Springtime for Danny Boyle

To categorize a film into a genre is an action that involves indisputable subjectivity. Everyone interprets a film differently; in a sense, it’s the one and only law of film analysis. Rick Altman, in his book, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genres”, acknowledges this principle and criticizes the traditional genre critics of his time, saying:

Genres were always-and continue to be-treated as if they spring full-blown from the head of Zeus. It is thus not surprising to find that even the most advanced of current genre theories, those that see generic texts as negotiating a relationship between a specific production system and a given audience, still hold to a notion of genre that is fundamentally ahistorical in nature. (Altman, 1984 8)

The inherent nature of a genre, Altman argues, is not to be a defining adjective for a film. Instead, it is to be a multi-functional concept that is used by the creators of a film as a tool for production, and recognized by the audiences as an indication of the film’s appeal. (Altman, 1999) This means that there are two parties that agree upon how a movie should be seen and categorized, the producing party and the consuming party. However, there are occasions where the viewers of the film receive the film a bit differently than the creators would have liked. In the Mel Brook comedy, "The Producers," the two protagonists intentionally seek to create the most expensive Broadway flop ever made, in order to get away with a tax fraud scheme. Unfortunately for them, the audience interpreted the play as a comedy, rather than a dramatic musical, and they ultimately fail spectacularly.

                In many, many instances, the creators of a film wish to deviate their own film from a particular ideology revolving around others in its genre. Each and every genre and subgenre is assigned a common set of ideas, beliefs and stigmas by its audience. Director Danny Boyle recognized this and decided to defy expectations with his 2002 film, “28 Days Later”. The original Western idea of zombies as monsters where, at the time, codified by the films of George A. Romero. Romero depicted the monsters in his Living Dead series as dead humans that are driven by an instinct to feed on human flesh. They are distinctively slow moving and have rudimentary motor skills. Romero designed them in such a way to emphasize the slow pace of the movie and instill the audience with a continuous sense of suspense, as they wait in anticipation for the inevitably lingering danger created by the vast numbers of zombies surrounding the characters. Boyle framed his movie around the concept of a zombie apocalypse, and decided to break away from the tropes inherent in the subgenre. He designed the monsters in his movie to be a logical antithesis to Romero’s design. In the film, humans are infected with the Rage virus, a hyper-mutated disease that inflicts a victim with complete loss of reasoning and a murderous urge to attack, infect and kill others. They can infect others via infecting their blood or saliva with their own. The monsters are technically still living, breathing humans, which means that they still have the same athletic prowess of a typical human. These monsters run and attack the targets. The horror in the movie comes not just from the suspense created by our protagonists being stuck in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, but from shock, as these monsters pounce and pursue with unrelenting speed.

                Boyle designed his movie to differentiate from the traditional zombie horror subgenre in two ways, by implementing his monsters with uncharacteristic attributes, and focusing less on the zombies themselves and on the apocalypse setting itself. 28 Days Later is a movie that spends less than 30 minutes of its approximately 2 hour run time on its zombies. In fact, the zombies appear in maybe five scenes. The movie pays attention to the characters it follows more often trying to survive their harsh environment. The movie purposefully functions more like a post-apocalyptic survival movie than most other zombie films. The ultimate irony in the film’s deviation from the genre was that it was its massive popularity that made it more definitive of the zombie genre. The movie reached new grounds, and took the genre with it. The film went horribly right.

References

28 Days Later. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris. 20th Century Fox, 2003. Film.
Altman, Rick. "A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre." Cinema Journal 23.3 (1984): 6-18. Web.
Altman, Rick. "What Is Generally Understood by the Notion of Film Genre?"Film/genre. London: BFI Pub., 1999. N. pag. Print.
The Producers. Dir. Mel Brooks. By Mel Brooks. Perf. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1967. Film.