Terrifying New Horror Movie Brings Zombies Back to Life, For Real
'The Cured' is a new kind of zombie movie up to some familiar tricks.
How would we rebuild society if, after several years plagued by a zombie virus, we managed to find a cure that was 75 percent effective? How would anyone psychologically process years of eating their fellow humans before becoming “human” again? A new horror movie, The Cured, explores just that in Dublin, Ireland, just a few years after the initial outbreak.
Entertainment Weekly debuted a new trailer for The Cured on Wednesday, and in it, Abbie (Ellen Page) is a journalist and mother who lost her husband (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) in the outbreak. Her brother-in-law Senan (Sam Keeley) is among the “cured” years later, and she graciously invites him to live in their home. Most humans, however, aren’t exactly comfortable with former mad cannibals moving into their neighborhoods.
The whole “zombie cure” plot thread seems fairly novel for a zombie film, even if The Cured feels an awful lot like 28 Weeks Later (2007), in which NATO military forces repopulate a safe zone in London almost seven months after an initial zombie outbreak.
Ellen Page plays Abbie, a young mother that lost her husband in the outbreak and accepts his cured brother into her home.
The Cured looks like it focuses more on the social commentary of the whole zombie situation, veering away from the zombie action and gore in favor of a paranoid metaphor for immigration. Senan’s guilt and isolation as a pariah factor majorly into the plot, but we’ll also get to see flashback scenes in which he and his brother appear as “infected.”
Sam Keeley, the actor behind Senan, described the nature of The Cured’s infected with unnerving detail: “They were more like wild animals, like wolves or something, than they were mindless beasts. It was very subtle changes to your physicality to make you seem just a bit more animalistic and more instinctual. But the breathing was a huge part of it, it was like their respiratory system is constantly moving a hell of a lot faster than ours. It took a while to make sure you didn’t hyperventilate and pass out, but once you got the hang of it, it was fun.”
That kind of “wild animal” zombie isn’t all that dissimilar to what we get in 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, so maybe there’s a cinematic universe brewing here?
'The Cured' has a frightening take on the zombie.
IFC Films is releasing The Cured in theaters and on digital platforms on February 23, 2018.
Watch the original short film from Titled Pictures called “The First Wave” that now functions as a prequel to The Cured:
