The University of York Filmmaking Society has taken it upon itself to remake classic movies into single-shot, minute-long videos. In addition to 28 Days Later, they've condensed Forrest Gump, Kill Bill (Volumes One and Two), and (rather less faithfully) Star Wars.

[via Cinematical]

But we'll get to that comic soon enough. Instead, let's start with Kevin Smith's return to the Dark Knight, in Batman: The Widening Gyre — the first of two mini-series he's doing with the character in an attempt to make some money in-between making movies starring Seth Rogen.

If that isn't enough movie action for you, then don't worry, Boom! Studios has you covered and then some. The first issue of the official 28 Days Later comic offers slow burn and foreboding, but also some fast-paced action to keep your interest. And the Jennifer's Body graphic novel lets you experience the new Megan Fox horror movie in a way that is completely unlike anything you'd expect, thanks to some great artwork from people like Jim Mahfood and Nikki Cook.

DC offers up some great (and diverse) takes on superheroes this week, with The Authority: World's End, Vol. 1, opening up with the day after the end of the world and providing some suitably dark post-apocalyptic stories from that point on. If you'd rather see a happier version of humanity's dark side, 1950s reprint book Showcase Presents: Eclipso gives you a glimpse at the man who can become his own worst enemy, thanks to a magically-powered evil diamond (No, really). And Gail Simone and Nicola Scott's Secret Six: Unhinged almost grabs the Book Of The Week title with its wonderfully screwed-up take on the former supervillains who now operate in the even murkier world of moral ambiguity and professional mercenaryness; funny, disturbing and gripping, it's highly recommended.

However, very little in the world of comics today can measure up to Brandon Graham, and particular King City, his tale of one boy and his magic cat. After original publisher Tokyopop pulled the series after its first volume, Graham is back with a revised version at new publisher Image. Make no mistake: This comic is entirely individual, entirely enjoyable, and easily the sexiest thing you'll find yourself reading this week. And it also has a cat that can do anything, given the right drugs. How could you even vaguely resist?

If that's not enough for you, you can always check Diamond Distributors' official list of everything reaching comic stores this week for other booty, or just go ask your local comic store what they recommend. Just make sure that King City #1 is amongst your reading pile. You can thank me later.

Boyle told MTV's Movies Blog that the title of the possible third movie still hasn't been decided, but it's probably not what we've all been expecting:

It don’t think it will be called ‘28 Months Later,’ that’s all I can say... I mean, it’s absolutely not written yet, but there’s a prospect of an idea and the way these ideas start is you just suddenly get a little glimpse.

My bet? 28 Years Later. Just you wait...

But more interestingly, Boyle also explained that all the times that we've referred to the infected in the first two movies as zombies, we've been wrong... and why:

There was an article in the paper the other day by Simon Pegg. He wrote this article begging people to let zombies stumble again and not run. He was trying to turn the tide back because everyone has zombies running now. He’s like, ‘No, please. Can we go back to the old days when you knew you could get away from them?’ That was sort of the thrill. These idiots didn’t lock themselves in car and died... That’s why I keep saying, ‘It’s not a zombie movie, everyone. It’s not a zombie movie!’ Because the aficionados - it’s sacrilegious what you’re doing by changing things like that. They’re infected. They’re not zombies.

Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe, Mr. Boyle. You can say what you like, but those "infected" monsters? Totally zombies. Even if they're on fast forward.

Danny Boyle On ‘28 Months Later’: It’s Not Called ‘28 Months Later’! [MTV Movies Blog]

Talking to MTV, Boyle hinted at the possibility of making a third installment to his 28 franchise. But even he knows it's going to get trickier and trickier to name these post apocalyptic films. Boyle told MTV:

“There’s a bit of discussion going on about it at the moment,” Boyle explained...“I have an idea for it [but] I’ve got to present it and see what people think really because it might be silly really,” he laughed.

Don't be such a tease, Boyle — 28 Years Later! Do it, just commit. It could be brilliant. But there'll be flying cars, right?

[MTV]

It used to be that the only time you were bothered by over-zealous silly zombies was on Halloween during the annual Thriller resurgence. Maybe it was Shaun of The Dead that opened the door for the last four-year craze of the undead on stage. I blame Shaun's good humor and fantastic writing of real characters that allowed other people to view zombies (more recently in a fun and friendly way).

But instead of making a better zombie comedy or another lovely gory zombie classic (such as the 2002 new rage spin 28 Days Later) filmmakers unleashed a string of so-so camp or shaky handy cam gimicky undead flicks, each one sadder than the next. Fido, Planet Terror, Zombie Strippers were all great, but their undead hordes leaned harder and harder on the crutch of camp to get through each take.

We need to be forward-thinking with our precious zombie commodities, people. And what has this campification and blatant misuse of zombies brought us? The Broadway zombie. I love Bruce Campbell and wouldn't mind seeing him singing and slaying on stage, but unfortunately he's not in it. And the Bruce-substitute is surrounded by happy dancing undead. Pass. Also passing on Re-Animator: The Musical, Zombie Prom and Z: A Zombie Musical.

Our last hope for a zombie attack we can take seriously is the forthcoming World War Z movie — which is really a post-zombie narrative, since it takes place after the zombie war.

But even though we all have twenty nine brains and a stomach that speaks Swahili, we shouldn't condemn Hollywood without considering the evidence. Here's the evidence for the prosecution:

1. Hollywood's unseemly hatred towards mutants.

Just consider the wealth of movies and TV shows about people who start spontaneously converting into something beyond their original human design, thanks to a genetic change or exposure to strange substances. Like the vicious ex-humans in Night Shadows aka Mutant, who terrorize a small Southern town. "Mankind's deadliest threat will not come from the skies," it proclaims.

There are also terrifying mutants in Hell Comes To Frogtown and a number of other movies. And on shows like Star Trek, whenever a character (usually a dweeb like Lt. Barclay on Next Gen) starts developing a super-mind — or evolving into a super-lizard — it's always portrayed as a bad thing.) Not to mention the murderous disease-altered mutants of movies such as 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, Omega Man and many others. (These aren't as well known as Night Shadows, of course, but they still have an impact on our mutant-hating culture.)
Counter-examples: Comic books come to our rescue. Mutants come off quite well in shows like Heroes and movies like the X-Men trilogy, which are either based on comic books or obviously derivative of them. Obviously, we should be using our superior posthuman intellects to boost the comic-book industry.

2. Why does Hollywood persecute cyborgs?

Again with the Star Trek hate: Trek gives us the Borg, who are the most hurtful representations of cyborgs imaginable. My friend Zzarglboz had to hide his swizzle-shaped head implants on the street for a year after First Contact came out.
They're like Frankenstein, only cyber! (And actually, some of our posthuman friends are partially dead, and the Frankenstein story is very unfair to them.) In the original Robocop, being turned into a cyborg makes Officer Murphy into a heartless killing machine. And for some reason, regaining his "humanity" is seen as a good thing. Says Cyberpunk Review:

As Murphy begins to realize who he was, and worse, what he's become, the question asked is what degree of Murphy's humanity remains? Murphy's partner, Anne Lewis (played by Nancy Allen) serves to surface these concerns, as she still thinks that Murphy is inside somewhere. Yet, every aspect of humanity has been taken away from Robocop - he doesn't have a home, but instead returns to a borg-like podchair at night to regenerate. Even if Robocop eventually considers himself human in some sense, it's no longer clear what that even means. At best, Robocop is part of that strange category we call "post-human."

3. Hollywood hates it when we merge with aliens.

In movies and TV, alien creatures that want to merge with poor ordinary humans and uplift them to a higher level of consciousness and ability are never "benefactors." They're always "parasites," or at best "symbiotes." For once, comic-book movie aren't even our friend, either — Spider-Man gets an awesome boost from the inky black creature in Spider-Man 3, but it's still portrayed as a terrible thing. Even though it makes his hair so much better! Plus in The Invasion, the alien "parasites" are horrible and awful, even though they clearly make Daniel Craig the most James Bond-esque he's ever been. The same goes for The Puppet Masters. And it's hard to find happy representations of people inter-breeding with aliens, either — it's always nasty and fatal, like in the Alien films or the Species films. When everybody knows that in real life, merging or interbreeding with aliens often works out great. (It's just like marriage, though — don't get hitched until you try living together for a while first.)
Counter-examples: Star Trek has one of the few I can think of, with its happy Trills, the symbiotes that make Dax and the other spotted-neck people all cheerful and ageless with the wisdom and the cute "old man" nicknames.

4. Movies and TV spread the hate against genetic engineering.

Just look at this hall of shame of genetic engineering movies and TV shows. You have your GATTACA, where genetic engineering upgrades the human race, but poor Ethan Hawke gets discriminated against because he's genetically inferior. (Which anybody who saw Reality Bites already knew.) And then there's the dark future world of Dark Angel, where people practice genetic engineering on humans, including the super-killer main character. And of course the aliens in the X-Files are practicing genetic engineering on humans. Not to mention, TV shows are always full of genetically advanced superhumans — including Khan's superior people in Star Trek and the subtly named Nietzscheans in Andromeda — who are all evil and intent on conquering everybody else. And in the forthcoming movie Splicers (or Splice), Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley create a scary-sexy human-animal chimera that turns out to be too much to handle. Why, oh why, can't movies and television ever celebrate the specialness of our genetically hacked brothers and sisters?
Counter-examples: Star Trek is the frenemy of the genetically upwardly mobile. On the one hand, there's Khan's gang and their whole Ceti-Alpha-Two keeping it real craziness. On the other, Trek does offer us Deep Space Nine's doctor Julian Bashir, who's a bit smug and obnoxious but otherwise a pretty decent upgraded human. So we'll call it even.

What can you do to stop the posthuman hate?

1. If you have mental powers as a result of mutation or some kind of alien implant, then use them on the producers and "suits" in Hollywood. Maybe if the blood vessels on their foreheads start swelling to the size of cantaloupes and everything tastes like bad salmon to them, they'll rethink their anti-posthuman prejudice. Otherwise, we may have to wait until the posthuman revolution happens, and then all of the regular humans will be tasped encouraged to treat us more fairly.

2. Support books. Books have been way more favorable to those of us who have moved beyond our human limitations. We'll have a post tomorrow detailing the pro-posthuman books that you as an aspiring posthuman, should read and support.

Top image adapted from photo by Lampeduza.

Sadly, the synopsis doesn't sound that great, with its references to "spiritual decay" and Jazz singers:

Simeon Rockwell is a man who becomes infected with a spiritual disease. His past and now this disease, forces Simeon to wrestle with his own inner demons and help rid the world of this virus. Simeon is aided by a beautiful female Jazz Singer named Satia Niall, who helps him in understanding his place in the greater struggle of mankind. Simeon realizes that time is running out and he must act fast to stop the spiritual predator who wants to bring about the downfall of society. During the course of this adventure, Simeon and Satia both change, as they bring out the best in each other; and eventually fall in love.

For my money, two of the scariest science horror flicks out there are David Cronenberg's 1980s version of The Fly, and Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. What stands out about them, aside from the fact that they are eat-your-arm scary, is that they are both sustained, visually-arresting movies about men going apeshit because they are men.

The Fly is a simple tale of a guy who has invented a teleportation pod that has a bug in it — literally. One day when our mad scientist Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is zooming between pods a fly gets stuck in there with him and the computer decides the best way to deal with the situation is to merge the two creatures genetically and create BrundleFly.

The film's special effects sometimes look strange and jerky to our CGI-trained senses, but Cronenberg manages to use a puppet-and-prosthetics infrastructure to his advantage by sticking to visuals that look as real as possible. When our mad scientist Jeff Brundle merges genetically with a fly and starts to transform, we are truly grossed out by his mulchy face and sudden need to eat sugary food by barfing on it first and then slurping it up fly-style.

Brundle is a stereotypical male science geek, totally obsessed with his machines and teleportation experiments to the point of caring about little else (though he does take some time out to get with Geena Davis — who wouldn't?) He's your basic guy nerd who doesn't give a crap about his body or meatspace. It's all about the machines. Brundle's rapid physical deterioration into half-fly, half-man is as pathetic as it is terrifying: He makes us gag and we feel sorry for him, so when he goes lethal, we sort of understand why. His gooey revenge is exactly what the Star Wars Kid has in mind for us.

28 Days Later draws its frenetic horror from another stereotypical idea about what dudes are like when given the chance. A virus turns most of the population of England into bloodthirsty, mindless superzombies, and one of the only holdouts against the diseased hordes is a military squadron holed up in a fortified mansion in the country. Our heroes, who have also managed to survive and escape London, join the military dudes for safety.

But then they discover the truly scary shit. These military guys, led by Christopher Eccleston at his most eye-buggingly Naziesque, have been trying to lure women into their little lair so that they can imprison them, rape them, and "restart the human race." Unfortunately, two of our heroes are female and now they're trapped between zombieland and a dark, dudely place.

This is a gory movie, but its horror doesn't come from looking at decaying bodies like it does in The Fly. Instead, it's scary because we're watching a decaying society. In Boyle's vision of the apocalypse, a bunch of guys with guns are more horrifying than any genetic disaster. He seems to suggest that men automatically revert to a state of violence and rape when provoked, and the inevitability of that transformation is what terrifies — the fact that these men seem so blind to the fact that they've become monsters.

And yet one of the heroes of 28 Days, Jim, is a guy who refuses to join Eccleston and his rape gang. He has no interest in possessing his female companions, and his blood-soaked rescue of the women takes up the latter half of the film. I think seeing the evil military guys through the eyes of another man who doesn't want to be like them makes this movie even more of a nail-biter. It would be easy for Jim to join up, to stay safe in the house protected by their guns, and to have a little gang rape for fun on the side. But he fights tooth and nail (literally) to stop that from happening.

In fighting the monstrous men, of course, Jim has to become a little bit like them. Those fight scenes are some of the most chair-grippingly intense I have ever seen. Scary, gory, shocking.

That's true horror, people. And never a vadge in sight.

So what's the most hardcore post-apocalyptic movie of all time? The answer probably won't surprise you...
In this chart, "warlords" refers to paramilitary leaders as well as organized thugs. "Degraded culture" means our culture has been reduced to shreds: there's the crappy Shakespeare performance in The Postman, and (scarier) Will Smith memorizing Shrek in Legend. "Weird power systems" means a jury-rigged power generator. Bonus points if it runs on pig shit.

The true horror in I Am Legend, and other stories like it, is having to watch what happens to people when they're robbed of society. It's no accident that Mary Shelley, author of horror-scifi classic Frankenstein, later wrote a post-apocalyptic book called The Last Man. Like many storytellers in the genre, she knew that no monster is scarier than a human being without companions.

Often the aloneness monster rears its head in post-apocalyptic scifi: New Zealand indie Quiet Earth tortures us with fear when our protagonist discovers he's the last guy on the planet; and the masterful 28 Days Later amps up the fear right away when the hero awakens to find himself alone in the middle of an abandoned London. Possibly the most desolate portrait of this aloneness comes in Vernor Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime, where a handful characters who can travel forward in time find that they've "jumped" to a future where humans are mysteriously gone. The time-travelers head to the future in longer and longer jumps, trying to reach a world where apes or spiders have evolved into intelligent life that can keep them company. But it doesn't happen. The sun just grows older and dimmer, and the lost humans never cure their species-loneliness.

Of course, there's being completely alone and then there's being "the only one." Being completely alone can sometimes be peaceful, as Ripley demonstrates in Alien when she crawls into her pod after ejecting the alien into space. But being the only human left in a world of mutants, super-evolved apes, or alien invaders - that's more typical in scifi horror. It forms the basis of often-retold stories like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and countless Alien ripoffs (often little more than slasher movies in space).

Still, no matter what horrifying creature menaces that army of one, the true terror lurking beneath the surface is the loss of protective community. This isn't a fear that humans reserve for themselves, by they way. The scary parts of E.T. (and yes, there are some) have to do with E.T. being a castaway who is vulnerable on a world dominated by homo sapiens. And those who read Frankenstein know that what makes the reanimated man into a monster is his realization that he's alone among creatures who want him destroyed.
Image from Marooned in Realtime book cover by Stephen Martiniere.

28 Days Later
A virus called Rage spreads rapidly through England, turning nearly everyone into zombie-like creatures who eat human flesh. A small band of uninfected humans escape London, only to find themselves in an even worse situation when they encounter a military unit whose madness has nothing to do with the virus. Ends on an ambiguously dark note. You won't be reaching for the cyanide capsules, but you may not be able to sleep.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 version)
This dark remake of the 1950s communist-scare story takes place in San Francisco and stars Donald Sutherland as a Sensitive New Age guy who discovers all his buddies have become pod people in their sleep. Made very soon after the Watergate scandal, the movie is a satisfying homage to conspiracy paranoia. The ending will make you want to never sleep again.

The Quiet Earth
This New Zealand indie is about a guy who wakes up one morning to discover he's the last guy on Earth . . . until he meets two other survivors. Sometimes having people around can be worse than being the only guy on the planet. Especially when the fabric of space-time keeps getting shredded. The ending is one of the most beautiful and frightening things I've ever seen.

Brazil
Terry Gilliam's mid-1980s dystopian masterwork holds up beautifully, and people a century from now will still be watching this sad tale of a dreamy bureaucrat who gets mixed up with political forces he doesn't understand. Set in a gloomy, fascist nation forever at war with nebulously-defined terrorists, Brazil is about how a little guy who dreams big can fight the system. But the ending — which Gilliam fought the studios tooth and nail to retain — will make you cry, rip your hair out, and question whether there is any hope left in the world.

Night of the Living Dead
There have been sequels aplenty, but none hold a candle to this 1969 speculative classic in which the recently-dead suddenly start walking around eating the living. Though it plays with horror themes, this black-and-white movie has almost a documentary feeling. There's nothing supernatural about government officials trying to explain and suppress information about the risen dead. When a group of strangers get stranded in a zombie-beseiged house, they have to work together to fend off the hordes of dead people. But director George Romero wants to be sure you know that heroism never pays off in late-60s America. The ending will make you want to chew people's arms off just like a zombie would.

Quarantined is a remake of a Spanish horror film, Rec, which doesn't even come out until Nov. 23. It stars Jay Hernandez (Hostel) and Jennifer Carpenter (Dexter). Director and co-writer John Erick Dowdle also directed the forthcoming Poughkeepsie Tapes, about a serial killer who videotapes his gruesome tortures. Could the writer's strike be helping to rush a total schlock-fest into production? Or will this be a searing look into the future of bioterror and superbugs? The answer, alas, is probably both of the above.

Screen Gems Locks In 3 For Quarantined [Hollywood Reporter]

Famous names: Danny Boyle, Cillian Murphy, Christopher Eccleston

Crunchy goodness: 5

Life lesson: Sometimes one rogue military unit is worse than a nation of zombies.

Sight you'll never unsee: Cillian Murphy poking out Christopher Eccleston's eyes with his bare hands.

Design breakthrough: Boyle revolutionized the zombie genre by turning the traditional shambling, rotting zombie into a fast-moving menace, making subsequent flicks like the Dawn of the Dead remake twenty times scarier - and parody Sean of the Dead forty times funnier.

28 Days Later Review at Movie Freak