The Cured & Its Place in the Zombie Media Universe

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Senan (Sam Keeley) faces down a group of disinterested zombies in The Cured.

Remember Meg’s rant about how fast zombies make for crappy horror movies and aren’t even real zombies anyway? Well she has a point. Fast zombies usually represent a different kind of horror than slow, stupid Romero zombies. But I wanted to push the subject, so I made her watch 28 Days Later (2002). If you didn’t read her post, here’s how she responded:

[T]he monsters in 28 Days Later are humans who’ve been infected, as one scientist helpfully explains, with “rage.” They're still alive, don’t eat flesh, and can be killed by normal non-head-shooting means. At best, these are zombie-adjacent living people with laboratory-leaked super rabies. (Nice try, fast zombie advocates!)

This is all true. Living people with super rabies are not the same as undead, shoot-em-in-the-head flesh-eaters.

But it’s not like Romero invented the zombie from whole cloth. Long before Night of the Living Dead, there was the zombie of Hatian lore: a living person controlled by a voodoo priest. The Hatian zombie shows up in the majority of pre-Romero zombie movies, most famously 1932’s White Zombie. And before that, African tribal lore refers to “Nzambi,” from which the word “zombie” is thought to have come. Nzambi, however, sometimes refers to a god, and other times to the spirit of a dead person.

So when I consider all that, I’m less inclined than Meg to outright reject fast zombies. And to me, 28 Days Later, even if it has fundamentally different zombies, still feels like it could fit into the world of the Living Dead.

And that leads me to David Freyne’s The Cured (2017), which also manages to feel like a Romero-style zombie movie, somehow fitting into the world of the Living Dead films, even though its zombies, with all their fastness, are also fundamentally different.

But more than just fitting into that world, The Cured deepens it by growing the broader plot behind it and expanding on the themes of the Living Dead franchise beyond what its creators envisioned. It manages to do this by drawing from the fast zombie tropes established in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and by returning to the source material behind the source material. The Cured goes beyond Night of the Living Dead (1968) and looks to the novel that inspired it: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954).

The Ship of Theseus

So let’s start with 28 Days Later. Despite the film having clearly non-Romero zombies, it too feels like a Romero zombie movie.

Which is interesting in and of itself, because it seems fair to say that, once you strip away too many classic zombie things, you’re no longer dealing with zombies, right? It’s like the Ship of Theseus, but with mindless human cannibals.

If you’re not sure what the Ship of Theseus is, it’s a ship Theseus bought from Heraclitus back in Ancient Greece. Once he set sail, he realized what a piece of crap this ship was, and he had to replace a bunch of parts.

Well, eventually Theseus replaced so much of Heraclitus’ shoddy workmanship that he decided to get his money back. But Heraclitus’ lawyer Plato stepped in and inspected the ship top to bottom. He said, “That’s not the ship my client sold you. If you could show the original ship you claim he built, a refund might be in order, but this is not that ship.”

In other words, Theseus had replaced so much of the ship’s components that, fundamentally, it was no longer the same ship. And the lesson is, Theseus got a raw deal. The end.

So sure, if your zombies are living people who can run and can be killed by non-shooting-in-the-head means, maybe they’re like the crappy ship that Heraclitus sold to Theseus, who eventually replaced every board and nail, stitch and sail, until it was a new ship entirely.

A fast zombie looks up from his meal in 28 Days Later.

How, you ask, can 28 Days (or any zombie media) feel like it fits the Living Dead world if it’s replaced so many of the boards and nails that comprise that world? It’s because he leaves the most essential elements in place.

Thematically, you’ve got the survival horror thing, as well as standard zombie body horror. You’ve also got that whole loss-of-self business that zombies represent pretty much across the board. Plus--and this is a big one--in 28 Days, humanity still manages to be scarier than sprinting, cannibalistic murder monsters with super rabies. Once the film gets to the military base, we find men committing Handmaid’s Tale levels of violence and oppression against women and killing any man who doesn’t support their colony of rapists. The choice between that and death-by-fast-zombie seems pretty horrific to me.

All that is to say, it’s possible to have a Romero-style zombie movie without traditional slow, stupid, shoot-em-in-the-head Romero zombies. Train to Busan (2016) is another great example, one that also feels like it could take place in the world of the Living Dead.

And that leads me to my favorite new thought experiment. (Or fan theory if you want to call it that. Meg calls it a fan theory. I think she’s being mean though.)

The Zombie Media Universe (ZMU)

A zombie in Return of the Living Dead takes the radio of a cop he’s recently killed and tells dispatch, “Bring more cops.”

Think of every piece of zombie media that feels like it could fit into the Living Dead world: Dan O’Bannon’s absurd Return of the Living Dead (1985), whose plot is clearly meant as an unofficial sequel; Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (1992); Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004); Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic series (2003-2019), which eventually became a hit TV show in 2010 (and just won’t die no matter how stale it gets); and of course the official Romero and Russo sequels and remakes.

I could go on. Keep listing them in your own head if you like.

Now, imagine all these and every other classic of the genre as sequels to the original modern zombie movie, Night of the Living Dead. All those stories, in this exercise, happen in the same universe, but in different times and places.

(Except that Zack Snyder garbage. His movies don’t get into the ZMU. Because it’s my thought experiment, and I said so.)

It’s a fun exercise, but when you think through it, you realize that all these movies are stuck in the standard zombie apocalypse narrative: suddenly, for whatever reason, there are zombies; people get so scared and selfish and militant that they become scarier than the zombies; the world is screwed; the end.

That’s why they all merge so easily into the same universe: the broader plot and the underlying themes are all basically the same. Sure, there are a few minor inconsistencies to how the zombie rules work and whatnot, but otherwise, they fit very neatly together. In fact, if you linger on this too long, the whole zombie apocalypse concept starts to feel like an undead horse that’s been continuously beaten for the past sixty-plus years.

Even if, taken individually, many of these movies, comics, and other zombie media are excellent, the fact remains that they recycle the same themes and plot turns. And the thing is, eventually, you do have to replace some of the parts of your ship, even one as well built as Romero’s. Otherwise it gets too old and falls apart, like a rotting zombie corpse.

In The Last Man on Earth, Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) tells Ruth (Franca Bettoia) he’s definitely a good guy and not the whacked out incel from Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.

Consider The Zompire

Back in her zombie rant, Meg also brought up 1964’s The Last Man on Earth--whose vampires look and act like zombies, but they also hate garlic, mirrors, crosses, and sunlight. Don’t think too hard about it.

Last Man is an adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, which also features zompires, but has a whole subplot about how some of the zompires have sort of cured themselves. They still hate sunlight and garlic, but mirrors are tolerable, crosses are fine, and they no longer have the urge to drink blood.

There are two other direct adaptations of I Am Legend: 1971’s The Omega Man and 2007’s I Am Legend. But aside from definitely not being zombie movies, they’re also not good movies. I mean, come on, the virus in The Omega Man turns you into a technology-hating medieval cultist. And in I Am Legend, once Will Smith’s dog dies, you pretty much feel like everything’s over and there’s no reason to keep watching. And you’re right to feel that way. It’s better as an edgy remake of Old Yeller than it is as an adaptation of Matheson’s novel.

And by the way, there are many adaptations and movies-inspired-by the book, including the OG modern zombie movie, none other than Night of the Living Dead (1968).

Hence why Last Man feels like a zombie movie, even though it’s supposed to be about vampires: it’s based on the same source material that inspired the Romero zombie, which eventually became the default, definitional zombie.

Also, hence why The Omega Man and the film I Am Legend don’t feel like zombie movies. It’s the Ship of Theseus again. They replace too much of the essential source material, so not only are we no longer dealing with zombies (or zompires, as the case may be), but the body horror is pretty much gone, the creatures don’t appear to be undead, they’re definitely not mindless, and living humans are definitely not the bigger threat in either movie.

The point is, to really understand the Romero zombie movie, you have to look beyond the Living Dead franchise, all the way back to Matheson’s work. Because the thing about I Am Legend isn’t so much the zompires--to be honest, as monsters, they’re kind of lame--it’s the way that character, plot, and theme all work together to build the prototype for what would become the Romero zombie movie.

And once you dissect that stuff, you start to understand why the ZMU was stuck in its apocalyptic rut for so long. The plot, character, and thematic nuances of I Am Legend are hard to translate to film. There are a lot of relationships and ideas and inner character workings that, on the big screen, either get compressed into cinematic shorthand or cut entirely. It’s much easier to focus on explosions, narrow escapes, and grittiness than it is to unpack layers of social, ethical, and moral complexity. To do that work, you need things like historical, cultural, and political context.

Beyond the Apocalypse

Maybe there are other Romero-style zombie media that break out of the apocalypse box--I haven’t yet gotten to the BBC miniseries, In the Flesh (2013-14), nor have I seen The Returned (2013). I’ll watch them eventually and probably write stuff about them too, but for now, the only zombie media I’ve seen that breaks out of that box is The Cured, which fits easily into my thought experiment while also expanding the broader ZMU plot: zombies happen; military takes over; but the world isn’t screwed because we found a cure; but also, the cure doesn’t always work, so now what we do with all these zombies and former zombies?

Zombie Senan and zombie Conor share a moment in The Cured.

The Cured also widens the ZMU’s thematic scope beyond people greedy, consumerism bad, to include cultural commentary on human tribalism and a more nuanced version of the neighborly distrust trope than most zombie media are able to manage.

Even aside from my whole silly ZMU thing, lots of folks have noted that The Cured feels like a direct sequel to 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later. It’s set in a world that was ravaged by a zombie outbreak similar to the one in those movies, except that humanity has managed to prevent the full-on apocalypse with brute military force.

What’s more--let’s say 28 months later--we’ve been able to reverse much of the pandemic with a cure that’s effective against 75% of people infected with the maze virus (i.e. the rage virus, also i.e. fast-zombieism). The remaining 25% (the resistant) either get killed or caged while scientists press on for a way to cure them. But there’s a growing movement to exterminate the resistant over fears that they might escape and start new outbreaks.

In Ireland, the physical and economic damage of the pandemic was far greater than in other parts of the developed world. Parts of the film’s Dublin look and feel like a post-apocalyptic landscape--even though there was no global apocalypse. So you end up with themes of global class divisions, in which Ireland joins the less-developed world in terms of growing poverty and internal threats to national security.

On top of that, in a welcome evolution of standard zombie body horror and loss-of-self themes, the cured still remember everything they did, everyone they killed and ate while they were zombies.

Having watched friends and family murder and eat one another, knowing that the cured still remember killing and cannibalizing, and still suffering immense economic fallout from the outbreak, Dubliners are fiercely divided over a military base established in the city, in which the cured are rehabilitated and the resistant are experimented upon. Dubliners (like the rest of the world) are further divided over reintroducing the cured into the rest of society, staging violent political protests and vandalizing the homes of people who take them in.

Of course, since we’re in Ireland, all of this is deeply reminiscent of the violent political and ethno-nationalist divisions that led to the Irish War of Independence at the turn of the 1920s, fracturing the country in two and eventually leading to the so-called “Troubles,” which lasted from the 1960s until the Good Friday agreement in 1998. In those nearly forty years, Ireland was marred with neighbor-on-neighbor and state-on-civilian violence, many of the victims being “disappeared” and never heard from again. All told, from 1960 to ‘98, the Troubles claimed over 3,500 Irish lives.

Fear Thy Neighbor

Invoking this tragic period of Irish history and combining the virus envisioned in 28 Days with the possibility of a cure established in Matheson’s I Am Legend, The Cured breathes new life into yet another common zombie theme: fear thy neighbor.

The horrific final images from the original Night of the Living Dead, resemble Jim Crow-era photographs of lynchings.

In Romero-style zombie media, uninfected people are dangerous and frightening because they might be infected, because they think you might be infected, and because they’re greedy, wrathful, vengeful, militarized, and downright stupid. But in Freyne’s film, society fears the cured because the cured murdered their friends and family and still remember doing it. And the cured fear the rest of society because they know how afraid everyone is of them. To jack up all that mistrust even more, the resistant can still sense the dormant virus in the cured and, as a result, don’t attack them.

This all builds to a complex sociological drama of class and cultural memory that deepens the standard fear-thy-neighbor theme of classic zombie media with a sense of history and relevance. It’s thematically rich in ways I haven’t seen since the end of the original Night of the Living Dead, when a white man shoots our Black protagonist Ben in the head. The images that follow resemble old photos from a lynching.

Rage, Maze, & Zompires

28 Days Later gave us the rage virus, an infection that causes people to lose their sense of self and become mindless, murderous flesh-eaters: alive, but still basically fast zombies.

It wasn’t the first fast zombie movie. As far as I can tell, that honor goes to Nightmare City, a mostly derided 1980 film in which, according to IMDB:

An airplane exposed to radiation lands, and blood drinking zombies emerge armed with knives, guns and teeth! They go on a rampage slicing, dicing, and biting their way across the Italian countryside.

But despite not being the first of its kind, 28 Days Later established a unique approach to fast zombies, treating them like a natural disaster, akin to a gargantuan hurricane that decimates entire continents in just a few weeks.

It also gave us a newer, much darker version of the military force that might take over in the face of a fast-zombie apocalypse. No longer able to sit back and laugh at the hobbled dumb things ambling toward them the way military forces do in the Living Dead films, this military takes on a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-never approach. No longer content to simply harass women like the male soldiers in Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, these men turn women into sex slaves and murder the men who stand up to them.

Then you have the maze virus and the Irish military force in The Cured’s Dublin. (And remember, we’re in the ZMU here, so this is all in the same universe as far as I’m concerned.) The maze virus, for all intents and purposes, is exactly the same as the rage virus. It gives its host mega-rabies and makes them hunger for uninfected people meat.

Additionally, victims of the maze virus, like Richard Matheson’s zompires, can be cured, at least partly. His cured zompires still struggle with garlic and mirrors and sunlight, but they’ve built their own society. In The Cured, the rest of society has found a cure for the maze virus, but some are resistant, and the cured still retain a dormant strain of the virus that appears to come out in momentary bursts of rage. (Fear thy neighbor again.)

The Cured’s Conor, relaxing after one of his zombie friends has eaten the cop who was just bothering him.

In another resemblance to the novel, The Cured’s main villain Conor (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) comes across as a potential hero at first. In him, you can see someone who might end up doing good, fighting for the rights of the cured, pushing toward a cure for the resistant. But you also see shades of Robert Neville, the anti-hero of Matheson’s I Am Legend, a woman-hating, selfish, murderous psychopath who also, at first, seems like a good man, or at least not a despicable one. Similar traits begin to emerge in Conor’s manipulative interactions with The Cured’s hero Senan (Sam Keeley) and in Conor’s veiled threats to Senan’s sister-in-law Abbie (Elliot Page).

Senan doesn’t come across so great either. The film doesn’t really allow you to let go of the fact that, while he was infected, he killed his brother, Abbie’s husband. On top of that, when Abbie’s son is infected, Senan kidnaps him--presumably because he’s afraid other people will kill him, rather than cure him. But still.

When you look at the specifics, sure, The Cured doesn’t share the same plot as I Am Legend, but it shares themes of ethnic and social conflict that get lost in the official film adaptations. It also uses complicated are-they-evil? core characters to add depth and nuance to those themes in ways that even Vincent Price’s Robert Morgan fails to capture. And the broad strokes of what happens to the world as the virus spreads come across in both the book and the film.

The Cured also draws on the original Night of the Living Dead, both in its use of history to inform its narrative and in the way it treats humanity itself as more dangerous and horrifying than any external threat.

In short, The Cured has been called the unofficial third film in the 28 Days Later franchise, even though it’s not an official sequel. It’s also the adaptation that I Am Legend always deserved, except it’s not an official adaptation. And it’s the sequel that the Living Dead franchise always needed, except it’s not an official sequel to that either.

This is what makes The Cured so successful: it draws on the roots of the modern zombie, while also expanding modern zombie lore. It looks beyond the zombie apocalypse and uses plot and character elements from I Am Legend and Night of the Living Dead to build historical and social context, adding depth and drama to the ZMU.

And that’s the most important thing to take from this article. No matter what anyone tells you, all good zombie movies take place in the same universe.

And probably also in Tommy Westphall’s snowglobe.

And it all happens inside this tiny snowglobe owned by Tommy Westphall (Chad Allen) in NBC’s St. Elsewhere (1982-1988).