roomthily

28 Days Later was a key moment in the history of the zombie movie—the moment when the genre reorganized itself around a taut antithesis, such that its monsters could henceforth march as the avatars either of consumerist hyper-civilization or of that civilization’s very negation, its sacking, though, of course, even Romero’s middle-class zombies were cannibals and so suggested a certain preemptive undoing of the antithesis, a welling up of savagery in the North American heartlands of consumer society, in some socialisme-ou-zombiïsme kind of way. It’s the kind of complexity at which horror movies excel, a sociohistorical rabbit-duck operation in which you can look at a figure and not be sure whether you’re seeing Martha Stewart or an Ostrogoth.