Episode 117: 28 Days Later with Jeremy Salmon

isn’t 28 days later an absurd movie???

Infectious diseases??? Human to Animal Transmission?? Science gone wrong? A pandemic spread fully by contact???

Lmao! 2002 was wild!

“Repent, The End Is Extremely F**king Nigh”
Get your running shoes on, the next installment of Zombie Night Extravaganza is here!
Forrest Miller, Conan Neutron, and J. Andrew World are joined by Jeremy Salmon to talk about this Alex Garland written and Danny Boyle directed 28 Days Later.

Incredibly innovative, especially at the dawn of digital filmmaking. We love that Boyle did this because of being frustrated by the Hollywood system after Trainspotting‘s unexpected success. It is difficult to articulate how big of a deal “what if Zombie… but FAST!” was at the time. Truly and completely horrific in a way that actually will stick with you. Even though technically they are infected people, not zombies.
Wild too that this film came out pre-Katrina and other massive disaster failures (*cough* COVID *cough*), as one of the most horrific things presented is: What if the system wasn’t ready to handle something like this?
Anyway, how did that turn out?

Amazing use of East Hastings by Godspeed You Black Emperor here, scoring one of the most iconic shots of the decade. So iconic that Boyle hired John Murphy to make some compositions that sounded sort of like GYBE!, these were also used for the sequel and for TONS of other movies almost single handedly starting the weird trend of Godspeed replacement soundalikes that still plague (*ahem*) films today.

The usage of digital for filming on this at the dawn of that technology gives this movie a certain look that is undeniably unique. It’d be hard to categorize it as “good”, but definitely unique.

Not a perfect film, but a remarkable and remarkably influential one that made incredibly inventive use of bleeding edge tech at the time and influential in a lot of ways on culture for the next 10 years.