28 Years Later: The gore is acceptable now

It's extremely unsurprising to me that 28 Years Later is easily my favourite film of the year so far. The original is one of the most beautifully intense films I've ever seen on the big screen, and I am very much into the pastoral horror thing, where the camera lingers on this lush and verdant fields, with something absolutely horrible on the edge of things. 

It's also got an amazing soundtrack, and another absolute gold-standard Ralph Fiennes performance, and - most of all - goes to some truly unexpected places, especially when they get to the life's work of the good Dr Kelson, and an ending with a tonal shift so vibrant and unsettling that I am aching for the next film in the series.

The movie felt like a constant surprise, but the most surprising thing of all might be the film's rating in many countries, because it wasn't the hard R that these sorts of films have traditionally earned. 

It does start with a bunch of kids getting horribly murdered, but it's just off screen - which can make things worse, but it is a genuine relief that we don't see it. And the giant massive cock on the primary monsters is just artfully obscured enough, while also being happily blatant. 

The kind of fake movie violence seen in movies like this would have once got the film in some very big trouble with the censors and other assorted prudes in the past. Now it feels like we've seen it all before, with the various Walking Dead TV series in particular doing just about everything you can do to a decaying human body.

It's just very funny to me that gore effects don't provoke the moral conniptions they once did, especially when I've spent the past few weeks reading old horror movie magazines from the 90s that breathlessly report on the seconds of footage snipped from Italian zombie epics. There have been way more words spilt on that prosthetic penis than the heads getting ripped off, which says something about the 

I'm just here for the ride, and stopped caring about rating systems the day I got old enough they don't matter. But if it's a small weight off the back of my favourite filmmakers, and they can make things as intense as they like without worrying about the killjoys, it must make for better movies.