Post-Apocalypso
There are few things more utterly unsettling than a dead public place.
This is true of any post-apocalyptic work -- you see it in The Stand a bit, and in King's The Gunslinger and following books quite poignantly sometimes. But I don't think I've ever seen it done quite so effectively in film as in the first few minutes of 28 Days Later. Masterfully, masterfully done. That's the first time I've had the bejeezus scared out of me by a car alarm.
There's something disquietingly poetic about a city, a world full of the trappings of humanity, with no humanity to grace it (if such a phrase may rightly be used of humanity, and city folk in particular). Whatever monsters men may be, them at least we know and expect; according to the sort of herd mentality that even the most independent of us fosters, we inevitably feel safer in a crowd because nobody else in the crowd has been eaten. If no one else is being eaten, it stands to reason that we ourselves are in no danger of being eaten -- but if there's no one to serve as a buffer, to give us early warning of the approach of danger, then our anxiousness increases exponentially. Logical enough.
But still, this doesn't in itself serve to explain why one would feel so much more nervous in an empty city than in an empty forest. One might posit that things are out of order -- a city is, by its nature, full of people, and an empty city is no city at all.
Perhaps King said it best, in his Dark Tower:
"All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one."
A dead public place is like a graveyard; it reminds us that eventually, all the halls will be empty, and all the graves will be full but the last one.
This is true of any post-apocalyptic work -- you see it in The Stand a bit, and in King's The Gunslinger and following books quite poignantly sometimes. But I don't think I've ever seen it done quite so effectively in film as in the first few minutes of 28 Days Later. Masterfully, masterfully done. That's the first time I've had the bejeezus scared out of me by a car alarm.
There's something disquietingly poetic about a city, a world full of the trappings of humanity, with no humanity to grace it (if such a phrase may rightly be used of humanity, and city folk in particular). Whatever monsters men may be, them at least we know and expect; according to the sort of herd mentality that even the most independent of us fosters, we inevitably feel safer in a crowd because nobody else in the crowd has been eaten. If no one else is being eaten, it stands to reason that we ourselves are in no danger of being eaten -- but if there's no one to serve as a buffer, to give us early warning of the approach of danger, then our anxiousness increases exponentially. Logical enough.
But still, this doesn't in itself serve to explain why one would feel so much more nervous in an empty city than in an empty forest. One might posit that things are out of order -- a city is, by its nature, full of people, and an empty city is no city at all.
Perhaps King said it best, in his Dark Tower:
"All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one."
A dead public place is like a graveyard; it reminds us that eventually, all the halls will be empty, and all the graves will be full but the last one.