A ZOMBIE MOVIE WITH BRAINS

28 Years Later revives a franchise, and a genre, that's about so much more than the walking dead

- BY MEGAN MCCLUSKEY

IN 28 YEARS LATER, THE ZOMBIES ARE EVOLVING. Scratch that—the infected are evolving. It may seem like an insignificant distinction, but the word choice has long meant something to director Danny Boyle, who has returned to helm the highly anticipated third film in the postapocalyptic horror franchise, nearly a quarter-century after unleashing his innovative outbreak thriller 28 Days Later. “We had this thing about ‘No, they’re not zombies. They’re infected,” he says. “We wanted them to behave in a different way physically, but they also weren’t undead. They could die and they will die, but so will you if they catch you.”

Proper terminology notwithstanding, 28 Days Later became a big old zombie success story anyway. After hitting theaters in the U.K. in November 2002 then making its way across the pond the following June, Boyle’s culture-shifting collaboration with screenwriter Alex Garland caught on like a contagion, earning more than $80 million worldwide against a reported budget of $8 million. Boyle’s second movie based on a Garland novel or screenplay—following 2000’s The Beach—28 Days follows Cillian Murphy’s bike courier Jim, who wakes up from a coma in an abandoned London hospital to find the so-called Rage Virus has devastated the U.K. The result of human experimentation on chimps gone wrong, it has left hordes of shockingly fast, uncontrollably aggressive, and rabidly bloodthirsty infected in its wake.

Now, over two decades later, 28 Years Later breathes new life into the franchise’s infection allegory in a world that is still recovering from a yearslong global pandemic. The original film may have been a smash in part because of its propulsive new take on a genre, but its appeal was never just its thrills and chills. The story remains a cautionary political tale about the ways in which people, when failed by institutions, resort to violence against one another.