bro, Like you gotta leave them, don't worry about it, Like it's just me and you. Bro's to the end, and unfortunately the infected people are on their tail. Sam tries to get onto the flying helicopter and this is the stuff I really remember from this movie. 00:32:53 Speaker 3: I think maybe I was kind of too young when it came out. 00:32:56 Speaker 2: I was so into the first twenty eight Days Later movie, and I think my young mat was kind of like, oh, it's so Hollywood, it's so big budget, like it doesn't really understand the origins of the movie. But I'm realizing now it's not from rewatching, is not really the case. And also it's just that some of the set pieces are so crazy, like this one where you have Flynn like using his fucking helicopter rotor blades, yeah, to try and like thin out the zombie crowd, which is so crazy. And then another iconic English place here if you watch any kind of sports, even NFL has had matches here. But obviously if you are a fan of European soccer, British soccer football as we call it, Wembley Stadium. That's where he's like, come here, and Doyle's like, I've got to save these guys. 00:33:45 Speaker 3: I've got to do it. I

can't do it. 00:33:47 Speaker 2: They then break into I love like the specificity of this and for some reason, this is like a very popular classic British car, but it's like a Volvo V seventy, which is like a really funny, like basically a hatchback that like an executive would drive. I don't know why, but English people they love Volvos. They hide in the car because there has been like a terrifying gas that has been released to kill the infected. Again, great commentary here on how population doesn't matter and it's all about control of the virus and the danger, which honestly, as the movie ends, we realize is probably what they should have been focusing on. So I'm not gonna like complain too much about the government, because the zombie apocalypse does end up spreading in this movie RP to Europe. But yeah, then we get really fun sequence where they go into the tube, the very famous London underground been there for like one hundred and fifty years, incredible public transport system. I love it can get you across London in like twenty five to fifty minutes, depending on where you're going. But what's really cool is we do have a few different movies in London set in the underground. There's a great movie Creeps Out Under that but in this sequence they use night vision to go through the tunnels and. 00:35:05 Speaker 3: It's really creepy. It's really unique. 00:35:08 Speaker 2: And then well I hate it and kind of forgot is that Donn is still on their tail. 00:35:13 Speaker 1: Yeah, he's still going after this. 00:35:15 Speaker 2: There's something something maybe pheromones or DNA. 00:35:21 Speaker 1: It like in the scene where he murders his wife, even though he is infected at that moment, there's always this implication again with the way they shoot him, with the way they shoot him when he's running through the crowd, that there's something of his previous consciousness, his emotions that remains, and that is animating him, and that is keeping him following them. 00:35:45 Speaker 2: And I think like, something that's really interesting about that is the notion of kind of like. 00:35:54 Speaker 3: Muscle memory, body memory, like who this guy was. 00:35:58 Speaker 2: Because also when I got to the end of the movie and I saw that don was still chasing them was still public. I recalled the beginning, I went back and rewatched it, and when Alice is really worried about the kids and kind of like doesn't know where they are and everything, he really shrugs it off in a way that I thought was him trying to reassure her, but actually I realized now is he probably. 00:36:18 Speaker 3: Doesn't care in the same way that she does. 00:36:21 Speaker 2: So they end up going to They go through the tunnels, Don is chasing them, and luckily Tammy Don and Alice's daughter ends up killing her dad, which feels very pointed in the read the Toxic Masculinity read, and she ends up. 00:36:38 Speaker 3: Being the hero. 00:36:39 Speaker 2: They get to Wembley Stadium, they

meet Flynn, who flies them to France. Seems like maybe there's something good that could happen it. I feel like they shouldn't have immediately gone to another country. 00:36:50 Speaker 3: Probably should have. 00:36:50 Speaker 2: Just like gone to many of the rural places in England that they could have, you know. 00:36:55 Speaker 1: Bene small islands like yeah, also not. 00:36:58 Speaker 3: Even just that, but like England is like America. 00:37:03 Speaker 2: There's loads of it that's inhabited, but also there's like tons of it that isn't. 00:37:06 Speaker 3: So I just feel like you could have gone to. 00:37:09 Speaker 2: Like the moors or somewhere, you know, gone to like a beach and tried to hide out there. 00:37:16 Speaker 3: Something. 00:37:17 Speaker 2: I feel like going to France was irresponsible, as we will learn it was because twenty eight days later, a French boye whui whui. That's why it's are the French? I know guys me uh, yes, that's it. I was gonna say, may I am i rosie, but that's not that's not French. But yes, they are asking to help. They are asking for the rape. You can hear them in the radio from Flint's abandoned helicopter and ut ooh, a group of infected people busts from a Paris metro station and in one of the most hilarious in my opinion, like feels like maybe a kind of like maybe an exec cast for this or maybe they were like, oh, let's see if we can make it happen the same where we did in England. We see the effected in front of the Eiffel Tower. They were like, what's French? They were like see that, yeah, And that is interestingly, where we leave the franchise for you know, many many years, almost twenty years, twenty eight weeks. 00:38:19 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, twelmost year later. 00:38:20 Speaker 3: It was two thousand and seven, and that movie was. 00:38:24 Speaker 2: Actually while we had Boyle and Garland on as producers. It was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, and it was like there was a screenplay with multiple writers on it, including Rowan, Joffy, Hemry Kue Lopez Levine, and Jesus Olomo. And it's interesting because I do think that it feels very different and I feel like at the time it did make a lot of money, but I don't know if it necessarily people received it in the right way. But I think rewatching it, it's really interesting and I'm not surprised at all that ended up being Carmen's favorite. She's got lots of great some great tastes. 00:39:01 Speaker 1: It is a good one. It's underrated, and I think for me, I think that the escape from the house in the opening m hm, Don's like as he runs out of the house and he's looking back over his shoulder and he's kind of like running in this small valley like between like at the bottom of like a hill, and you see he looks to his left and on the hill above him, you see infected start coming over the hill down towards him. I think that's, for me, the scariest moment in the series, when you're just like it, because you really it's hard for me to fully blame him for you know, he's mindlessly scared, like yeah. 00:39:46 Speaker 2: The opening, you're meant to think like, Okay, I could see how I could do that too. 00:39:51 Speaker 1: I couldn't see how I could do it. 00:39:52 Speaker 2: Yeah, But I also think something that I love is when he's first running away. 00:39:57 Speaker 3: Something else this movie does. 00:39:59 Speaker 2: Well is like go because when he first runs away, he's looking behind him and there's only like seven zombies and it doesn't look that scary, but you still got to run away from those seven zombies like you only need one to bite you. You know. Yeah, I think it's such an interesting movie, and I'm very I'm intrigued to see if on revisiting and if they can deliver with twenty eight years later, this could go down as like a very legendary horror franchise, horror trilogy. 00:40:25 Speaker 3: I think, Yeah, it's. 00:40:27 Speaker 1: One of my favorites, and it's like everyone else, it reinviuriated my love of zombies. That was always a big zombie guy. I saw Romero's Dawn of the Dead when I was too young to see it on VHS. Of course, I think, you know, the helicopter blade scene from twenty eight weeks is I think a clear homage to the helicopter partial decapitation from Dawn of the Dead. Slow motions obviously, and just a great movie. Great movie, fast zombies. It really ups the for me, It up the fear. Fat Well, let's take a quick break and we be right back with our zombie omnimous x omnibous omnibus. And we're back with the Zomnibus. Welcome to today's edition of the Zomnibus, where Loura, analysis and understanding come together. Today we're talking about zombies. 00:41:31 Speaker 3: Zombies. 00:41:33 Speaker 1: Zombies arose from tragedy. The concept initially emerged in Haiti under the slave regime of French colonial rule. As Mike Mariano writes in a excellent zombie historiography in The Atlantic Quote, the zombie archetype, as it appeared in Haiti and mirrored the inhumanity that existed there from sixteen twenty five to eighteen hundred, was a projection of the African slaves relentless misery in subjugation and slave people in Haiti believed that dying might free their souls to go back to their homeland, but those who took their own lives were doomed instead to wander the plantations eternally trapped in their bodies soulless zombies no e z MBIs condemned to a nightmare existence of perpetual servitude. After Haiti's revolution in eighteen oh four, the zombie myth entered general local lore, where it evolved. There was the addition of bokhors, who were these kind of sorcerers who could reanimate people to do their bidding again. The slave metaphor is central to this idea, and there were several points over the course of the nineteenth century where Haiti, though free, it seemed like it might have slavery reimposed upon it, and the folkloreic zombies of this period were, as Marianna writes, quote, a more fractured representation of the anxieties of slavery, mixed as they

were with the cult trappings of sorcerers and necromancy. Even then, the zombies roots in the horrors of slavery were already facing dilution. Fast forward to the twentieth century. The Zombie then enters Western popular culture with American writer William B. Seabrooks and sensationalistic nineteen twenty nine non fiction book of The Magic Island. This story introduced readers to Haiti's voodoo zombie, which Seabrook described as a corpse revived by witchcraft, shuffling along obediently with quote eyes staring, unfocused and unseeing, as if truly undead. The book described seabrooks travels to Haiti during the US occupation of the island and his encounters with various elements of Haitian culture and voodoo practice, all of which is presented within a pretty racist context, and casting the Haitian people as this kind of other world, otherworldly, primitive, exotic culture and society. In the chapter dead Men Working in the Kingfield, Seabrook describes for the first time in literature, the zombie these undead laborers animated by strange magic. The book was a sensation. A review in the January ninth, nineteen twenty nine edition of The Brooklyn Eagle reads, and I think it's at least for the reviews I've read that we're contemporary. Is this is pretty pretty much part of the course. The Magic Island reeks with sacrificial blood, the odor of cadavers, the sinister breath of witchcraft, the horrendous exaltation of unholy terrors slaked in the steaming passions of human animals. It is a grim story of voodooism. This The Magic Island, filled with sickening mummeries, repulsive rituals, orgiastic expiations and propitations, and armed with an uncanny ability to woo the reader into his own experiences. Seabrook has again created a book that commands attention, although it has no other literary distinction than to be extraordinarily interesting. The first zombie film appeared shortly thereafter. It was White Zombie from nineteen thirty two, starring the legend Bella Lagosi as a voodoo master in Haiti turning people into zombie slaves. It leaned heavily on seabrooks account and played on White America's racist fears of black people and their general antipathy towards Africans in general. In these early depictions, you know, zombies weren't out to eat you. They were still this kind of broad based metaphor for enslavement. During World War Two and into the Cold War, the zombies cross pollinated with that era's anxieties about war, about authoritarianism, and about nuclear destruction. In King of the Zombies nineteen forty one, a foreign spy uses voodoo zombies to extract military secrets. And in the horror comedy Revenge of the Zombies, which is the first horror film that actually presumed that audiences understood what a zombie was like. There was no non a zombie origins story, no exposition dump. This features an evil doctor raising an army of Nazi undead, and in the b picture Creature with the Adam Brain nineteen fifty five, a rogue scientist reanimates corpses with nuclear energy to his bidding. As Zachary Krokett and Javier Zarachina write in the Vox article how the zombie represents America's deepest fears. After Hiroshima and the start of the Soviet nuclear test quote, American fears of nuclear radiation and communism began to manifest in zombies. These were America's fears made real about the dead and the incarnet, about armies of soulist killing machines, about atomic fallout about being enslaved by communism and Red Scare, brainwashing, etc. But through this entire period, zombies basically remained very niche until a Pittsburgh area independent filmmaker burst upon the scene. This is Georgia Merrow with his nineteen sixty eight cinema classic Night of the Living Dead. Interestingly, Romero originally didn't call his creature zombies on set. He called them ghoules because of his aversion to the original linkage of the term back to French slavery in Haiti. But his film's impact essentially reinvented horror and created the modern zombie template as we know it. His innovation, Romero's innovation was to kind of strip away all the supernatural voodoo and the sorcerers and all that stuff. Is very little in the way of actual explanation, kind of a vague there's like a vague hypothesis that it might be like space radiation or something. But the crucial innovation, and something Rosen and I talk about all the time, is that the enemy in Night of the Living Dead is not the zombies. It is us. It is people. The film's shockingly bleak ending shows Dwayne Jones the hero of the story, black protagonist, surviving the zombie apocalypse of that night, only to be mistaken for a ghoul and shot dead by a white posse, which I can only imagine resonated like a gut punch in the climate of nineteen sixty eight. As many have noted, Night premiered the same year that Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated and its finale black hero killed by trigger happy white militia felt ripped from the headlines. Night of the Living Dead pulsed with the anxieties of its era, civil unrest, violence, fragility of the social order, and perhaps most centrally, America's fascination with guns and with militia violence with extra legal violence. Dawn of the Dead from nineteen seventy eight, my personal favorite, traded the rural farmhouse for a shopping mall and a cutting critique of aria of American materialism and capitalism. Romero later explained that after Night became a surprise hit, he felt pressure to make the sequel that mattered, which is why it took a little while. Quote everybody was after me to make another one. I said, I don't want to just make it on the one. I have to have an idea, I have to have something to say, And it took ten years before inspiration finally struck. Ramiro visited one of Pennsylvania's first indoor malls and was struck by this spectacle of a consumer paradise. Quote. I saw the trucks coming in, bringing in everything you could ever possibly want. It just seemed like this temple to

consumerism. The light went off and I thought, maybe I could do something with this, And man, does he ever do something with this. The movie opens with what I think is like the best twenty minutes maybe in a horror movie ever. It feels so real, you really feel society coming apart. It takes place in this local news studio where this news program is both covering the dissolution of the world under the weight of this zombie infection, but also is giving you this fantastically charming like exposition dump as this expert is like, the dead will rise, they will kill more, and those will rise and they will never stop coming. It's like you're just like, whoa, it gave you away. Yeah. And then, of course, much of the movie takes place as characters escape from the kind of small safe havens that they had put together as the as the weight of the zombie hordes kind of like break down these small havens. A small cast of characters flees to this shopping mall where they create a fortress and for a time, a utopia. There's the scene that stuck with me and that I think probably sticks with a lot of people because I saw this one. I was maybe ten or eleven was they first break into the mall and then they spend there's this montage of our heroes going having a grand ole time, going from store to store, taking clothes, taking different consumer electronics, filling up shopping carts with stuff over this kind of jaunty soundtrack music, and that really stuck with me. And of course it can't last. The utopia cannot last forever. The zombies get in. They start eating people, including a truly horrendous like intestine eating scene. But you know, by this point the genre and its template had been set. Through the eighties and nineties, zombies kind of shuffled along in pop culture with a varying degree of vitality. There were sequels Day of the Dead Return of the Living Dead, which by this point are starting to kind of revert to the more b movie origins. 00:51:32 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:51:33 Speaker 2: Well, also there was a weird situation which allowed zombie movies to thrive, which was the proper trademarking of Night of the Living Dead was never done, which is why it's on every free streaming. It's why any studio, i mean, any distributor can put it out on DVD. It's why you can watch it on YouTube. It was never properly copyrighted, which means a lot of movies were able to come out and sound like they were connected Tonight of the Living Dead, but they were not necessarily officially connected, which I think is still one of the weirdest Hollywood kind of confusions that's ever happened. 00:52:11 Speaker 3: But yeah, and so it allowed that to be this kind of wave of rip offs. 00:52:19 Speaker 2: You know, fa sounds like they're connected, but they're not connected. And yeah, and there's still going on. I mean, there are still you can still find movies that seem like they are amer connected when they're not. 00:52:30 Speaker 1: Perhaps because of this inundation of the marketplace with zombie content, the eighties and nineties was kind of a sorry for this turn of phrase, was kind of a dead period for the zombie It was mostly kept alive through video games, most notably Capcom's nineteen ninety six Resident Evil, and that many many sequels, but it's a turnover the new millennium, the Zombie returned to bite us yet again. A trio of Landmark works ignite I did the revival, with Rosie's Homeland central to this. It first came a twenty eight Days Later from two thousand and two, Sean of the Dead from two thousand and four, and then Americans Can't let the English have all the fun the Walk and Dead comic, which debuted in two thousand and three twos and two to two thousand and four. Pretty crazy period crazy for the Zombie. 00:53:25 Speaker 2: Also really interesting because twenty eight Days Later is a complete reimagination to the point where Danny Boyle at first does kind of like Romero, doesn't think it's a zombie film, then Shan of the Dead, which instead goes back and introduces kind of like a mega social commentary comedy version that's very much in the screen mold of something that feels familiar and has loads of references, and you kind of have to be inundated in zombie law as we all are to understand it. But then you have The Walking Dead, which is so out of the range of what we understand by being a comic book and was at the time, and I'm sorry if I've told the story before, but I love it was so expected to be a flop. It was so underprinted. Image Comics that actually turned down Robert Kirkman's idea for The Walking Dead multiple times because they said, nobody cares about zombies, nobody wants to read a zombie comic. So he lied to them and he said, well, at certain point in the story, you're going to find out that really the zombies were sent by aliens and it's part of this kind of alien you know, invasion story. 00:54:42 Speaker 3: And Eric Stimson said. 00:54:43 Speaker 2: Okay, great, like you can make the Walking Dead, And so the first issue comes out and the second issue, and slowly they say to him, hey, when are the aliens coming? And then the book becomes such a big hit that he doesn't ever have to do it, so like he had to lie to get the comic made. But then that comic ended up completely changing the landscape and changing the way that we would see zombies. Bringing us back to that twenty eight days later, a style of kind of like a new way of telling the story and like, who are the real Walking Dead us or the zombies? 00:55:14 Speaker 4: Like that's a crazy three year hit though, and of course, as zombie stories had done previously, twenty eight days later, even Sean of the Dead and certainly The Walking Dead tapped into the anxieties of the era biocontagion, terrorism, protest, and social unrest, you know, stars had was emerging at the time the anthrax attacks had happened, and of course twenty eight days later it feels as if it predicts a lot of the kind of post nine to eleven cultural

iconography. The wall with the pick of a missing. 00:56:01 Speaker 3: Which ironically was a coincidence. 00:56:03 Speaker 1: Coincidence completely before filmed before nine to eleven and all of that emerged. 00:56:08 Speaker 2: You talk about something here that I think is kind of interesting, and this is not you know, I'm sure somebody has written a great article about this, and I'll go find it afterwards. But also there is a level of just like the early zombies, Abell Legosti zombies, which were incredibly you know, very racist, the white zombie version of a zombie that if you actually think about it, the representation of this idea of like a community who's so filled with rage, and you'll never understand them, and they'll just destroy your country's kind of. 00:56:36 Speaker 3: There's a racist reading of it, Sure you could. 00:56:39 Speaker 2: There's definitely some interesting stuff to be tapped into there as well. Yeah, I mean it's so interesting just how much it is a time capsule of exactly what was going on right then. 00:56:52 Speaker 1: I think the most successful and long running, certainly a zombie property of this or any era, has to be the adaptation of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead, which began as an anti comic in two thousand and three, as Rosie said, and then debuted on AMC in twenty ten, quickly became a blockbuster and at least for me, became a you know, it added the element of I think it put the American soul front and center. This is a story in which, like a law enforcement officer is the main guy, you're dealing with regular people, school teachers who become these like local warlords. And it's a lot about the kind of core American love of guns and the thought, you know, experiment that I think many Americans play all the time, which is, okay, what happens when the shit pops off and I have to start shooting people and man the Walking Dead. I think a lot of it's long running, it it's endurance in the popular cultural imagination is because of this particular way. It has put its finger on something about the American psyche. But the rest of the world was also getting involved. Most only Asia there was Trained to Busan from twenty sixteen, a Sang Ho's iconic, heartfelt, heart breaking zombie film that harnesses, you know, Korea's particular lens about class and capitalism. And it is a story about a workaholic businessman and his young daughter who end up on a train filled with zombies and have to deal with the zombies but also the kind of like craven ambitions of like regular humans. The director reflected in an interview quote, if in Trained to Busan, we say that selfishness spread like a virus. His zombies may be fast and ferocia, but the true villains of Training Bussan are human greed and cowardice. So what is it about the zombies that keeps us coming back? They're blank slate, They're versatile, they are the perfect every enemy, you know, like Nazis, which I think for certain nondiances are complex now because like people are are not sure if they're the bad guys. 00:59:21 Speaker 2: Yeah, apparently so, And I will say reflectively, we see less stories right now about how Nazis are that evil catual villain and zombies this kind of more flexible. You can put whatever you want onto them, become that clean slate. Anyone can kill them without feeling guilty. 00:59:43 Speaker 1: Yes, they Aileen. They've been metaphors for everything from looters, rioters, rampant materialism in the way that they only consume and mindlessly consume this. Cultural critic James Parker observed, the zombie is quote old, reliable, outlasting even its sexier monster cousins, the humble ghoul. That quote rides the bestseller list and consumes the pop unconscious like no other. From Haitian sugar plantations to shopping malls the nineteen thirties B movies to presstch TV, the zombie has shambled and then run and then sprinked it all the way. Its evolution is the story of pop culture itself, always mutating cross pollen, I responding to our collective hopes and fears with a disgusting, rotten grin. Well, that's it for this episode. Next time on X ray Vision. We're getting you ready for Marvel's Ironheart. No Mit Education acquired few. That's it for this episode. Thanks for listening. 01:00:44 Speaker 3: Bye x. 01:00:47 Speaker 1: Ray Vision is hosted by Jason Concepcion, I'm Rosy night and is a production of iHeart Podcast. 01:00:52 Speaker 2: Our executive producers a Joe Alminique and Aaron Kleman. 01:00:56 Speaker 1: Our supervising producer is Abu safar Ah. 01:00:58 Speaker 2: Produces a common Laurent Dean Jonathan and Bay Wack. 01:01:02 Speaker 1: A theme song is by Brian Vasquez with alternate theme songs by Aaron Kaufman. 01:01:07 Speaker 2: Special thanks to Soul Rubin, Chris Lord, Kenny Goodman and Heidi are Discord moderator