Stephen King felt ‘28 Days Later’ missed the mark on lasting horror: “Nothing came back to haunt me”
Being labelled ‘The Master of Horror’, Stephen King has become a go-to critic on all things frightful, with fans demanding his opinion on recent releases within the horror genre. After building a reputation through the creation of stories such as The Shining, It, Misery and The Green Mile, the writer came to be known for his accessible and fantastical tales that have shaped the framework of fear itself, going on to inspire countless on-screen adaptations. However, when discussing recent horror films, King didn’t give much praise for one cult zombie apocalypse film.
Danny Boyle is one of the great British directors, exploding onto the filmmaking scene with Shallow Grave and Trainspotting in the 1990s, with a gritty style that captured the underground sub-culture of the UK through their unflinching gaze and grungy characters. While Trainspotting achieved a huge fan base, Boyle’s next film in 2002 reached entirely new heights.
28 Days Later begins in the aftermath of a deadly virus being accidentally released from a research facility in London, with a small group of survivors attempting to protect themselves from a population of fleshing-eating killers. The zombie apocalypse genre has proven to be very popular over the years, with the success of The Walking Dead franchise marking a resurgence in the popularity of extreme survival storytelling.
However, Boyle was able to put his own spin on the genre, moulding his signature gritty style to the tropes associated with horror, creating a harrowing and frankly petrifying portrait of chaos and disorder in a city plagued by disease. The film has been credited with revitalising the zombie horror genre, with the monsters typically being characterised as being slow-moving and sluggish threats, with Boyle reanimating them as quick creatures that run to bite people. Due to the success of the first film, it was later rebooted in 2008 and will shortly return to our screens for the 28 Years Later sequel, starring Ralph Fiennes and Jodie Comer.
Despite being loved by many, King was not a huge fan, saying he “liked 28 Days Later but didn’t love it”.
He added: “The bottom line for horror movies doesn’t change from year to year; their job is to scare you silly, and either they do it or they don’t. 28 Days Later intrigued me — I’m a sucker for survivors in empty cities, as anyone who’s read The Stand knows — but there was nothing in 28 Days Later that came back to haunt me later that evening after the bedroom light was out.”
Perhaps this is the ultimate litmus test for any horror film – that if you can turn the lights off afterwards and not feel afraid in your own home, then it isn’t that scary. But for a fear veteran such as King, maybe the bar for being spooked is too high, with the writer developing a vague immunity to terror after creating some of the classic scaring tactics that have cropped up in cinema.
But alas, fear is unique to the person experiencing it, and while King may have been able to trek to his bedroom in the pitch black without scampering under his bed sheets, I can’t say the same for myself, and many people return to the film when in need of a good scare.
