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“Close your eyes… imagine you’re walking down a lonely path in the middle of a dense forest at around midnight. You’re entering the banyan grove- the residence of the evil spirits. You walk quietly, dragging your rubber soles through the mud, careful, so that you do not receive any attention that can turn out unpleasant. The banyan trees crowd over you. Everytime a skeletal root brushes your skin, your eyes make a quick circle to check if anything has moved. The wind picks up. Maybe it’s about to rain. White flashes and thunder. You can feel the dark omens in your gut, your mind reads them and goes in denial but the heart beats hard. You’re afraid to turn behind. Footsteps? No, can’t be. Denial. The wind gets colder but the forehead breaks out in sweat. Don’t look behind. Suddenly, a light in the distance, a tiny flame in an old temple in the heart of a most twisted banyan. You’re not sure if you should walk near or run away. It’s beginning to rain. You run towards the flame. Maybe you hear footsteps behind, maybe it’s your imagination. You reach the temple. You see something move in the dark branches. A sinister shadow. Lightning. You can see the face. Old, shriveled… like a rabid monkey, the old witch twitches among the branches. She’s looking at you with her black beady eyes. Lightning. She cackles with the thunder. Her pointy tongue is black as coal. Darkness again. Where did she go? Not a sound. Even the wind died down. Lightning. And from behind your neck… Booooooooooooooooo!”

It’s the stuff of childhood rituals- inducing with myth and make-believe, a primordial fear by the storyteller in the heart of the audience. Depending on the art of the storyteller, the victim, if he isn’t scarred for an entire lifetime, he spend the next few nights coming up with ailments and excuses so mama and daddy would snug him up in between them lending him de facto protection from all that goes bump in the dark. The image of the monkey woman, vague from the descriptions of the storyteller, is actually construed from the figments of the audience’s fear reservoir and projected on his consciousness which in turn is used by the storyteller as he sucker punches with his loud scream and jolt at the end of the ritual. By offering the audience select and provocative bites of information like the beady eyes and her wild cackling, the storyteller baits the listener into construing an image scarier than one he could come up with. It isn’t mere fear when it’s mined from the subconscience, its terror. The most successful of the horror films and psychological thrillers employ this very deception. What’s seen is scary but what isn’t is even scarier. The prime example cited can be Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and in the same role in ‘Hannibal’. In the former, when the venerable Lecter breaks free from his prison and announces over the phone to Detective Starling that he’s having a friend for dinner it is as if something gruesome and nasty is crawling inside your skin. Not a single scene from the brain-devouring to the disemboweling can measure upto the sheer terror of the phone conversation. Another ace example of the terror of the unseen is ‘The Blair Witch Project’. This unnerving low-budget horror mockumentary arrived at a time when horror was being put through the ‘Pulp Fiction-scope’. The genre was increasingly turning self-deprecatory and inter-textual and in the end pure hokey. From teen-centric hokum, horror moved into a new phase termed ‘The Splat Pack’ or ‘torture porn’ which were nothing but painfully detailed exploitation that left all flinching and deception to the audience. In Stephen King’s pyramid of fear- terror, horror and gross-out, the Splat Pack were bottom feeders. All ‘The Blair Witch’ ever yielded, it seemed, were a couple of good spoofs and a bunch of unimaginative piggy backers that languished in Direct-to-DVD.

With ’28 Weeks Later’, more companion piece than direct sequel (with no characters repeating) to the Zombie revisionist classic ’28 Days Later’, Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and his team have finally created a worthy successor to ‘The Blair Witch Project’. Shot in a handheld documentary style using natural light, the movie adapts the mechanics of ‘The Blair Witch..” to a more conventional screenplay and proceeds to achieve what many documentaries fail to- self-effacement of the crew behind the camera. The camera is a point of view set in the middle of an apocalypse, the images are chaotic, confused and the pathos and paranoia of the moment boil over among the audience. The technique puts the audience right among the blood and guts of doomsday. Images distorted with shadow, light and visceral editing suggest the confused frantic stream of consciousness of a participant in the terror unfolding on the screen. Never did the utter bleakness and chaos of a doomed world seem so immediate. Inventive use of lighting in the scene with the outbreak in an over-crowded Bomb Shelter (shot in a successions of flashlight beams) and the build-up to the climax (shot in night-vision) amps up the claustrophobia and shock to boiling point. Extreme close-ups of eyes appear throughout the film lending meaning and rhythm to the visual texture. Also, the actors are shot in close-up with emphasis on the eyes as if Director Fresnadillo wants us to experience the apocalypse from the desperation within.

While ’28 Days Later’ was concerned with the survival of individuals, ’28 Weeks Later’ picks up, after the virtuoso opening sequence, at a point where the wave of infection has been quarantined and tided over, the last of the zombies have died of starvation and the survivors are banding together as a civil society, concerns itself with a society struggling to find its feet after a complete breakdown of the system. The resurrection is performed under the detached and overbearing US Army. It is tradition in the modern zombie genre, from George Romero’s path breaking ‘Night of the Living Dead’ to the revivalist ’28 Days Later’, to subtext the overlying storyline of death, disease and survival with subversive political comment. Avoiding rhetoric, Fresnadillo lets the action on the screen speak for itself. With the US Army, increasingly viable sitting ducks for critique, he resists demonizing them. Rather, he is compassionate towards the soldiers while attacking policy. When the general orders a massacre, he is not shown as a salivating sociopath but as a cool composed professional carrying out his work as per policy.

While ’28 Days Later’ starts with one of the most talked about opening scenes of a horror film with a band of animal rights extremists vandalizing a animal testing lab and in their naïve idealism, setting loose a bunch of rabid chimpanzees and the rage virus over the unsuspecting Brit populace, ’28 Weeks Later’ makes tradition of it with a spectacular opening set in a cellar of survivors preparing for a meal. Within minutes, he establishes the subtle emotional undercurrent- repression, loss, longing, frustration, denial and the altered reality. Inevitably, the scene ends in outbreak and Robert Carlyle’s protagonist Don, in an act of cowardice and survival, leaves his wife to the hordes while himself escaping to the new settlement where he is assigned a position of importance that previously before the infection, he couldn’t even dream off. When he is reunited with his kids to whom he lies about their mother’s death but is not convincing enough for them to not venture out of the protected area on a search for her. It may just as well be a compulsion of the script to kick-start the zombie action. But the scene that really sticks out as a sore thumb is the one where an errant helicopter is set on a field of zombies. I’m not debating with the utter coolness of it all but it ruptures the otherwise low key movie.

As is true for most films on the apocalypse, the script turns out a tad repetitive but the urgency of the visuals keep things interesting. The crashing guitar theme of the ’28 Days Later’ infuses tension and a certain style. Performances are adept at all times, the actors occupying their characters well without spilling over, making us root for their survival and mourn for their deaths. The art direction inspires the bleakness of apocalypse- from the candle-lit survivors’ cellar to the ghost-town sights of London.

At a time where the horror genre is looking out for reasons to set about ordeals of torture and execution, ’28 weeks later’ looks vital as ever. Trashy yet intelligent, slick yet grounded and that to on good amount of substance, it is a reminder of the classic sci-fi of the Charlton Heston kind- the kind that packed in the chills and thrills with something to ponder on. A boo, a jolt and so much more.