28 Weeks Later

When Danny Boyle and Alex Garland stepped back to executive-produce, the sequel to 28 Days Later passed 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. The result, released in 2007 as a British–Spanish production with Fox Atomic's backing, is a rare genre sequel that feels authored rather than assembled — larger in scale than the original, colder in temper, and every bit as unsparing.

The premise shifts the frame 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, played by Robert Carlyle 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 — reworking his now-ubiquitous "In the House – In a Heartbeat" — gives the whole film its pulse. The opening sequence is regularly cited among the finest in modern horror.

Critics were largely won over: 78 on Metacritic, with reviewers noting that what it lacks in the first film's humanism it recovers in atmosphere and sheer propulsion. Its imagery of a militarised green zone and of containment collapsing read, in 2007, as pointed allegory for Iraq. It took the Empire Award for Best Horror, and with 28 Years Later reopening the story nearly two decades on, it stands as the franchise's essential, savage middle chapter.