 Starring: Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Catherine McCormack, Imogen Poots, Mackintosh Muggleton
Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Plot: Six months after the apocalyptic events of 28 Days Later, those infected with the Rage virus have all died of starvation and the Americans have secured an area of London and are starting to repopulate the city. Don (Carlyle) welcomes back his kids (who were overseas when the virus decimated the UK), who promptly escape the secure zone to go back to their old home, however what they find there could cause a new outbreak of the Rage plague and also throws into question what their father told them happened to their mother. |
I’m not entirely sure why I own 28 Weeks Later when I don’t have 28 Days Later, but never mind, it’s just an anomaly I need to sort out one day. However both films are very good and have also raised the ire of zombie traditionalists, who continuously protest that the films don’t have zombies in them, despite the fact that they’re continually referred to by both the press and the movie-going public as zombie movies.
You see zombies are dead people who’ve come back to life, are virtually brainless, move very slowly and have an insatiable thirst for human flesh. As they’re already dead, it’s incredibly hard to stop them, and they are utterly relentless in their pursuit of feasting on the living. In 28 Days Later and its sequel, the infected aren’t dead, they just have a virus running through their veins which means all they want to do is bite and feast on other people. All the ways you can kill a normal person work on those with Rage, and most importantly, while traditional zombies are incredibly slow, this new breed are very fast.
Since the release of 28 Days Later, a whole new wave of ‘zombie’ films have been released, many of which have had far more nimble ghouls than we’ve previously seen. Even George A Romero’s zombies seem to have gotten more fleet of foot and show a little more intelligence, while the remakes of his films, such as 2004’s Dawn of The Dawn, also have much faster living dead. The traditionalists don’t like this and insist that nearly all of this latest band of films about people desperately trying to eat one another are not proper zombie movies.
While the argument has raged over whether these fast-moving cannibalistic killers count as zombies, I would like to propose a solution by coming up with a new name for this modern breed of movie monster, and my vote goes to the zoombie. A zoombie doesn’t actually need to be the reanimated dead, although they can be, but they’re much faster than zombies (hence ‘zoom’-bies) and share the fact that they’ve pretty much lost their humanity and just want to kill normal people and eat them.
This way we can separate them from the slow, plodding, relentless living dead that have been around for years and accept that what we’re dealing with is actually a need breed of horror movie villain. We can even bring in things like the mutated humans in I Am Legend, which weren’t zombies, but weren’t vampires either, but shared traits of both. So what were they? Well, they were fast and wanted to kill everybody and so were therefore zoombies.
So there you go, that’s my argument for why we needs a new name for this different kind of movie monster to separate them from proper zombies, and my suggestion for what these nimble, not necessarily dead, but humanity-lite, cannibalistic killers should be called. So the next thing is to go out and make sure everyone knows about this and we can therefore ensure that nobody ever says zombie when they actually mean zoombie.
There’s already some work been done on this front, as I’m not the first to suggest the word, with UrbanDictionary.com saying a zoombie is, “An undead person who possesses greater than average mobility compared to other, more traditional undead creatures; a zombie who runs and moves at a normal (or greater than normal) human speed.” It also gives 28 Days Later as an example (although as I’ve said, the rage infected aren’t undead, so Urban Dictionary needs to update itself a little).
So now it’s up to you. Spread the word, and if you hear anyone say zombie when they mean zoombie, just bite them to death and then they’ll never make the same mistake again.
TIM ISAAC
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