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28 Days Later kickstarted the zombie revival, now its back for another bite
Welcome to Cheat Sheet, where we give you all the intel you need about iconic shows and films. In honour of its new addition, this time we're looking at the film franchise that revived the zombie genre, 28 Days Later.
Have you ever heard of a movie trailer so popular that it forced a studio to re-release a 23-year-old film?
That's what happened at the end of 2024, when fans got a first glimpse of the third film in Alex Garland's revolutionary 28 Days Later zombie series.
Chillingly set to Rudyard Kipling's poem Boots — itself about the horrors of war — the teaser for 28 Years Later quickly broke the record for most-viewed trailer of 2024. Soon after, it became the second-most-viewed trailer of all time (just behind 2019's It: Chapter Two).
The demand from fans was so thunderous that, two days later, Sony announced they were re-releasing the original film — which hadn't been available digitally for years due to rights issues.
But 28 Years Later wasn't done gathering steam just yet. After a single day on sale, the film broke the record for most advanced tickets sold in the US for a horror film this year.
Here's what you need to know.
The concept of the animated undead has been lurking in cinema for almost 100 years, and has been terrorising folklore for centuries more.
George A. Romero's influential 1968 flick, Night Of The Living Dead, gave silver screen zombies the reputation of being slow-moving and dim-witted — threatening because of their numbers or lack of personal protection.
But the zombies in 28 Days Later presented a curious alternative.
Inspired by the relentless ghouls in Japanese video game series Resident Evil, writer Alex Garland envisioned a different kind of zombie: agile, angry and lightning fast.
But Garland still yearned to rid zombies of their "magic". Enter Trainspotting director Danny Boyle, who infused Garland's script with the concept of rage. Instead of being supernaturally reanimated corpses, the zombies in 28 Days Later are actually infected with a "rage virus" unwittingly released onto the British population after a test monkey escapes his lab.
With a refreshing concept and a minuscule $US8 million budget under their belts, the team gathered a cast of then-unknowns and began filming in mid-2001.
Beyond briefly explaining how the virus was unleashed, 28 Days Later has little interest in the lore of the infected, instead capturing the human reaction of societal collapse.
Bike courier Jim (Cillian Murphy, 20 years before his Oscar win) wakes up from a coma 28 days after the initial outbreak to an empty hospital. After wandering around London, Jim eventually stumbles upon a handful of fellow survivors. They then must battle not just hoards of infected, but also the ruthless leaders who have survived by brute force.
The production was consistently hounded with monetary issues. Christopher Eccleston, one of the only actors on the cast with a name, agreed to take an emergency pay cut for his work. Until one day it all caught up.
"I just had to say one day, 'We haven't got any more money,' and we packed up and left. We didn't finish the film," producer Andrew Macdonald said.
They soon returned to cobble together some sort of an ending; after showing the studio their efforts, they ponied up for one last reshoot.
Released in the UK at the end of 2002, 28 Days Later became an unexpected hit, quickly breaking even and then eclipsing its budget with ticket sales.
The film then became a sleeper hit in the US market, pulling down $US45 million despite an initial limited release. By the end of its original theatrical run, the movie had made back its small budget ninefold, grossing $US72 million worldwide.
It was praised by critics for the political analogy hiding behind the blood and gore. Filmed while the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred and released just a year after, Boyle says the film grasped onto a larger uneasiness in a seemingly less safe world.
"The film was the first one out of the blocks that touched — not directly, but aesthetically and morally — some of the residue of what 9/11 had done to us," he said in 2018.
"And, in our particular case, it made cities, which feel so immense, suddenly, they were utterly vulnerable."
Many commentators point to the critical and commercial success of 28 Days Later as one of the catalysts for the zombie revival of the 2000s and early 2010s. The boom saw the release of other familiar undead fare: 2004's Dawn of the Dead remake; Spanish-language Rec (2007) (as well as its 2008 US remake, Quarantine); and World War Z (2013).
But, just like a mutated virus coursing through a corpse's veins, the boom also opened the door for zombie sub-genres. There were zombie comedies like Shaun of the Dead (2004), Zombieland (2009) and Black Sheep (2006). Films like Warm Bodies (2013) even gave the zombie rom-com a crack.
The zombie craze leaked into TV as well: 2011's The Walking Dead features protagonist Rick Grimes waking up in a deserted hospital. Reverberations of Boyle and Garland's fast and infected creatures can even be felt in 2023's The Last of Us, which features an unknown fungal infection that transforms the world's population into surprisingly fast monsters.
In the midst of it all, Boyle and Garland (now acting as producers) had another bite at the apple with 28 Weeks Later in 2007. Following a different family caught up in the devastation, the film tracks the slow attempt at rebuilding and sinks deeper into the political ramifications of an apocalypse.
Then, in 2020, 28 Days Later had a cultural resurgence no-one saw coming.
One of the earliest tableaus in the original film sees Jim, disoriented and clad in hospital scrubs, stumbling around the eerily empty streets of London. It was an arresting image at the time but as cities around the world emptied due to COVID-19 lockdowns, many recognised the similarity between what Boyle captured and their current reality.
Speaking to the BBC, Boyle said the world's collective experience with COVID made 28 Years Later "feel possible".
Set nearly three decades after the original, 28 Years Later shows a UK that has been quarantined by the rest of the world. The action shifts from cities to a small surviving community who have barricaded themselves in their island home, following strict, traditional rules to keep the peace.
"In the last 15 years, the world has become regressive and it's very preoccupied with looking backwards. It's all about making things great again," writer Alex Garland told The Screen Show's Jason Di Rosso.
"So [this film] is something to do with a misremembered past and what things survive, what notions survive, what things are lost."
Like its predecessors, 28 Years Later uses the still-ravaging hordes of infected as catalysts for emotional pathos, as 12-year-old villager Spike (Alfie Williams) is taken to the British mainland for the first time by his blood-thirsty father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).
Boyle's affection for unusual camera rigs has also returned. Parts of 28 Days Later were filmed using a small digital video camcorder, which gave the film an almost home-movie look. This time around, Boyle turned to iPhones, binding eight, 12 and 20 phones together.
"We used [the rigs] for the violence … you could whip inside the action almost like in a 3D way, or pause it, or go back on it, startle with it. That's what we were trying to do, put beauty and horror together, which is a great combination for this kind of movie," Boyle told The Screen Show.
"It also gave us a chance to keep a light footprint in the countryside — we wanted it to look undisturbed."
Although not acknowledged in the title, 28 Years Later is actually the first part in Jamie and Spike's story. A sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple — which will see a heavier focus on mysterious cult leader Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell) — will be released in January 2026.
A third, untitled, reportedly final film is currently in the works.
28 Years Later is in cinemas now.
