28 Weeks Later

When Danny Boyle and Alex Garland stepped back to executive-produce, the sequel to 28 Days Later went to Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, a Canary Islands-born director whose only feature, the Madrid-set gambling thriller Intacto (2001), had won him the Goya for Best New Director. Released in 2007 as a British and Spanish production with Fox Atomic's backing, it is that rare genre sequel with a real author behind it: bigger than the original, colder in temper, and every bit as unsparing.

The premise moves from survival to occupation. Seven months on, American troops have sealed off a corner of Docklands and started bringing Britons home, among them two children, Tammy (Imogen Poots, in her first major role) and Andy, returning to their father Don, whom Robert Carlyle plays with a raw, guilt-stricken intensity. Rose Byrne's army medic and Jeremy Renner's sniper watch the reconstruction from inside the cordon. Enrique Chediak's handheld camera and Fresnadillo's frantic editing make panic almost physical, and John Murphy's score, a reworking of his now-ubiquitous "In the House, In a Heartbeat", gives the whole film its pulse. The opening sequence is one of the best in modern horror.

Most critics came round to it. It scored 78 on Metacritic, and reviewers noted that what it lacks in the first film's humanism it makes up in atmosphere and sheer propulsion. In 2007 its imagery of a militarised green zone read as pointed allegory for Iraq. It won the Empire Award for Best Horror, and now that 28 Years Later has reopened the story nearly two decades on, it is plainly the franchise's savage middle chapter.