Anatomy of a Scene: The terrifying introduction of ’28 Weeks Later’
Serving as the breakthrough role of Cillian Murphy’s career and popularising the sprinting zombie that would go on to become an accepted part of the horror genre, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later had a much bigger impact on 21st-century cinema than anyone would have expected of a relatively inexpensive British film.
Naturally, its open-ended conclusion led to much clamour for a sequel when it recouped its production budget ten times over at the global box office, but expectations weren’t particularly high for Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s sequel, due in part to director Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland not being involved in a creative capacity.
While 28 Weeks Later is undoubtedly inferior to the opening chapter, it boasts one of the most unforgettable opening scenes in the history of horror. Whereas Boyle’s first instalment used the emptiness of a vast city like London to enhance the desolation brought on by the zombie apocalypse, Fresnadillo narrowed the scope but significantly upped the tension, dread, and sheer terror.
Zeroing in on a small family to highlight the human side of the undead uprising, Robert Carlyle’s Don and Catherine McCormack’s Alice are doing their best to live out a remote existence in a tranquil countryside setting. However, a boy has led the infected right to their door, forcing Don to put his self-preservation at the forefront of his thinking in a fast-paced, frantic, and ultimately tragic scene that paints his abhorrent selfishness in shades of despair and desperation.
Barely escaping with his life intact, Don clambers onto a speedboat and makes a mad dash for freedom, with Alice agonisingly pounding on the glass of their abode as he leaves her behind to die. The fast-paced editing, close-up camerawork, volume of zombies flooding the frame, and John Murphy’s pulsating musical score combine to create an intense, upsetting, and nerve-shredding introduction to 28 Weeks Later, all laced through with a moral dilemma it’s all too easy to sympathise and identify with.
Fight or flight is one of humanity’s base impulses, and knowing that there was a much better chance of survival were he to abandon his family, Don is overcome with the desire to protect himself at all costs. It’s an unforgiving situation with no correct answer or right choice, but the dread created in the pit of his stomach as he leaves his loved ones behind is both replicated and reciprocated by the audience, many of whom would hypothetically do the exact same thing were they in his situation, even if they don’t want to admit it.
Even when he’s made the call to put himself first, the scene is constructed in such a way that there are no guarantees Don will even reach safe haven, such is the furiously-paced nature of the initial assault. He’s entirely deserving of his comeuppance for what he did, but there’s always the faintest sense of hope on the viewer’s part that he’ll get away in one piece if only to provide some sense of justification for the most harrowing of sacrifice plays.
Of course, karma comes back to haunt him later on in 28 Weeks Later when Don is forced to lie to his children about what happened to their mother when he’s reunited with Mackintosh Muggleton’s Andy and Imogen Poots’ Tammy, leaving him so disgusted with himself that he can’t bear to tell his own kids about the role he played in their mother’s demise, whether he believed it was preventable or not.
Things come full circle in a way when Don becomes infected, leaving Andy and Tammy to make their own devastating choice, but unlike their father, they don’t have a choice. In the opening scene, Alice hadn’t yet been attacked by the zombies and there was always a possibility – no matter how remote – that if he’d decided to try and save her, they could have been together again as an entire family.
In his case, the transformation is too far gone, which both rounds out his character arc while refusing to put his children in identical shoes. They kill him because they have to, not because it’s the easiest option available to them at the time. As a whole, 28 Weeks Later isn’t on par with its predecessor, but unless the recently-confirmed 28 Years Later does something truly special or remarkable, its introduction will remain the finest single scene the franchise has to offer.
