28 Days Later

Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later opened in 2002, three years before George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, and is widely credited with reinventing the zombie film for the post-9/11 era. Alex Garland's screenplay (Garland's first) established the central conceit of the fast-running infected, separating the film's monsters from the slow shamblers of Romero's tradition and influencing everything that followed, from The Last of Us to Boyle's own 28 Weeks Later.

Bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy, in his star-making lead) wakes in St. Thomas's Hospital after a 28-day coma to find central London entirely deserted. The opening sequences (Murphy walking across an empty Westminster Bridge, past Trafalgar Square, through Piccadilly Circus) were shot at dawn on a closed Sunday morning and remain among the most disturbing images of urban evacuation ever filmed. Naomie Harris and Brendan Gleeson play the survivors he eventually joins; Christopher Eccleston is the army major whose Manchester barracks turns out to be the film's true horror.

The film was shot on consumer-grade Canon XL1 mini-DV cameras, which gave the digital footage a distinctive grain that became part of the look of low-budget British genre cinema for the next decade. Boyle's collaboration with composer John Murphy produced In the House, In a Heartbeat, the film's main theme, which has been re-used across multiple later films and television scores. 28 Years Later arrived in 2025, returning Boyle to the franchise.