28 Years Later

In 2002, Danny Boyle and 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 (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 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 a London Film Critics' Circle award for his breakout. As the first movement of a larger story, it reasserts Boyle and Garland's franchise as the most restless in the genre.