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And boy, is it terrifying! While this change feels like a fairly arbitrary concept – zombies running instead of walking – this small change revolutionized the zombie genre.Ģ8 Days Later was an instant critical and commercial smash. In the hands of Boyle, the infected attack like rabid dogs, inexorable and relentless. Rather than ponderously shuffling toward their victims, these zombies run flat out while screaming and slobbering. But the infected themselves may be the most revolutionary aspect of 28 Days Later. Boyle’s reliance on practical effects and propulsive pacing give 28 Days Later a timelessness that has ensured that the film has not only endured but become more beloved in the 20 years since its release.

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Naomie Harris, too, introduced herself to the world with this role, leading to a slew of prestigious TV jobs and film roles.

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As Jim, Murphy offered a glimpse of the craft and intensity that would lead to him becoming a bona fide movie and TV star due to his work in the BBC production Peaky Blinders and various film projects with Christopher Nolan. The scenes of a desolate and empty central London have become iconic and acted as a grim precursor to similar scenes during the COVID crisis. While 28 Days Later explored many of the same themes as the zombie films that came before it, several key differences set Boyle’s masterpiece aside from the rest.

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After encountering the infected for the first time, Jim teams up with Selena (Naomie Harris), a chemist and battle-hardened survivor, taxi driver Frank (Brendan Gleeson), and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns) as the unlikely quartet attempt to reach safety.Ī still from ’28 Days Later’ starring Cillian Murphy Little did the cast and crew know that the scenes in which Jim glances at huge notice boards filled with missing posters would take on an eerie prescience following 9/11. The horror landscape was ready for something new.Ģ8 Days Later follows Jim (Cillian Murphy), a bicycle courier who awakens from a coma to find London deserted. When Scary Movie 2 is one of the year’s most successful ‘horror’ films, you know the genre is in trouble. Horror itself was undergoing an existential crisis. It wasn’t just the zombie subgenre that needed to be revitalized. It was in this uneasy landscape that 28 Days Later would be born. The big horror hits of the era included titles as diverse as Jeepers Creepers, The Others, and Thir13en Ghosts. The glut of post-Scream teen slashers was about to make way for torture porn and found footage movies. The horror genre was in a strange place in 2001. Inspired by Romero’s films, the massive popularity of the iconic video game Resident Evil (released five years earlier in 1996), and classic, post-apocalyptic horror fiction such as Day of the Triffids, Garland wrote the screenplay and handed it to Boyle (whom he had worked with on The Beach a couple of years earlier) and the two agreed to collaborate. But for writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle, shooting has begun on 28 Days Later, starring Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Brendan Gleeson, and Christopher Eccleston. Now, cast your mind back to September 2001. I would also add that when one of the infected is running at you at pace, they don’t care much whether you consider them a zombie or not. For my money, however, they are still zombies. Instead, they are infected with the rage virus, which turns them into murderous lunatics who exist only to infect others. The ‘infected’ (to use the movie’s parlance) don’t die and come back to life. 28 Days Later isn’t technically a zombie movie.

Fortunately, it all changed in 2002 with director Danny Boyle and his low-budget zombie classic 28 Days Later.įirstly, let me address the rotting and undead elephant in the room. Unsurprisingly, offerings such as Return of the Living Dead 3, Weekend at Bernie’s II, and Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island did not provide the shot in the arm required to bring zombie movies back from the dead. Peter Jackson’s horror-comedy Braindead was perhaps the final film of the golden era before a long barren period in the ‘90s began. However, as the ‘80s rolled into the ‘90s, the moribund shuffle of the zombie movie ground to a halt entirely.