28 Days Later (2002) vs. 28 Weeks Later (2007)
Predicting a bloody future without stating the bloody obvious. How Danny Boyle and Alex Garland reinvented the reanimated
I’ve added a spoiler-flag for those who haven’t seen the first movie, allowing you to skip a section in this post. But expect trailer-level spoilers overall.
Having lived through 9/11, Brexit and Covid – while barely surviving the world’s current epidemic of algorithm-induced psychosis – watching 28 Days Later makes you wonder if someone travelled back in time to give Alex Garland a checklist to work from while he was writing the script.
Like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1984) and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) is one of those sci-fi movies that’s become genuinely – and regrettably – prophetic. These movies couldn’t be made today without feeling too on-the-nose. Lana and Lily Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999) still has a few prediction boxes left to tick, though I’m confident I’ll be locked inside a goop-filled AI-pod by the end of next year.
While a lot of modern science fiction seems content to state the bleedin’ obvious1, 28 Days Later undertook the harder, riskier, more imaginative task of predicting a possible future. Director Danny Boyle (still riding high after Trainspotting, 1996) and writer Alex Garland (still hot from his backpacker bestseller The Beach, 19962) tuned their creative antennae into the anxieties of their day – terrorism, bio-weapons, refugee crises, impending war in Iraq, surveillance culture, recession – and came up with a nightmare vision that would have left Rod Serling in need of a straight Scotch.
The movie opens with perhaps its most prescient image: a captive ape, imprisoned by screens, brainwashed by endless rage-bait. We’re in a virology lab somewhere in Cambridge and a group of animal liberation activists are about to make a very poor decision. The title card intervenes and 672 hours later we find Jim (a young Cillian Murphy in the role that made him a star) waking from a coma to find himself in a deserted hospital, unaware that the population of London has become a horde of screeching berserkers who want to pound him into a smash patty. These ‘Infected’ are contaminated with a virus that brings about a permanent state of homicidal rage, much like scrolling through Facebook.
Garland was initially inspired by Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara’s 1996 Capcom classic Resident Evil. (He found the game’s fast-moving Dobermans way scarier than the shambling zombies, which gave him the idea to make his movie-monsters sprinters rather than shufflers.) Further influenced by George A. Romero’s ‘Dead’ trilogy and John Wyndam’s novel The Day of the Triffids (1951), Garland’s script owes just as much to Romero’s lesser-known outbreak movie The Crazies (1973) in which a small town is infected by a virus that turns the living into homicidal loons.3
A surprise hit in the US, 28 Days Later made well over $84m out of a shoestring budget of $8m. It also kickstarted a hunger for the zombie apocalypse, which overran horror media in the 2000s and beyond: movies – Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), Zack Snyder’s adrenalized remake Dawn of the Dead (2004, possibly Snyder’s best), Romero’s fourth instalment in the ‘Dead’ saga, Land of the Dead (2005), Ruben Fleischer’s splatter-comedy Zombieland (2009), Marc Forster’s World War Z (2013) – video games – Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara’s Dead Rising (Capcom, 2006), Mike Booth and Chet Faliszek’s Left 4 Dead (Valve South, 2008) – comics – Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s The Walking Dead (2003-20194), Kirkman and Sean Phillips’ gleefully horrifying Marvel Zombies (2005) – and the apparently unkillable TV franchise still growing out of The Walking Dead (2010-2022).
Despite moments of electrifying terror, 28 Days Later is less an exercise in ever-tightening suspense and more a grave survey of the English apocalypse, dowsing the dying embers of ‘90s Cool Britannia with a cold shower of third-world hardship.
Welcome… to the Great British Breakdown.
The movie was shot by Anthony Dod Mantle, a key cinematographer of Dogme ’95, the Danish filmmaking movement that embraced austerity and authenticity over showy technique. Filmed on handheld digital cameras, 28 Days Later looks like crap, deliberately unvarnished, stark and grainy. The early sequence of a bewildered Jim wandering the empty heart of London is not only authentic (filmed on Sunday mornings at the crack of dawn), but eerily familiar from Covid lockdown.
Cutting between static shots of abandoned landmarks evokes the feeling of switching between surveillance cameras. We see everything, yet nothing, just vacant streets awash with litter, an overturned bus, a wall of missing-persons posters, cheerful ads for Costa and Benetton appealing to customers long-vanished.
It’s unnerving to see a western city so exposed and vulnerable, laid to waste by an invisible enemy whom no one saw coming.
9/11 occurred just over a week into filming.
Like any good Irish ladeen, Jim ends up in church. But the only order of service he finds here are the painted words, ‘THE END IS EXTREMELY FUCKING NIGH!’ The pews are piled with bodies, several of which are far from dead. They gape at Jim for a chilly few seconds before the priest bursts in with a head full of devils.
Making the monster hordes living rather than undead brings the story a step closer to the credible (Garland says he was keen to explore a scientific rather than occult angle), but it’s a moot point in terms of story. What does affect the scenario, drastically escalating the threat level, is the fact these human monsters can move like jet-propelled velociraptors, and it takes more than being smashed in the face with a petrol bomb to put them off their stride. Physical performers – dancers, gymnasts, sprinters – were cast as the Infected, while tinkering with the camera’s shutter speed gave their scenes a frantic, skittery feel.
When traditional Romero-style shamblers bring about the apocalypse, the terror is more subtle, more tantalising, tense and atmospheric. The zombies may have the numbers, but their ambling gait at least gives you time to think, to plan, to hope. If you’re smart, lucky or ruthless, you could thread your way through this groaning crowd and buy yourself another few days of existence. But if your plan hits a locked door or your sidearm clicks dry at the wrong moment, they’ll gorge on your innards like pigs.
And they’ll do it slow.
The Infected of 28 Days Later lack the Jungian resonance that comes from being devoured by former loved ones. The Infected are more like shock troopers. They give you no time to think and no choice beyond ‘run or die’. If they catch you, they’ll pulp you like a pack of enraged gorillas. At least it’ll be over quickly.
Their rate of infection is just as urgent. If a dab of diseased blood hits your eye or seeps into an open wound, you’ll transform in seconds.
In any zombie/infected apocalypse story, the choice to kill is always morally revealing. Consider the rooftop game played by the survivors in Snyder’s Dawn remake, so dehumanised they’re now amusing themselves by popping the heads off undead celebrity lookalikes.
As zombie movies evolved in the 2000s into projects like Zombieland, they became more like first-person shooters, inviting the viewer to take dead-eyed pleasure in survivor-on-zombie violence, indulging the very redneck fantasy that Romero’s movies warned us about. The Infected of 28 Days Later are too swift, too relentless to allow for moral consideration, to sob about having to bash in the brains of a former loved one or to line up a trick-shot to amuse your bros.
In a shocking scene, a wounded survivor gets the telltale jitters of infection and is immediately hacked apart by his machete-wielding companion. It’s an abrupt, fleeting, horrifying moment. No quips. No tears of regret. No slo-mo to relish the splatter. No moral choice at all, just necessity. Be quicker to the kill than they are, become even more monstrous than the monsters.
28 Days Later is at its best when it speaks the least, its monologues less effective than the memorable visuals like Jim wandering a deserted London, rats fleeing ahead of an Infected stampede, the city of Manchester burning on the horizon for want of firefighters. Most indelible is the scene in which Jim returns to his parents’ house, a moment that bites all the deeper for its lack of dialogue, making us piece together the awful picture for ourselves: the gentleness of the funeral hymn Abide With Me as Jim mounts the stairs to his parents’ bedroom, sleeve pressed to his face to keep out the stench; the slow, reluctant pan that reveals what’s on the bed; the empty glass on the nightstand; the scattered pills; the photo of Jim as a boy gripped between yellowed fingers; Jim’s crushed response to the epitaph scribbled on the back: ‘With endless love, we left you sleeping. Now we’re sleeping with you. Don’t wake up. X’
It's the most devastating scene in the movie – perhaps the entire trilogy – and it isn’t the scariest, but the most emotionally raw.
28 Days Later maintains its jittery, unnerving feel by emphasising the fragility of its main character. Cillian Murphy’s Jim isn’t Chris Redfield, biceps bulging either side of his Racoon City-issue Kevlar. He’s not Will Smith in I Am Legend (2007), prowling the grassy sidewalks of Manhattan with a Law Enforcement Carbine and a convenient doctorate in virology. He’s not even Ben from Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1969), a sleeves-rolled-up everyman, armed with nothing but a tire-iron and a plan.
Cillian Murphy was around 25 when he made this, but he looks a lot younger. The first time we see him, we’re peering down at him like he’s a newborn, sprawled hungry and naked on a hospital gurney. The movie constantly exposes Jim’s physical and psychological vulnerability, how little he’s aware of what’s going on, his compassion compared to the ruthlessness of spike-haired survivalist Selena (Naomie Harris whom this movie also made a star), his skinniness next to burly cockney cabbie Frank (Brendan Gleeson), his long-lashed androgyny compared to a crew of horny squaddies.
With his dazed blue eyes and alien cheekbones, Murphy is one of those actors whose beauty feels unearthly. Like Anya Taylor-Joy, David Bowie or Tilda Swinton, he looks like he’s just stepped out of a flying saucer. In 28 Days Later, he’s an angel who must learn to become a demon if he is to survive the hell in which he’s found himself, journeying north to Manchester in search of a military safe-haven, along with Selena, Frank and his young daughter.
Skip ahead to the next image if you want to avoid spoiling the ending…
The light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be a locomotive in the form of Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston) and his crew of rowdy soldier bros, working-class geezers delighted to have taken over a stately manse in the country.
The threat these heavily armed men pose makes itself known by their barely maintained order, the boyish delight they take in blowing up the Infected, and by the uncomfortably formal dinner Jim and his companions are forced to attend. The Major asks the ladies, “I don’t suppose you can cook can you?”
It turns out this ramrod patriarch has robust views on the best way to re-establish society, or at least to keep his men from killing themselves. It’s he who delivers the film’s most chilling line: “I promised them women.”
Until now Jim has been a reluctant killer, still feeling bad about despatching an Infected child during a gas station pit-stop. But when his female companions are threatened sexually (another horrible moment in which Selena forces the young girl to take a heavy dose of valium in preparation for what might come next), Jim is now forced to become the protector, a male that can out-alpha the Major, the ultimate monster, whose onslaught is so savage Selena mistakes him for one of the Infected.
It’s here – when Jim goes feral and becomes a Leon-like killing machine – that 28 Days Later falters, concluding thematically if not convincingly. Characters who would almost certainly know better make tactical blunders just to keep the story moving, while Jim’s rescue plan relies on improbable quirks of luck and timing. The climax becomes a gothic melodrama, out-of-synch with the stunned realism of the first two thirds.
The movie literally stalled at the last minute as the filmmakers ran out of money before a proper ending could be filmed.
“We subsequently shot two endings: one in a hospital and one in another country house, in the Lake District. The hospital ending was the ending I’d written. Jim dies and the two girls set off into the world — who knows what happens to them? It tested really badly. Not just badly but really badly.”
Alex Garland, Interview with Inverse, 2023
Unfortunately, the filmmakers kept the punters happy with an upbeat ending, though it would have been more on-theme to let the monster die for his sins.
Towards the end of 28 Days Later, the survivors realise that passenger planes are still crossing the sky and the rest of civilisation is carrying on without them. It turns out Europe enforced its own Brexit upon the UK by placing the country in quarantine to stop the rage virus from infecting the rest of the world. In reality, we Brits found out the hard way that quarantines are less useful when your PM would rather you just washed your hands and let the bodies pile high.
The tenuous notion of quarantine is the central focus of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s ferocious sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), which takes a more commercial, conventional route into Resident Evil-type action-horror.
By the time the sequel was green-lit, Boyle and Garland were already committed to making their ambitious sci-fi drama Sunshine (2007). Impressed by his paranormal thriller Intacto (2001), they chose Juan Carlos Fresnadillo to take over and co-write the script5. Thankfully, the team were just as interested in humanity as they were in seeing body parts zing through the air under the rotor-blades of a ducking helicopter.
The movie opens with a terrifying calm-before-the-chaos sequence so masterful it deserves a separate breakdown. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see how this scene expertly pulls the viewer in before freaking them the hell out, and I’ll post a full breakdown next month…
In summary, our main character Don (Robert Carlyle) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack) are hiding out in a country cottage along with the kindly, elderly owners. A brittle sense of peace and safety pervades. Until it doesn’t. Suffice to say, it’s like the movie takes a bite from one of its own Infected and wigs out into abrupt and shocking anarchy. The scene’s turning point is a devastating character reveal that leaves Don alive, and us unsure how to feel about him for the rest of the picture.
Shot in a combination of digital, and grainy 16mm, it’s a sharper, clearer film with even more expansive views of lockdown London, whose empty streets have lost none of their power to unsettle. It’s a more hawkish view of the capital, seen through the eyes of the American-led NATO forces helping to repatriate the surviving Brits now the Infected have finally starved and died off.
Four months before the movie was released in May 2007, President Bush had announced his “New Way Forward” in the Iraq War, pledging to commit an additional 20,000 troops to the region to combat the virus of sectarian violence and insurgency.
In 28 Weeks Later, the American-made quarantine zone is a peninsula on the River Thames into which the Brits are penned until the Yanks are done fumigating the rest of the capital. Bored snipers prowl the office rooftops itching for something to shoot, overseen by the watchful General Stone (a monolithic Idris Elba, then fresh from TV’s The Wire). The reason his Chief Medical Officer (Rose Byrne) is dismayed to find children among the captive Londoners is because she knows her CO is prepared to order a Code Red; if he sees a single person exhibit so much as a sniffle, he’ll exterminate every last one of them.
It turns out that Don has made his way back to London and is now reunited with his kids (Mackintosh Muggleton and a pre-stardom Imogen Poots). He’s somehow become a high-level caretaker in the quarantine zone with a handy Access All Areas pass. It’s here that credibility starts creaking like frayed rope, giving way to the entirely unbelievable in the sequence of events that lead to the inevitable outbreak.
But it’s hard to be pernickety when a horror movie is this fast and this furious.
Fresnadillo is not only great at capturing those moments when the tables abruptly turn but is alive to the truth those moments reveal in his characters. (His feature debut Intacto was a magic realist piece in which luck is a commodity.) When the Infected attack a lightless basement full of evacuees, it’s less like the real-time surveillance footage of the first movie and more a cannibal nightmare straight out of Goya. The director loses you in the ugliness, monsters gorging on their prey like rabid wolves in a sheep pen. (The Infected feel more like biters than beaters this time.)
When the carnage spills onto the streets, the snipers face the impossible task of picking out Infected targets among the terror-stricken civilians. The American forces have all the guns, all the expertise, all the angles, but no control. Troops are forced back and General Stone declares open season on anything that moves. This midpoint sequence recalls the slippery thrill of the opening scene in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) when the cable news team realise just how FUBAR the situation has become and start abandoning their posts.
Societal breakdown is as liberating as it is terrifying, as – unlike the cold-blooded General Stone – our lead sniper Doyle (a pre-Hawkeye Jeremy Renner) chooses not to open fire on fleeing civilians but instead play the hero. The second half of the movie follows his escort mission to get Don’s kids to the extraction point, alongside Rose Byrne’s wounded medic, before the streets get dosed with napalm.
Renner’s action hero is the opposite of Cillian Murphy’s string-bean nobody. He’s stout, dependable, warm as apple pie; he looks like Sam Gamgee as a Navy SEAL. We’re back among the renegade SWAT troopers and stalwart flyboys guiding us through the apocalypse in Romero’s Dawn and Day of the Dead (1985).
However, 28 Weeks Later takes place in a moral universe far more ruthless, where the choice to do right or do wrong amount to pretty much the same thing. Here courage goes unrewarded, and heroes burn the same as cowards.
Unlike the first movie, the sequel ends on a satisfying downer.
All roads in the zombie/outbreak genre still lead back to Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead, in which we’re powerless to prevent the apocalypse from making either meat or monsters of us all.
Stay weird.
Sources:
The Oral History Of 28 Days Later (Ralph Jones, Inverse, 2023)
Pure Rage (Toby James, making-of featurette, 2002)
10+ Years Later: 28 Weeks Later Has a Fierce Bite (Kurt Hayfield, Screen Anarchy, 2017).
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I haven’t seen a great deal of Charlie Brooker’s anthology show Black Mirror (2011-), though I do wonder whether the concepts I hear so much about really need encoding within the symbolic language of science fiction. I doubt it’s much of a surprise to anyone that we’re now living the predictions of Orwell, Huxley, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick and John Wagner. Digital imprisonment, authoritarian dystopia, and protean, paranoid realities are the stuff of today’s headlines. Unless a story is built on a ‘what if’ or else harbours some deeper revelation about our current reality (How did we get here? How do we live with this? How can we get out?), then the sci-fi element surely risks feeling redundant. Watch The Twilight Zone from the early 1960s: Rod Serling puffing on a Chesterfield as he and his audience stare down the very real prospect of nuclear annihilation. Serling’s science fiction contrasted that terrible awareness of present reality with stories that emphasised human courage, empathy, rationality, imagination, and the resolve to endure and make things better.
Filmed by Boyle in 2000.
The Crazies got a zombie-era remake in 2010, directed by Breck Eisner, and was echoed by James Herbert’s novel The Fog (1975), comics including Warren Ellis and Max Fiumara’s Blackgas (2006-7) and Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows’ dubious Crossed (2008-18), as well as Rob Jabbaz’s Taiwanese movie The Sadness (2021).
The Walking Dead borrows the waking-up-in-hospital opening of 28 Days Later, which borrowed it from Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids.
With British writer Rowan Joffé and fellow Spaniards E.L. Lavigne and Jesus Olmo.
"Director Danny Boyle (still riding high after Trainspotting, 1996)" - not entirely convinced this was the case, but then I had the job of adapting the car crash of Boyle's Trainspotting follow-up into a comic so my judgement may be impaired. He followed that with The Beach and two TV movies (credited as 2001) which never get mentioned anymore, Strumpet and Vacuuming Complete Nude in Paradise. Yes, he still had a tiny bit of Trainspotting heat but most of it was long gone by the time of 28 Days Later, I'd suggest, and point to the tiny budget as proof.
Your mileage may vary, of course!
Loved this, really thoughtful and enjoyed you reminding me of just how fucking terrifying Eccles is in 28 Days.