An examination of the representation of blood-born viruses in the movies “Near Dark” and “28 Days Later”.
This paper describes and analyzes anxieties about blood-born illnesses as they appear in horror films. It focuses on the shift between fears about AIDS in the 1980s, as portrayed in Katheryn Bigelow’s 1984 film Near Dark, to fears about global epidemics, as in Danny Boyle’s 2002 film “28 Days Later…”. It looks at how while one film attempts builds on anxieties about a virus infecting the most sacred place and institution in American society, the country and the family and how the other builds upon the recent discovery of animal-related viruses crossing into humans, with particular reference to Mad Cow Disease. It shows how although using two different types of classic horror film “monsters” the vampire and the zombie, both films express fears about epidemics, though one is an isolated incident and is cured, the other is a globalized event and ends in an apocalyptic fashion.
“Near Dark surfaced in a climate of AIDS paranoia, and this fear is reflected within the film’s blood-born illness of vampirism (Nixon 119). In 1987, the year Near Dark was released, anxiety about HIV/AIDS was peaking; the novel And the Band Played On was already on the bestseller list, over 26,000 Americans had already died of AIDS, and in Arcadia, Florida, the Ray family, with three hemophiliac and HIV-positive sons, had their home burned down by their paranoid neighbors (Nixon 127-128). It is hardly surprising to find vampirism acting as a metaphor for the AIDS virus; traditionally, the vampire has been seen by anthropologists as a mythic transformation to explain death from misunderstood natural causes, and has been particularly linked to venereal disease (Silver 20; Nixon 118).”