When 28 Days Later hit theaters more than two decades ago, it offered a quantum leap in zombie movie tropes: Gone were the slow-moving, brain-eating, quasi-mystical monsters of George Romero's moody imagination; they'd been replaced by sprinting, swerving, freakish creations infected with a virus let loose by rogue animal rights activists. The virus, we are told in the film's prologue, is not so much a disease as an idea—rage. The film unfolds as a travelogue that culminates in a terrifying vision of a post-apocalyptic authoritarian society, man's true nature let loose by the collapse of civilization. And it only took twenty-eight days.
That movie, released just after 9/11 and all that it wrought, earned its bleakness, and its cynicism. Directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, who were both relatively young at the time, 28 Days Later was a genre masterpiece about the horrors man can unleash upon the world when the fragile veneer of modernity is discarded. A follow-up from a different creative team, 28 Weeks Later, mined similar territory to mixed results.
It would have been all too easy, and perhaps even appropriate (have you been reading the news?!) for 28 Years Later, the new and long-in-the-works sequel from the original creative team to return to the darkness and nihilism of their original.
