Editorials
[Editorial] ‘Days Gone’ is Dangerously Slow to Start, But Perseverance Pays Off
In spite of that initial and riotous E3 2016 trailer which saw our man Deacon St. John pursued by a monstrous army of Freakers, their vast number spilling through and tumbling over the environment in ways that would make World War Z blush, it’s fair to say that the response to Days Gone in the intervening years has been a touch less enthusiastic.
Much of the muted reception came down to the fact it was soon revealed that Days Gone would be an open-world adventure, that genre designation immediately conjuring cursed images of brain-dulling busywork, a range of content padding, pointless collectibles and more side-missions than you can shake a rotting femur at.
What didn’t help either was that, as launch day approached, it seemed like our worst fears would be realized – that somehow Days Gone had gone from this immensely exciting, zombie horde-style survival sim with a pair of massive, clanging brass balls to something much more pedestrian and, well, despairingly regular.
As it turns out, Days Gone very much does ascribe to that well-worn and frequently practiced open-world game structure that we’ve seen in everything from Watch Dogs to Red Dead Redemption 2, but what isn’t immediately obvious to the discerning eye is just how much nuance is concealed beneath its familiar veneer.
For its sins, Days Gone is not a fast starter. Indeed, it takes a good 10-15 hours of solid play before the Sony Bend Studios product really kicks into gear – something that, understandably, many folks, with varying degrees of open-world fatigue, may be reluctant to put in.
Once that threshold of play has been reached, however, Days Gone begins to yield and properly showcase its hidden depths, and nowhere is this better exemplified than in the Freaker menace that serves as the game’s chief group of antagonists.
Though clearly the labor of a creative melting pot that has frequently bore witness to Danny Boyle’s superb 28 Days Later, the Freakers are nonetheless very much unique nightmares unto themselves as the mutation which drives their homicidal tendencies branches out in a number of interesting ways.
For instance, it isn’t until someway into the Lost Lake map area of the game that players are exposed to the Screamers – an especially creepy variant of the standard Freaker whose melancholy, broken singing acts as a grim precursor to the ear-piercing shriek that follows, bringing down swarms of Freakers onto the player in turn.
Likewise, though the presence of the Breaker variant might seem unsurprising; the massively roided, burly zombie archetype being a staple in games of this ilk since records began, their attitudes to other creatures in the world might not be what you’d expect. Should you find yourself tackling a swarm of Freakers and one of these brutes is lurking nearby, you shouldn’t worry about incurring his wrath as the Breaker will furiously go after the lesser Freakers instead, decimating them with gleeful aplomb as you hastily make your escape.
Then there is the Horde itself – arguably Days Gone‘s star attraction and the one facet of its design which effectively brought it to the dance. Though you glimpse a Horde in the game’s opening minutes, it isn’t until a good few hours later that actually encounter one in the wild.
Most tellingly, when you do properly encounter them for the first time you realize that the terrifying spectacle of their original E3 2016 debut was not exaggerated. A veritable force of nature, each Horde is a murderous engine that consumes everything it touches; a violent and encroaching flood of torn flesh, gnashing teeth and bloody sinew that requires a keen eye and a tactical mind to surmount.
So grandly refreshing is it then that when you destroy your first Horde – utilizing all manner of tools, establishing escape routes and improvising environmental choke-points to funnel your foes into kill-zones for maximum damage, that Days Gone makes you feel like some sort of heady hybrid of MacGuyver and Ricky Grimes from Kirkman’s popular shambler fiction.
And this is the thing, that first handful of hours that you put into Days Gone will hint at none of this, instead, giving the impression that the game is absolutely the sum of its unambitious genre inspirations and nothing more.
Days Gone slow burning reveal of its deeper nuances and mysteries also expands to its storytelling too. What at first seems like a distinctly groan-worthy, Bros-On-Bikes post-apocalyptic jaunt, later on, begins to blossom into a meditation on the desperation to cling on to what came before, that quintessential need to revisit those Days Gone at the expense of everything else.
Days Gone isn’t perfect – that isn’t in dispute, but much like its relentless throng of flesh-torn antagonists, it has depths and sophistication which lurk beneath its vicious, and outwardly familiar face that demand investigation. You just need to put the time in – the apocalypse isn’t over in a day after all.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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