28 Years Later

In 2002, Danny Boyle and the screenwriter Alex Garland remade the zombie film for the post-9/11 age with 28 Days Later, trading Romero's slow shamblers for sprinting, virus-driven infected and shooting a depopulated London on consumer-grade digital cameras. 28 Years Later, released in 2025, reunites the pair to open a new trilogy, leaping forward almost three decades to a Britain sealed off from a world that has moved on without it.

The film centres on a community surviving on a tidal island and on a boy, Spike (the newcomer Alfie Williams), making his first crossing to the mainland. Boyle shot much of it on rigs of iPhones, a return to the restless, improvised texture of the original scaled up to widescreen, and he stages the action with the kinetic editing and saturated grain that have always marked his work. Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson play Spike's parents; Ralph Fiennes appears as a mysterious doctor living out among the dead, and Jack O'Connell as the leader of a stranded band of survivors.

Reviews praised its formal daring and its willingness to fold grief and folk-horror strangeness into a studio horror picture, even where they divided on its swerves. It earned a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding British Film, and Williams won a London Film Critics' Circle award for his breakout. As the first movement of a larger story, it makes the case for Boyle and Garland's franchise as the most restless in the genre.