I Saw That:

In 28 Days Later it’s done much more skillfully than ever before. Oh god, the zombies in 28 Days are so fucking scary!!!!! How could anything be as scary as the first half of that film? Yet somehow the army guys are indeed more scary. At first it seems like they are rescuers, even though they shot Brendan Gleeson like a million times after the zombie blood fell out of the crow’s beak and into his eyeball–so, I mean, fair enough, but still. They take the survivors back to their compound. The survivors are sort of conveying that they don’t feel as relieved as they ought to feel; something’s not right. The compound is indeed safe from zombies. There are all these army guys there, the place is surrounded with guns, and the army guys have strict rules and patrols during which the also-aforementioned gleeful mowing-down of zombies occurs. But pretty soon we realize that these guys are psychotic, and it becomes this dreadful rape terror where they’re going to kill Cillian Murphy–leaving him for dead on a huge pile of corpses that it’s sort of ambiguously implied were army victims, not zombie victims, I mean, my god, it’s zombie apocalypse and the army is still taking hundreds of living humans out into fields and shooting them?? WHAT A WORLD–and rape the two ladies millions of times, and it’s just horrible, and suddenly you realize life was way better when they were out in the countryside just fighting off the odd blood-crazed zombie horde, a.k.a. life was better when they were FREE.

Now they live under the law again, under the protection (“protection”) of the military/government, which fights terror with terror, and actually shit is way worse than it was when they were fending for themselves. The fantasy of just “finding an authority figure” and then everything will be okay is here DESTROYED. Just as it is destroyed in real life if you stop to think for two seconds. I mean, I’m really gonna let the TSA feel up my crotch and racially profile random college professors and prohibit scholars of Byzantine erotica from re-entering the country because 0.00000000000000001% of humanity might one day once again hijack a plane in some hard-to-predict way? ARE YOU SERIOUS.

-- http://urbanhonking.com/isawthat/2011/06/05/zombies-a-very-long-possibly-incoherent-cultural-history/