In a time of monsters: do we have any ideas for surviving the zombie apocalypse that aren’t nightmare patriarchy?

Alex Garland is looking for redemption.

Everyone forgets the actual opening scene of 28 Days Later, which features a helpless chimp strapped to a table and forced to watch doomreels of ultraviolence until it loses its little monkey mind and eats David Schneider. It's a universally relatable image. But it's eclipsed by the famous sequence that follows, where Cillian Murphy wakes in a hospital bed to find that he has slept through a deadly pandemic and the ensuing collapse of civilisation. As Murphy drags his not-yet-world-famous cheekbones through an eerily abandoned metropolis, we see Piccadilly plastered with the names and faces of the missing and the dead. Audiences in 2002 were reminded of the recent World Trade Center attacks, which happened in the middle of filming. Unfortunately, it was about to get a lot more prescient.

This week, as the long-awaited last instalment of Alex Garland’s zombie franchise hits cinemas, I’ve been rewatching the first two films, which truly feel like a ‘coming up next’ montage for two decades of economic collapse, climate breakdown, civil unrest, carnage and chaos. There’s the theatre of quarantine, the masked soldiers swabbing wall-eyed survivors who have just watched their world implode, and Naomie Harris as handy exposition ninja, explaining that:

‘It started as rioting and right from the beginning you knew this was different. Because it was happening in small villages. Market towns.

…By the time they tried to evacuate the cities, it was already too late. The infection was everywhere.’

Decent horror does a lot more than scare the audience. It asks us to think about what frightens us, and why.

This is now a normal day at Guy’s Hospital

I apologise to everyone whose doctoral theses I’m about to comic sansify, but in brief- the big three monsters of mass culture are Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies, in descending order of sexiness. Ego, Id and Superego. Vampires are about power, exploitation, and the nasty suspicion that, given the chance, you too might be prepared to hurt other people if it meant getting to flounce about forever in a mansion. Werewolves are about the monster inside you, about the fear that one day you’ll lose control, tear up your life and wake up in the woods with a weird headache and no trousers. But zombies are the most obviously political. Zombies are about our fear of other people as a collective phenomenon.

Goth picnic

Terror of the unstoppable mob has been baked into the genre from the beginning. In the 1960s, Romero’s Living Dead franchise caught the mood of mass protest and played into polite society’s fear of the civil rights movement. In the intervening decades we’ve been served every flavour of shambling undead, and all of them, even Resident Evil, offer us what looks like a reassuringly simple moral choice. The shambling horde, after all, has ceased to be sentient. It cannot be reasoned with. It will keep coming until you kill it, because there’s no way to have a productive debate with someone who is actively trying to chew out your pituitary gland. All of which feels upsettingly relevant to the recent experience of representative democracy.

Garland’s ravenous, man-eating mobs of ‘infected’ are not, technically, undead - they’re just very, very cross. The virus spreading unstoppably across the nation is, simply, ‘rage’. If you’d pitched that in 2020, it might have felt too on the nose, but Garland has already explicitly told us that 28 Years Later is more about Brexit than it is about COVID. It works, because zombie movies aren’t just about fear of the mob - they’re also about the horror of being forced to tolerate other people. They’re about the the price we pay for the notional protections of civilisation, and they’re rarely subtle about it, which fine, because nobody watches monster movies for delicate analogy, and personally I prefer my Hobbesian dilemmas with a side of dishy actors dressed mainly in other people’s blood panting, screaming and swinging baseball bats….

As usual, I’ll make the rest of this post public as soon as we hit ten new paid subscribers. Thank you, truly, for whatever support you can offer independent writers like me.