all the rage

Continuing my journey into Halloween, I stumble and grunt my way through the empty streets of London, 2002.

One film that gets better the more I see it is 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle's pulse quickening tale of things-that-definitely-aren't-zombies chasing Cillian Murphy around a deserted England. One the surface it looks like a 21st Century riff on a tale that has been done dozens of times before - boy awakes alone, boy finds world deserted, boy gets chased about by monsters for a bit. The two tales it calls to mind most are Matheson's 'I am Legend' (filmed a number of times with increasing degrees of stupidity) and Wyndham's 'Day of the Triffids', the 1980 version of which still renders me terrified of rhubarb. And, of course, it is hugely indebted to the horde of zombie films that shambled in the wake of Romero's 'Dead' trilogy.

28 Days Later is, however, not a zombie film. Oh no. Ask Danny Boyle, see what he says. In fact, I'll save you the bother. He'll say no. Not zombies. No. Rage infected humans, he'll say.

But, but, you might splutter, society has collapsed due to a phenomenon which causes perfectly normal people to transform into flesh eating monsters who hunt without reason. What are they if they aren't zombies?

And here Boyle will point out two things to you. The first, he will say, energetically nodding his weird shaped head, is that you have mistakenly assumed cannibalism to be an essential characteristic of the creature we call a zombie. Whcih is, of course, untrue. Zombies only became cannibals in the 60s, some 30 years after their cultural birth. The original, 1930s, ready salted version of the zombie did little more than stumble about looking stupid, occasionally fetching you things if you asked. Didn't eat anything. No.

Secondly, and more importantly, Boyle would say, taking off his glasses and rubbing his nose, it is important to note that the infected are not dead. They are still alive. So not undead. So not zombies.

Now, I'll admit that for quite some time I was in the 'They are zombies, whatever you say' camp. Generically speaking, 28 Days Later has all the iconography and narrative structure of a zombie film, so who cares about technicalities like how dead they are? A number of commentators have said similar things, and put Boyle's insistence on the 'infected'ness of his creatures down to a reluctance to associate with the little-regarded subgenre of the zombie movie. Nowadays, I'm not so sure. I think it is probably quite important that the rage infected humans are alive.

What ths film is about, I think, is civilisation. More specifically, it is about the vague and shifting line that divides our concept of civilisation from its opposite, whatever we might call it. Barbarism? Third-world-ism? The thing about the infected is that they have not really gained the desire to become something monstrous. It is more like they have lost something. The infected have lost the ability to keep themselves in check, to suppress their base desires and act in accordance with everyone else. Once free of these civilising instincts, they are free to do whatever they want... and what they want to do is scream, and run, and smash, and hurt. Not like monsters, but like children. Or like me, inside, lots of the time. Sometimes all I have to do is drop a spoon. You want rage? Try hiding the remote control for the TV, or watch to see what happens if my PC disobeys me.

Boyle's direction, and Alex Garland's script, give us two excellent pointers as to how problematic the concept of civilisation is. First, and perhaps most obviously, we have Major West's soldiers. It is no accident that they live in a big country house, full of culture (check out all those lingering shots of statues). Our heroes reach civilisation, and find it worse that what they run from: monsters disguised behind soft words.

And then there's Jim. Ostensibly our hero, Jim is a walking critique of the hero's journey experienced in most Western texts. Overtly feminised at the start of the film, he transforms himself by steps into a 'real man', so that by the end he can defeat the monsters and win the girl. He has got there by killing a child, murdering men and finally by resembling the very creatures we are meant to be afraid of. The camera starts to treat him as it does the infected: the frame rate drops and jerks, Jim flashes past the frame in silhouette.Finally we see him plunge his thumbs into another man's eyes. Compare this to Will Smith's clean cut scientist-cop-hero-genius-Jesus in the narratively similar I am Legend and the ideological differences become hard to ignore.

This is a film about our definitions of civilisation and how they can make us blind to our own monstrous nature. We exclude ideologies that seem less rational and trust in our intellectual superiority. But doesn't it seem like that intellectual edge is used, more and more, to mask the horrific things we do? To give comfortable words to horrible ideas so we don't have to face up to the insanity of our culture.

Anyway, that's what I think. It is also a top monster film and I really like the scary bit in the tunnel.