28 Days Later

• 1. Introduction

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  28 Days Later is a 2002 British horror film directed by Danny Boyle from a screenplay by Alex Garland, and it begins in an empty hospital. A bicycle courier named Jim wakes from a coma in St Thomas' Hospital in London. Nobody comes to his bed. He wanders outside and finds a capital with no crowds, and newspapers that speak of a mass evacuation. Cillian Murphy plays Jim, and he will soon learn what emptied the city.

  Several questions run through the story. How does a film crew make one of the busiest cities in Europe look abandoned? What kind of virus does a filmmaker invent when he does not want ghouls from a grave? Where did the money come from, and why did the ending change so many times? And how did a picture that its own director did not call a zombie film end up reshaping the genre?

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• 2. The Rage Virus

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  Before he wrote a word of the script, Alex Garland had loved George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, from 1968, and Dawn of the Dead, from 1978. He had watched them as a child. He then largely lost touch with zombies until he played the video game Resident Evil in 1996, which reminded him how much he enjoyed them. Danny Boyle liked the resulting screenplay, having already directed the 2000 adaptation of Garland's 1996 novel The Beach. Boyle also pointed to John Wyndham's 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids as Garland's original spark.

  The creatures here do not rise from graves. Garland and Boyle conceived a biological contagion that amplifies aggression, an urge they saw as already present in people. They offered it as a metaphor for everyday fury such as road rage and air rage. For the look of the infected, Boyle borrowed from real illness, especially Ebola, with touches of rabies.

  The outbreak starts in a laboratory in Cambridge, where animal rights activists break in to free chimpanzees. A scientist warns them that the animals are "infected" with "rage". One activist releases a chimpanzee anyway. It attacks her, and within seconds of exposure she succumbs and turns on the others.

  Garland said on the DVD commentary that the idea of a quarantined Britain arrived during production. It replaced an earlier plan for a worldwide outbreak, which had included infection boarding a plane to the United States. He tied the quarantine to British worries about BSE, known as mad cow disease, and foot-and-mouth disease.

  The film also winks at its ancestors. Garland called the supermarket sequence a nod to Dawn of the Dead. He described the chained infected figure as a nod to the character Bub in Day of the Dead. When he wrote the soldiers' dinner scene, he had the plantation dinner from Apocalypse Now Redux in mind.

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• 3. Streets Without People

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  Sunday mornings gave the crew roughly 45 minutes after dawn to film London while it was truly quiet. They shot at Westminster Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, Horse Guards Parade and Oxford Street. Street closures lasted only "90 seconds or two minutes" at a time. Volunteer marshals, students and friends of the production, held back the traffic.

  The cameras had to suit that pace. Most of the film was shot on Canon XL1 digital video cameras, which were smaller and more nimble than film cameras. On the empty M1 motorway, Boyle said police created a rolling block in both directions. That opened a corridor of bare road and gave the crew seven or eight minutes with multiple cameras. Boyle said the early London scenes avoided "littering the world with corpses" and chose a symbolic emptiness instead.

  The overturned double-decker bus shows how tight the margins were. The crew placed it on its side, filmed Jim walking past, and removed it, all within about 15-20 minutes. Westminster City Council had refused permission to put it outside Downing Street. When the crew arrived at 4am and found no council official there, they set it up anyway.

  The September 11 attacks happened while the film was being shot. Boyle saw a parallel between the missing persons flyers at the start of the film and those posted around New York City afterwards. He also said the crew probably would not have been allowed to close Whitehall after the attacks, which made the earlier bus stunt look lucky.

  The supermarket scene was filmed overnight at a Budgens on Tottenham Court Road, lit by the store's own overhead lights. To save time, the crew avoided neon where they could, and the effects house Clear painted out what remained. Some pick-up shots were done by cinematographer Alwin Küchler, because Anthony Dod Mantle was unavailable.

  Outside the capital, Trafalgar Park near Salisbury stood in for the mansion. The ruins of Waverley Abbey in Surrey provided a calm interlude on the road to Manchester. The production even hired an optometrist to supervise the red contact lenses worn by the actors playing the infected.

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• 4. Faces in the Ruins

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  Boyle explained on the DVD commentary that he wanted relatively unknown actors, so that audiences could believe in the world. Cillian Murphy had worked mostly in small independent films. Naomie Harris had acted on British television as a child, and Megan Burns had a single earlier film credit. Christopher Eccleston and Brendan Gleeson were the exceptions, already respected character actors.

  Murphy first auditioned using a Standard Southern British accent, because Jim was written as English. During filming, Boyle and Murphy chose to return to the actor's natural accent. Jim was rewritten as Irish. James McAvoy also auditioned, for a role as one of the infected. Toby Sedgwick played the infected priest and later came back to the series as movement coach for 28 Years Later in 2025.

  Around Jim gathers a small group. Harris plays Selena, a hardened survivor in London, and Noah Huntley plays her companion Mark. Gleeson plays Frank, a taxi driver, and Burns plays his young daughter Hannah. Their trust in each other is tested when a drop of blood from a corpse falls into Frank's eye.

  The film's sharpest turn comes when the group follows a military radio broadcast offering "salvation from infection". It leads them to Major Henry West, played by Eccleston, and his soldiers in a fortified country house. Beneath the banquet and the tour lies a plan to lure female survivors into sexual slavery, meant to keep the troops' morale up. The monsters in the film are fast, but the cruelest decisions are made by uninfected men.

  For the final reckoning, Hannah puts Frank's cab into reverse. The soldier Private Mailer, played by Marvin Campbell, bursts through the rear window. West does not survive.

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• 5. Money and Endings

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  Producer Andrew Macdonald had access to National Lottery funding, and he pitched the film to Universal Pictures, which declined. Money stayed tight. Christopher Eccleston had to accept an emergency pay cut. In June 2001, it was reported that Fox Searchlight Pictures had joined as co-financier and worldwide distributor.

  The first version of the film ended with Jim being shot, at the point where the first budget ran out. After Fox saw that cut, the production received extra funding. The original ending had also tested badly with audiences. Several new pitches followed, and the studio finally approved the one that reached cinemas, shot months later.

  That new finale unfolds near a remote cottage in Cumbria. Jim, Selena and Hannah spread a huge cloth banner reading "HELLO" as a Hawker Hunter jet passes overhead, while the infected lie dying of starvation on the roads. The crew arranged for a real jet to fly over, since a computer-generated one would have cost about £70,000. Boyle said an RAF jet stood in for one from the Finnish Air Force, and its markings could not be changed. Fox paid for the Lake District ending, and Boyle shot it on 35mm film so the picture would feel as though it had opened up.

  Three discarded endings appear among the DVD extras, and all of them end with Jim dying. In the first, he dies of his gunshot wounds in a hospital while Selena and Hannah try to save him. The American theatrical release attached this version after the credits, answering heated online arguments about which ending was better. In the second, Jim dreams of the accident that put him in a coma as he dies.

  The third exists only as storyboards. Instead of soldiers killing Frank, the survivors tie him up and find a research laboratory at the blockade. There Jim gives a full blood transfusion to save Frank and dies for it. Boyle and Garland agreed it was not plausible, and it was never filmed.

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• 6. The Soundtrack

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  John Murphy composed the original score, built on electric guitar and atmospheric electronic production. Other artists on the soundtrack include Brian Eno, Grandaddy and Blue States. A combined score and song compilation, titled 28 Days Later: The Soundtrack Album, came out on the 17th of June 2003.

  One track is missing from that album. A heavily edited version of "East Hastings" by the post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor plays in the film. Boyle could only secure the rights to use it on screen, so it was left off the record.

  Some of the music lived on far from London. A modified version of "In the House - In a Heartbeat" became the theme of the character Big Daddy in the 2010 film Kick-Ass. The same piece accompanied a 2012 Louis Vuitton advertising campaign called "L'Invitation au voyage". In 2019, it was remixed for the video game Metro Exodus.

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• 7. Release and Rights

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  28 Days Later opened in the United Kingdom on the 1st of November 2002, released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. In the UK it took in £6.1 million. In the United States it became a surprise hit, earning over $45 million from fewer than 1,500 screens. Worldwide it grossed more than $82.8 million, which made it one of the most profitable horror films of 2002.

  Reviews were generally positive. On Rotten Tomatoes, 87% of 237 critics gave it a positive review, with an average rating of 7.40 out of 10. Its consensus line calls it "both a terrifying zombie movie and a sharp political allegory". Metacritic scored it 73 out of 100 from 39 reviews. Bloody Disgusting ranked it seventh among the top 20 horror films of the decade, asking: "Zombie movie? Political allegory? Humanist drama?"

  Later lists kept it visible. Empire placed it at number 456 in its 2008 ranking of the 500 greatest movies. A 2017 Time Out poll of 150 film professionals ranked it the 97th-best British film. In July 2025, Rolling Stone put it at number 53 on its list of the best movies of the 21st century. The Hollywood Reporter ranked it sixth among the best horror movies of the century.

  It also collected prizes. The Saturn Awards named it Best Horror Film, and Empire gave it Best British Film. Naomie Harris won a Black Reel award for breakthrough performance, and Anthony Dod Mantle won the European Film Award for cinematography.

  The film reached DVD and VHS in Europe on the 16th of May 2003 and in North America on the 21st of October 2003. A Blu-ray followed on the 9th of October 2007 alongside 28 Weeks Later, with one more alternate ending added. Later, however, buying the film became surprisingly hard because of out-of-print copies, costly secondhand discs and no digital release.

  In February 2024, it emerged that Macdonald had bought the rights back from Disney and sold them to Sony Pictures Releasing, together with the rights to the 28 Years Later trilogy. Sony made the film available to buy and rent digitally from the 18th of December 2024. A 4K remaster in a steelbook case was later announced for the 1st of September 2026.

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• 8. Revival and Sequels

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  Danny Boyle never considered 28 Days Later a zombie film, yet it is credited with reviving the genre. With Resident Evil, it helped start a wave that lasted more than a decade, before fading by the late 2010s. Its fast-running infected and character-driven drama set it apart from the slow shamblers of earlier decades. The 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead drew on it.

  A long line of infection stories followed, including Shaun of the Dead in 2004, I Am Legend in 2007 and Zombieland in 2009. The same wave carried into books such as World War Z and Warm Bodies, and into television with The Walking Dead. Parody arrived too, in the 2005 South Park episode "Die Hippie, Die" and in "Treehouse of Horror XX" from The Simpsons in 2009.

  When COVID-19 lockdowns emptied streets in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, many compared the images to the film's opening sequence. In 2021, Megan Burns said she had no idea of the film's eventual cultural impact. Christopher Nolan said that seeing Murphy in 28 Days Later convinced him to cast the actor as Scarecrow in Batman Begins in 2005.

  A sequel, 28 Weeks Later, was released on the 11th of May 2007. Boyle and Garland returned as producers beside Macdonald, and the story follows American troops arriving about seven months after the first film. In March 2007, Boyle had said he would like to make a third film, then called 28 Months Later. In 2019, he said he and Garland had "a wonderful idea for the third part".

  28 Years Later arrived on the 20th of June 2025, directed by Boyle and written by Garland. Its follow-up, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, was directed by Nia DaCosta and filmed back-to-back with it. It premiered in the UK on the 13th of January 2026 and brings back the character Murphy played in the original.

  The story also spread into print. In 2007, Fox Atomic Comics and HarperCollins published the graphic novel 28 Days Later: The Aftermath, written by Steve Niles. In 2009, Boom! Studios launched a monthly comic that follows Selena between the first two films.

  After the success of the last two films, Sony confirmed that the third and final film of the 28 Years Later trilogy is in development, with Boyle again directing and Garland writing.

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