Less is memento mori
Crossed + One Hundred = 28 Years Later?
Alex Garland’s film Men (2022) is his least popular and most misregarded. A folk horror starring Jessie Buckley as a widow whose hopes of convalescing in the countryside are met by an onslaught of men who all look like Rory Kinnear, it was criticised by some from a sociopolitical angle, for what they took to be its obvious, unctuous male-feminist buttonholing. Others went at it for its gullible historicity, for the way it’d fallen for the ol’ canard that the Green Man is pagan and not what it actually is, cod-folk modern, or went at it for its cod-psychology: wow, another horror about trauma-as-haunting, about the Monsters from the Id, female style.
If the sociopolitical critic insists ‘for every text, a context’ then the psychological critic insists ‘for every text, a pretext’. And both critics all too often betray an ignorance of, or apathy for, the details of a given artwork, the atomic level on which any artistry in it functions. (It’s like they can’t see the words for the texts.)
Even so, both have a point: all artworks stem from society and history, enact their makers’ psychologies in open or hidden ways; it (banally) couldn’t be otherwise. But to focus on these at the cost of what the artist works from, with, and towards would be like judging The Gherkin only through the lens of Blairite politics and Norman Foster’s childhood while ignoring what the tower was built out of and how. Hate an artwork to your liver’s content but if you wanna critique it you have to get it first.
Men reminds us Garland began his career as an author, and what helps make sense of why he formed the film the way he did is to read in it his literary references. A bad artist references other art like a glamour-hound drops names; a good one, in Clive James’s words, is staking their work’s place in a continuity of the imagination. A bad critic, of one stripe anyway, is a trivia nerd who lists the obvious antecedents and ‘You might like’ comps of a given artwork; a good critic is also always a historian, tries to learn how artists have homaged, undercut, subverted and redeemed art that came before. Garland’s Men synthesised the art, particularly the books, that had led to it.1 Watching 28 Years Later, then, I stayed alert for what he and Danny Boyle might be referencing this time.
What strikes you first (and what struck horror fans worst) is how the film dispenses with most trappings of a zombie story, shoving into a prologue the usual outbreaks and break-ins. It takes the form instead of a quest amid zombies, an adventure story of a youth abroad in a post-apocalyptic landscape (O brute old world) where arrows are the go-to weapon, as in Riddley Walker or William Golding’s The Inheritors—a cult author himself, Garland knows which cult novels he writes in the footsteps of. But he’s also something of a covert UK pulp and pop culture guy. His first draft for 28 Days Later had 747s trying to escape Heathrow with the Infected clung to their wings; he took the time-dilating made-up drug ‘cake’ from Brass Eye and made it the drug Slow-Mo in his script for the second, savvier adaption of the comic Judge Dredd. Little surprise then (and a lot of pleasure) to realise his script for 28 Years Later took a page, or two, from the greatest zombie story of modern times. Not his and Boyle’s own genre revival but Alan Moore and Gabriel Andrade’s comic, Crossed + One Hundred.2
When 28 Days Later came out in 2002 it fronted, if not fomented, a viral outbreak in the culture: Romero-homage Shaun of the Dead, Romero-rehash Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, the gruellingly-long-running Walking Dead comic and TV series, through to The Last of Us video game and TV series of the 2020s. It popularised certain zombie-heresies, too, like having them run fast rather than shuffle slow, and making them living spreaders of infection rather than the self-exhumed dead.
A lesser known work that the smash success of 28 Days Later tenderised the culture to receive is Crossed. A comic that ran from 2008-2010, its many sequels include 2015’s Crossed + One Hundred3, which in turn, and in a pleasing homecoming, helped to shape (as I hope to show) the film’s latest sequel.
Created and written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Jacen Burrows, Crossed didn’t reinvent the zombie sub-genre, and many times over: there was still an indeterminate, global outbreak, survivors on the run, false cure leads, a scramble for where to hole up. Ennis and Burrows knew this was all set-dressing; more important to answer the question of every zombie story: who are your zombies?
Sometimes a zombie story narrows scope, turning one group feral to hook to the surface our harshest fears about them: the zombies are only kids, or only parents, or only men, or only cis people. More commonly, anyone can turn zombie. It’s been observed the horror genre reserves a spot for our morbid fascination with, and revulsion by, the other as other; in stories of universal zombiehood, that other is humanity en masse, the revulsion misanthropy. In Shaun of the Dead, the arrival of the living dead is prefigured by the shuffling texting brain-rotted humans of the 21st century. The fungal brutalisation of humanity thanks to rising heat in The Last of Us, the cold white walkers ignored till it’s too late by power-hungry humans in Game of Thrones embody an obvious modern species shame. So what is the dim view of our species in Crossed?4
Its pseudo-zombies, the Crossed - named for the rash pictured above - are living and fast-moving: as with the 28… franchise, the comic is a zombie story in spirit and not by the letter of the genre. Ennis and Burrows saw that franchise’s impatient MTVification of zombies and raised it. Their Crossed aren’t ragefully brainless (or just after brains, or unable to say anything other than brains): they’re ingeniously skilled at taking “pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another”, as Jekyll said of Hyde. To me that’s always been the scariest thing about sadism of the, what’s called in Crossed, “fun-hurting” variety: since the sadist enjoys it they’ll want to prolong it, intensify it: get creative. The Crossed’s creativity is what makes the comic go where few even x-rated horror films would.
It teases its zero-limits in the first few panels, where the narrator Stan waxes ironical about the days we thought we could no longer be shocked by anything, just before the reader sees, in a shocking series of images, Stan’s locale engulfed by the bodily-fluid-spread sadism that’s crashing the world to a close. From then on the shocks hardly let up.
Chris Morris jabbed fun at Martin Amis for speaking in straight-faced Morrisese when he coined ‘horrorism’ in contrast to terrorism. But the contrast is useful: fear is the nearing howl of the demons, terror the chase, horror when they’re inside with you and your family. Ennis and Burrows hoped to exorcise their demons by putting the worst things they could think of onto the page. The result is a horrorist work of art. It’s like a 120 Days of Sodom without the laughs: an almost - you wish - numbing iteration of human suffering, an almost hopeless story. Take the way Ennis and Burrows tease the genre trope of ‘There’s a cure / A cure is futile’ then dispatch it in the most shocking page-turn to a double-page splash (pun grimly intended) in the medium’s history. The things we see people suffer in Crossed are worse than hell; at least down there God has oversight with some righteous point to make for eternity. In this one respect infinite suffering isn’t as bad as finite. A world and life that end, as in Crossed, in extreme suffering but also end full stop have finality to add to their list of horrors.
Why read something like that? I hear pretty much everyone say. Aren’t Ennis and Burrows the real sadists?5 But creators of what Maggie Nelson calls the Art of Suffering don’t have to be (just) sadistic hypocrites; their artworks are QEDs.
Consider the theories suggested by uninfected characters in Crossed about where the Crossed came from, running the usual gamut: divine punishment, a man-made virus timed to trigger at the same moment around the world. Narrator Stan has another theory:
There was no great secret to [them]. I’ve never seen one do anything a human being couldn’t think of doing. Hadn’t thought of doing. Hadn’t done. They were all the awful aspects of humanity magnified a hundred-thousand-fold, but they were nothing more. Where did they come from? Us.6
Meaning Ennis and Burrows themselves, and their fellow humans.
I think that’s why Crossed hits such a nerve—peels the nerve, yanks at it like a root. (The comic didn’t just give me nightmares idiomatically. I had them often enough to subcategorise them in the mornings as “I had another Crossed dream.”) The horror in it is like The Horrors of a psychedelic and/or psychotic breakdown; turning into one of the Crossed feeds on the fear of madness we used to think of as a fear of possession; their sadomasochism is that of our own intrusive thoughts. They’re the secret spite in us, the urge to deprive through envy, a mass manifestation of the mundane fact that any love can turn into hate.
Which is a bleak way of saying that learning that Crossed had a sequel written by Alan Moore, maybe England’s greatest living artist, was like learning that the most psyche-shredding hallucinogen of all time came in your favourite ever flavour, like finally finding the house of your dreams and it’s located in Xibalba.
Begun as a riff by Moore on the phone with Ennis on what the world might look like a century after ‘C-Day’ (or what in his sequel he renamed more sinisterly ‘The Surprise’), Crossed + One Hundred, or as we might call it 100 Years Later, jumps three times further than 28 years into the world after the end of the world. This places it in that richer sub-genre of ‘post-post-apocalyptic literature’, alongside the aforementioned Riddley Walker and Always Coming Home (which I sang of here). And it deserves a high place in the sub-genre for being such an inventive drawing out of the implications of its direct and indirect predecessors.
Alan Moore is the artist equivalent of those brain pills in bad films that turn an ordinary schmo into a polymath genius. Whichever franchise he enters he elevates, in a dozen directions. There’s Crossed + One Hundred’s witty self-reflexivity, with chapters titled and themed after the ‘wishful fictions’ its archivist character, Future Taylor, finds in the ruins (The Return of the King, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Foundation and Empire, giving Moore the chance to flex one of his fave tricks, the multiply freighted in-joke). There’s the future dialect the characters speak, cringed out of a post-Crossed world, where science fiction becomes wishful fiction, dates and assertions get appended with ‘AFAWK’ (as far as we know), and the noun ‘beliefs’ is retracted into the more cautious verbal noun ‘believes’. Less graphic than the original by a broken nose, it horrifies more through implication and through siting its horror in who suffers (kids in front of parents for instance), who records it and finds them funny, the story’s sick jokes.7 Firming my link from it to 28 Years Later most, though, is the way Moore expanded the answer given by Ennis and Burrows to that core question: who are your zombies?
Spoilers ahead (that’d be a good name for the Crossed, the spoilers). Moore’s answer starts with a problem: considering their monomaniacally destructive nature, the Crossed have no future. Humans, on the other hand, who survived The Surprise adapted their cultures accordingly: as well as hedging how they speak, they’ve dropped all ideologies or “believes” (except for a modified Muslim culture in Murfreesboro that prays to an Allah who’s no longer all merciful but “as merciful as is possible”8). But to keep surviving, the humans could just wait it out. Though the Crossed themselves have been naturally selected for those who won’t eat their own newborns on sight, they otherwise have zero interest in reproducing themselves socially, and remain too violent, too enfeebled by incest and busy fucking themselves to death with STDs to keep their numbers up with the uninfected. By 2050 the uninfected outnumber them. When the story starts, the Crossed are fading into legend.
A legend is what the Crossed themselves need, and his name is Beauregard Salt. When first heard by the uninfected humans, the name’s been corrupted to the mysterious word “Bosol”, hosannnahed by remaining “illbilly” Crossed. Future Taylor uncovers that Salt was a serial killer who thrived during the initial Surprise. Hell on Earth for him was the world starting to make sense. As much as he enjoyed the mayhem he saddened at the realisation it couldn’t last forever: as the ultimate death-driven Monsters of the Id, the Crossed are incapable of their own prolongation. Salt began to select and breed Crossed for relative restraint; but his eugenics wouldn’t be enough: he had to tie together his Super Crossed with a tribal sense of identity, a shared iconography, a conquering purpose and himself as their founding father. He gave them culture.
Future and her friends uncover Salt’s hundred-year-plan too late to save their home settlement from being invaded by the Super Crossed. As well as solving an artistic problem - how to keep telling interesting stories about villains so monomaniacally destructive? - Moore had a point to make here. As crucial as it is for survival of a people, culture is morally neutral and relative. The Crossed need it, too, to survive. But as they get it they get more like us.
For Ennis and Burrows, their pseudo-zombies were a redundant (if highly concentrated) instantiation of the already proven evil of humankind. Moore and Andrade’s response to them didn’t deny their idea that the Crossed come from “us”; they brought it full circle. Their pseudo-zombies are a redux of humankind’s history of rapine and brutal violence, of the usefulness of culture in helping even or especially the most warlike people to survive and spread. By giving them restraint and the ability to plan ahead, raise young, domesticate animals, which are cause and symptom of their aim to convert the world to their spoils or to more Crossed like them, Moore and Andrade have made them another iteration of those familiar villains, in a familiar clash: the roaming takers versus the sedentary producers, the raping-and-pillaging horde that descends on the farmers in the fold.9
As Andrade and Moore responded to Ennis and Burrows, Boyle and Garland have responded to Andrade and Moore. The Crossed might be ‘just us’, in nature and also in culture. But according to 28 Years Later that’s not just us.
That Boyle and Garland were responding to Crossed + One Hundred at all becomes clear once you notice their film’s rhymes and chimes with the comic. Both works are set a hop-skip into the future, and set there because of what that enables its creators to do: depict what the post-post-apocalypse might look like. (As the tagline went for the trailer to the film, ‘What will become of us?’) In the comic, Bosol / Beauregard Salt is the serial killer founder of the Super Crossed’s culture; meanwhile the film ends with - and its coming sequel centres on - a violent cult that seems to have modelled itself on serial rapist Sir Jimmy Saville. (The film also baits us with the fear that Ralph Fiennes’s euthanising GP, Dr. Kelson, harks back to another recent UK devil, Dr. Harold Shipman (or harks sideways I should say: since, in the film, the UK ended circa 2002, Saville and Shipman got away with it, and as such have become the genius loci of this savaged and re-wilded land).10
Where Garland and Boyle’s response to the comics - ‘That’s not just us’ - comes clearer into play is in their more hopeful take on babies. In the comics the Crossed have just about learnt to resist killing their own, who nevertheless are born infected. In the film the presence of Infected humans who look younger than 28 implies they too resist; and, after Spike and his mother Isla help an Infected woman give birth, we learn babies are born uninfected: at this, Dr. Kelson vaunts to them the miracle of the placenta protecting foetuses from the Rage virus.
But it’s Kelson and what he’s been up to for the past 28 years - what he’s built - that mark the most telling rhyme between the film and the comic, and at the other end of life: a motif of bones and skulls and the question of what they make us feel, or ought to.
When you visit an ossuary, especially a vast one like the Paris catacombs, you’re meant to feel what you keep seeing inscribed: memento mori: remember, you must die. It’s hard not to feel instead overwhelmed therefore underwhelmed by the sheer ungraspable surfeit of skeletons, all those bones-slides and skull-walls. To go away feeling that human deaths and lives are superfluous.
There are skulls and bones on most pages of Crossed + One Hundred, most dating from The Surprise. The evolution of the Crossed and the secret plan of Bosol is revealed when Future finds in the woods a terrifying fairytale scene: a house that looks like an extension of Leatherface’s bone-filled living room in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (really his dying room). Earlier, searching among other bones for useful remnants from the past, Future urged us to resist my feeling of superfluousness, to not gloss over skulls and bones as if they were the original objects rather than remnants of something themselves. She writes:
Doing archive, you get iced out over bone-bunches. You just count the heads, see? You don’t skull about how it opsied when it was fresh. It’s a bone-bunch, only. It’s a hundred years ago. You don’t skull about how it incidented, what it was like. You just opsy the heads, the numbers. You don’t skull about the peoples.
(Translation: Practising history, you get desensitised to massed human skeletons. You just count the skulls, see? You don’t think about how it looked when it was fresh. It’s a mass of skeletons only. It’s a hundred years ago. You don’t think about how it happened, what it was like. You just see the skulls, the numbers. You don’t think about the people.)
Skulls and bones are at the core of 28 Years Later (whose sequel is called The Bone Temple) and in a way that builds off Crossed + One Hundred. Lately Zadie Smith said the hardest thing in life can be remembering the truth that all other people are as real as you, as thinking and feeling: as subjective and individual. Dr. Kelson explains to Spike and an ailing Isla, in terms similar to Smith, the temple he’s built from the skulls and bones of Infected and uninfected alike. Each skull was not a museum artefact or theatrical prop but a person like them, yet each ought remind them of more than their own mortality (that poetic spin on the traditional horror shriek, “We’re all gonna die!’). Garland quoted the poet Larkin in his TV show DEVS, W B Yeats in his film Men; underlying 28 Years Later is W H Auden. Semi-quoting Auden’s “We must love one another or die” from the poem ‘September 1, 1939’ (or its pessimistic misquotation, “We must love one another and die”) Dr. Kelson says his actual meaning is “memento amoris”: remember you must love.
Since what Future told us is true - that people aren’t just a head-count but each as real as you or me, is what Dr. Kelson tells us true, that we must love each other? One doesn’t imply the other (like some weird new syllogism, ‘All men must die. You are a man. Therefore you must love’). Homicidal psychopaths - the Crossed - aren’t ignorant of human value, individuality and subjectivity. They relish them for the depth of flavour they add to the suffering inflicted.
Rather it’s true because of what love means. The Crossed imply their antithesis. To not be Crossed would be to put others’ happiness and suffering above that of yourself. With the emphasis on the suffering part: less dedicating your life to giving maximum pleasure to the other, more to suffer whatever for them, and not just the heroic taking of arrows and bullets, but the unspoken, boring, even dishonourable stuff. The love Isla has staying up all night, tumour be damned, to murderously defend Spike from a Crawler, the love Spike has for Isla in letting her leave him through euthanasia. Without that willingness to suffer the more, it’s just fondness, preference, not really love.
This love doesn’t have to be familial or romantic or sexual. It does have to be for an individual, or individuals, in a binary relation (by this tack, polyamory is what happens when you have too little love to give). Loving by group or class or tribe, like the Super Crossed, is just too easily hate for those outside it (as love of the arts is really a hatred of philistines, love of animals misanthropy. As for love of country…).
The harder emphasis on Auden’s “We must love one another or die” is that it’s a declaration of the only two possible modes, such that if you’re not one you’re the other: not to love is annihilation, and that not-loving includes indifference. To love no one is to think and act as if no one else is quite as real as you, in which case they may well be a bunch of bones, be thrown to the Crossed: so long as it’s not happening to you. To truly love means to know the other is as real as you—in a sense, realer: the true Bigger Picture. If horror stories are about revulsion for the other, 28 Years Later is also about that rarer truth, the primacy of the other. And since, as Massive Attack sang, love is a doing word (rather than just a feeling) we must - a Kantian must - assert that primacy through loving. Every skull in the photo below was someone realer than you; yes, other people are only perceivable via your subjectivity—but they’re a firmer part of whatever objective world exists than your subjectivity is. To accept this primacy in action is to love them. To not, as good as to kill them, to die: to back even further off from reality and so never have really lived. Maybe then the flip-side of the RuPaulism was always the better one: If you can’t love somebody else, how in the hell are you gonna love yourself?
This isn’t the same as the facile intertextuality with which suck-ups to AI art define art full stop: that all artists consume patterns of the past then regurgitate a remixed one and call it ‘new’. Good artists do not just remix the past to their imaginations’ prompts. They have a purpose: they intentionally, hence meaningfully, create bonds from artwork to artwork, back into their art-form’s past and setting torches out into its future. Art is Intelligent Design come true.
Since art isn’t formed by only art either but the world, I’d be remiss not to account for those contexts and pretexts. In 28 Years Later, there’s a nested Brexit: an island haven of survivors off the coast of mainland Britain, itself cut-off and moated from the rest of the world since the outbreak of Rage that destroyed the UK we knew. The survivors are (all?) white, they sing traditional songs in a pub hung with pictures of the Queen, their sorties on the mainland are intercut with shots of medieval archers from vintage British films; they use their own arrows on East Asian, worm-slurping ‘Crawlers’ and a big-dicked ‘Alpha’ Infected who’s black or brown. And when they encounter a jock marine stranded in England he shows off his lip-fillered fiancée to the young protagonist Spike—and so the film shows the world got on fine with the UK being benched in toto circa 2001: there are still apps and cameraphones and democratised plastic surgery. Meanwhile Katie Hopkins’ wet dream has come true in the worst way for her: the marine is from Sweden, the social democracy utopia of the Western liberal imagination turned licenced-to-kill border guard: lifeboats swapped for gunboats to make sure the superfluous, dangerous Brits stay on their self-infested rock.
An earlier sequel depicted a characteristically hesitant Prime Minister Gordon Brown fluffing the UK response to the outbreak then hiding in a bunker where he meets a bloody end at the hands of an infected advisor. (Poor Gordon, never could catch a break.)
What zombies are in the 28… franchise has a neat theory from filmmaker and scholar Devan Scott: “The thing about the infected… is that they’re inseparable from digital filming and editing techniques. The artifice of the edits (jump cuts, speed ramps, freeze frames, MTV-type split-second edits only really feasible in a digital system) - and digital visuals (noise, lens and sensor artifacting, impossible-on-35mm camera placement ideas, cranked shutter angles, infinite depth of field) define their screen presence as much as any diegetic plot or design conceits. They are fundamentally digital zombies.”
Let’s just say this epiphany lands better than The Walking Dead’s relay of a similar message, “We are the walking dead!”)
Speaking of jokes, one wishful fiction that Future Taylor reads is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which she deems unrealistic because it features only one baby on a stick.
The Last of Us TV show settles for the pat prediction that religious groups that survived the apocalypse, a Christian commune for one, would be all the more misogynist and child-abusive.
The thing about how Moore evolved the Crossed is that it’s a smart development in the story but a dead-end for the series. The Crossed’s draw was their creative savagery; but more of the same would’ve gotten old, so the solution he found was good. But it gives Crossed + One Hundred the feel of arriving back to the familiar, historically speaking; we already know of brutally violent yet complex cultures in the past (Walter Benjamin’s “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”) - and in the present for that matter (of leaked ISIS plans, the Guardian reported “it builds a picture of a group that, although sworn to a founding principle of brutal violence, is equally set on more mundane matters such as health, education, commerce, communications and jobs. In short, it is building a state.”) And of arriving back to the familiar genre-wise: bone-suited man-eating rampagers—haven’t we seen them in everything from Orcs to Orks to Firefly to Cloud Atlas to Mad Max? Granted the Super Crossed are even more dangerous than their originals, able to use more than animal cunning thanks to Bosol culturing them. But we already live in a world where older men tell stories to ensure they and their side can continue dominating the weak and fun-hurt those in their way. All of which makes the Super Crossed less horrifying than the Crossed. By taking the story to the smartest next place as he did, Alan Moore ended Crossed for me. I guess I should be thankful.
I don’t think Boyle and Garland had to have read Crossed + One Hundred to get the idea of evolving their zombies into their cleverer Alphas; that’s been going on since at least the novel I Am Legend.
This piece really made me think. How do you quantify seeing the 'words for the texts'?