It was no doubt inevitable that this creepy image would return, given that hugely profitable horror films, like the monsters they contain, tend to spawn ghastly offspring. Though not a big fan of 28 Days Later, I will hand it to Boylethe talented stylist of Shallow Grave and Trainspottingthat his film deserves a place in the history books for that chilling vision alone. To me, the techniques are finally inconsequential compared to the result: indelibly eerie proof that even the most beautiful and storied of cities is nothing but a yawning necropolis if swept clean of its people. How did they do this? Was it an elaborately orchestrated shoot on a Sunday morning with the police cooperating on a vast scale to keep cars and pedestrians entirely out of central London? Or were manifold erasures courtesy of digital airbrushing also necessary? In Boyle's vision, the city has been emptied by a terrible plague that turns people into zombies, and thanks to the wizardry of aerial photography, we skim over its vast expanses and famous landmarks and behold not a single living soul. Indeed, when I think back on the film, its story seems a jittery blur, but those images remain engraved on my brain. Of these films, the arty, digitally shot, extremely successful 28 Days Later offered the most original and haunting images of a stricken London. Whether or not they constitute a movement, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, the Wachowski Brothers' V for Vendetta and Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men are notably similar in conjuring a Britain that seems to have made a stomach-churning somersault beyond the horrors imagined for it by George Orwell in 1984 (one of the obvious ancestors of this new breed of creepfest). Today London, alone among major metropolises, is synonymous with the acridly insinuating adjective "post-apocalyptic." From a gauzy love nest fit for the likes of Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, the stately capital has morphed into a nightmare burg crawling with the sickest, most revolting of creatures. The current decade, though, has seen a striking reversal in the city's fortunes. The neo-romantic, newly prosperous London of '90s hits like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. The punk/multi-culti London that dominated in the late '70s and '80s. The swinging London of Blow-Up and other trendy '60s films.
There was the stiff-upper-lip London of the blitz and World War II. Like other great cities, London has exercised such a strong presence in movies over the years as to be considered not just a setting but a character itself.
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