28 Days Later at Secret Cinema: a bloodthirsty attack on the wallet

You would think that 28 Days Later is the perfect Secret Cinema film. It’s a genre picture held together by big set pieces, and is exactly the sort of slow-burn cult movie that Secret Cinema should be concentrating on. Plus, having been to the Beckenham Odeon a fair few times, you already have some experience in hellish, post-apocalyptic cinema environments. It’s more expensive than watching a film normally, but you figure it’ll be worth it. You go online and buy a couple of tickets.

£134 later

You’re pointed towards a special mini-site that notionally exists to build the immersive nature of the experience, but mainly seems to want to sell you a £20 costume to wear to the event. You hate costumes, because you are an adult. But then you look online and see that Secret Cinema has apparently been turning people away if they haven’t been wearing them.

Reluctantly, you buy two.

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£40 later

You see that the event is being held next to an abandoned factory that used to produce print media, and realise that this is the perfect location for a film about creatures that angrily stagger on, long after they were supposed to die.

15 minutes later

You’re inside the venue. Specifically, you’re in a part that’s been made up to look like an authoritarian testing facility, where people variously shout at you for either wearing a surgical mask or not wearing a surgical mask. The dedication of the performers is beyond doubt, but a part of you wishes that you’d gone to the Back to the Future event instead, because that one probably wasn’t full of arseholes who keep telling you off.

20 minutes later

Not to give anything away, you’re funnelled through a series of beautifully rendered rooms based on scenes from 28 Days Later. The attention to detail is incredible. In fact, it feels like you’re actually in the movie itself, albeit a catastrophically ill-advised version of the movie where Cillian Murphy has been fired and replaced with 20 listlessly preening hipsters. But still, it’s great.

30 minutes later

You’re led to a room with food in it. And you’re left there without instruction. Nobody really seems to know what they’re doing, but a klaxon goes off every five minutes, requiring you to drop to the ground. Eventually you succumb to boredom and buy two small cheeseburgers and a portion of chips to share with your guest.

£17.50 later

You’re starting to feel slightly ripped off. People still don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing, so you entertain yourself by watching the performers’ hapless attempts to stay in character as bedraggled, terrified zombie-attack survivors while charging visitors for drinks with miraculously still-working contactless debit card readers.

20 minutes later

You’re led into another room where blood drops on you and techno music plays and a man attempts to goad you into dancing, and you’re completely sober, and it’s like the lights coming up at the end of a rubbish student disco on the worst day of your life. When it finishes, you’re led back to another room. Your heart sinks. It’s the food room again.

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25 minutes later

People start to impatiently fidget and tut. A military performer tries to fill the space by handing you a sheaf of paper and telling you to draw a map. Someone has already written “These burgers are overpriced” in big letters on the paper. Also, the klaxon keeps going off, and everyone groans when it does, because it turns out that repeated mandatory crouching isn’t actually that much fun. You buy a £2 can of Coke from an extra, and tell him that you don’t know what you’re supposed to do. He looks at you, with genuine sadness in his eyes, and mutters: “Imagine how I feel.”

One hour later

Finally, something happens. It’s a rave in the blood room. A full-on rave. You look around and see everyone else whooping and screaming with excitement, each of them the star of their own private movie, and you wonder whether you’re the problem, whether it’s your inability to have fun that’s hampering your enjoyment of this event. Then you notice that there’s a bar in the room selling cocktails in mugs for £6 a go, and that’s the real point of the room. And you realise that it’s actually Secret Cinema’s determination to part you from every single penny you’ve ever earned that’s the real problem.

Half an hour later

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You finally get to watch 28 Days Later. And the staging is incredible. The layout inventive, the film’s big moments augmented with live performance. It is everything you’d hoped from a Secret Cinema screening.

Two hours later, four hours after you started, and hundreds of pounds poorer than you once were

You go home with mixed feelings about Secret Cinema. You can’t fault the design or the performances, and it’s an interesting way to see a film like this, but everything feels slightly mercenary. And the rage is certainly real.