28 movies that owe it all to 28 Days Later

It’s natural, watching 28 Days Later, to wonder about the opening minutes and hours of the Rage Virus outbreak, to imagine how it might have broken various, immediate attempts at containment and virulently erupted to new areas, carried at the speed of a sprinting ghoul. French zombie film La Horde, meanwhile, gives us a thrilling illustration of what those early moments might have looked like, albeit to people who have absolutely no idea what is happening. Playing like a twist on the likes of From Dusk Till Dawn, the film begins as a tense crime story, following a group of police officers as they storm a mostly abandoned apartment high-rise to take down a gang of drug dealers, only for the “zombie” component of the story to suddenly arrive with a reanimated alacrity that manages to be genuinely startling. It’s as if a starting gun goes off, and both the criminals and the police are left staring in slack-jawed amazement at the outside world as Paris seems to be completely tearing itself apart. How did we hit critical mass so quickly? Was this problem swept under the rug for so long that it was allowed to get totally out of hand? When Jim awakes in his abandoned hospital bed in 28 Days Later, the scenes we backfill to explain how he got there take on the shape of La Horde, stories of pitched survival for people who haven’t yet had any time to calculate just how horrifically their world has changed overnight. Those who survive will soon find out. [Jim Vorel]

28 Days Later didn’t just resurrect the zombie movie; it made the apocalypse a box office draw again. Arriving the same year as 28 Weeks Later, the Will Smith-led adaptation of The Last Man On Earth sold itself on images Cillian Murphy could relate to. Just as the actor’s Jim wandered the empty London streets in 2002, Robert Neville (Smith) trolls a bombed-out New York City, evading and fighting murderous mutants. The main difference is he’s much deeper into the new normal than 28 days. Three years into the end of the world, Neville hunts the streets for food, supplies, and infected rats, hoping to find a cure, whilst staying mindful of the cannibalistic mutant vampires born of the viral outbreak that has overrun the planet. If that setup sounds familiar, it’s because it is. The Darkseekers, as the vampiric monsters of I Am Legend come to be known, take Boyle’s scrappy handheld filmmaking and put the full weight of a reported $150 studio budget behind it. With its PG-13 rating and the world’s biggest movie star, I Am Legend reminded studios that Armageddon is for the masses. [Matt Schimkowitz]

In its infancy, the “zombie film” was a uniquely American invention, but the concept of the Romero-style living dead, or the rage-infected souls of 28 Days Later, soon broke containment to become a worldwide source of filmmaking inspiration—even in countries on the other side of a U.S. embargo, like Cuba. Juan Of The Dead billed itself as Cuba’s first feature-length zombie movie, and despite a title that plays on Edgar Wright’s Shaun Of The Dead, the film actually has more in common with the sober, Romero or Danny Boyle-style encapsulation of the breakdown of society, aided by government propaganda. Juan and his closest relations are so bathed and deeply saturated in state media that when the dead begin to rise, their first thought is that it’s all a machination of those dastardly “capitalist dissidents” causing all the trouble. The rest of the world, meanwhile, seems to look on without feeling any responsibility to intervene on a humanitarian front, allowing the Cuban people to literally eat themselves alive, just as the rest of the world effectively cordons off the U.K. in 28 Days Later, left to its own deadly devices. The lack of our presence in the story is itself an accusation of our lack of humanity. [Jim Vorel]

After 28 Days Later and Shaun Of The Dead sank their teeth into the genre, a new George A. Romero zombie movie seemed like a no-brainer. It had been 20 years since his last, Day Of The Dead, and having the auteur who codified and popularized the genre direct a fourth installment of his long-dormant Living Dead series was a built-in sales pitch, especially after the Dawn remake’s $100 million box office take. The sudden resurgence of zombie cinema helped secure a healthy budget for the DIY stalwart, allowing for a zombie epic that, unlike Snyder’s remake, leaned back into the socio-political satire that was the series’ stock and trade. It’s also the first of Romero’s movies not confined mainly to a single location. Land Of The Dead enters from the outside, latching itself closer to the perspective of the zombie working class and the humans inside the roving armored killing machine, Dead Reckoning, as it inches ever closer to Dennis Hopper’s feudalist Pittsburgh. While 28 Days Later gave studios the hunger for more zombie thrills, Romero followed his own muse, returning his undead to their shuffling beginnings, with plenty of blood and brains on the menu. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Even as Lupita Nyong’o was being showered in acclaim for her scintillating horror turn in Jordan Peele’s Us in 2019, she was simultaneously starring in another horror flick—this one a zombie comedy—that was passing under the radar. Many zombie films are about the necessity of protecting friends or loved ones in an outbreak, but Little Monsters effectively expands the premise: What if your responsibilities during this emergency extend to an entire kindergarten classroom? So it is for the teacher character played by Nyong’o here, with much of the humor derived from her simultaneous desire to shield the kids from the reality of what is happening around them. She can’t very well have them terrified, wailing and refusing to move in the face of the deadly threat, so she must instead turn the entire experience into a sort of elaborate game of make-believe to keep her classroom charges on track. Like 28 Days Later, though, Little Monsters displays a deep mistrust of authority figures (such as the military) as a source of intervention, a seeming belief that when the shit hits the fan, it will be the rank and file members of society who we must turn to, rather than those designated to protect us. [Jim Vorel]

It’s not easy to deliver a genuinely postmodern zombie film that also doubles as a fantastically tense piece of chamber horror, but Pontypool is the rare movie that pulls it off. It casts aside most elements of zombie convention, reimagining the idea of “infection” as a result of societal, species-wide decline in our ability to earnestly communicate with one another. Infection isn’t conveyed by bites or scratches, but by mental conditioning and psychological destruction: The danger is found in the English language itself, which has seemingly become so watered down with pleasantries and insincerity that it’s become virulent and dangerous to hear or speak. Its antagonists are never actually referred to as “zombies,” with director Bruce McDonald occasionally referring to them as “conversationalists,” beings who ultimately get fixated on minutia until they lose all sense of themselves and lash out. There’s a great sense of tragedy to Pontypool, evoking the same speed of transformation at the whims of fate in 28 Days Later. In Boyle’s film, Frank (Brendan Gleeson) is doomed when a drop of wayward blood falls from above and hits him in the eye, quickly overwhelming his reason and turning him into one of the same beasts they’ve been fleeing. In Pontypool, the wrong word—a misplaced term of endearment—can cause the same obliteration of the self. Any exchange of dialogue could be your last. [Jim Vorel]

Another family unit survives an end of the world stalked by lightning-quick killers in screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ high-concept sci-fi franchise. While its sound-focused aliens are triggered solely by noise (at the discretion of the script, of course), the horror is deeply influenced by the “don’t alert the rushing baddies” kind of hide-and-survive action sequences found in 28 Days. Cillian Murphy doesn’t join the series until the second film, where A Quiet Place‘s scope expands to include the familiar star, a repeating radio message from a local group of survivors, and a group of humans almost as bad as the monsters. Even if it’s a little quieter, this is an apocalypse audiences have seen before. [Jacob Oller]

Drawing a link from the underseen Rammbock: Berlin Undead to 28 Days Later isn’t exactly rocket science, given that the former hinges around the outbreak of a, wait for it, “rage virus” in the titular city, that element presumably not being subject to copyright. No matter: The tidy, 63-minute feature may borrow some of the terminology, and mirror some of Boyle’s emotional stakes, but it also allows for new wrinkles to the zombie film canon, such as the idea that one can potentially suppress the transformation into a fully infected, raging person through the avoidance of intense emotional states. The apartment/tenement block setting both allows for some Rear Window-style observation/connection with the neighbors as they likewise struggle with the universal threat of the infected, and mirrors the dynamic of the flat in which 28 Days Later‘s Jim finds father and daughter Frank and Hannah. Rammbock: Berlin Undead feels like what we might have seen if Jim, Selena, Frank, and Hannah (Megan Burns) had simply decided to stick it out as urban fortifiers in that setting, attempting to live a covert life of ducking between the marauding dead to scavenge for the necessities to keep life going for one more day. It presents a hardscrabble city-set fight for survival, in which the dead are our all-too-nosy neighbors. [Jim Vorel]

The fleet-footed, ravenous zombies weren’t finished ravaging Europe by 2007, when the Spanish found-footage funhouse [Rec] hit theaters and spawned a franchise. ‌[Rec] follows a late-night news outfit, riding along with a Barcelona fire department night shift on an emergency call at a nearby apartment where a zombie infestation is on the cusp of outbreak. Situated in an apartment building that gets more terrifying on every floor, ‌[Rec] doesn’t simply borrow 28 Days Later‘s speedy, disease-infected villains; it makes Boyle’s technical innovations part of the plot, using handheld digital cameras to capture the on-the-ground eyewitness news aesthetic. It’s a marriage of two trends that worked surprisingly well, and briefly refreshed a genre cycle that was already starting to run its course—and The Walking Dead hadn’t even premiered yet. Like 28 Days Later, shooting digitally kept production cheap, making for a massive return on investment, as the cheaply shot shrieker launched a series and an American remake of its own, Quarantine. [Matt Schimkowitz]

One could easily edit the opening scene of Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes into 28 Days Later. After the monkey escapes and begins spreading the Rage Virus, Boyle cuts to Jim in the hospital room, 28 days later. But what happened in those 28 days? Surprisingly, Rupert Wyatt’s franchise reboot gives us an idea. Boyle’s film plays on the imagery that has been a part of animal rights literature for decades. Rise borrows the outbreak, and in giving a bio-medical origin to those damn dirty apes, it apes some of 28 Days Later‘s storytelling to pin the blame of humanity’s downfall squarely on our fellow homo sapiens. However, rather than transferring the Rage Virus, Rise‘s Simian Flu followed the all-too-familiar pandemic protocols that led to humankind’s demise and the rise of the ape planet. The relationship between the two movies ends there, but it’s hard not to think of the chaotic beginnings of 28 Days Later when watching the planet succumb to the apes. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Obviously, The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winner, is not a zombie movie, but like many of the end-of-the-world travelogues that sprang up in 28 Days‘ wake, it retains Rage Virus symptoms. In many ways, The Road operates like a zombie movie, minus the zombies, as a Man (Viggo Mortensen) and Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) navigate the frontier of a post-apocalyptic America, reevaluating their roles in society as Jim and Selena do in 28 Days Later. And like Jim, Mortensen’s character must let go of the person he was before the end times and learn to kill or be killed. The connection becomes even more pronounced when one considers the big bad of both: Other humans. Just as Boyle’s film moves its conflict to a man vs. man instead of man vs. zombie story in its militaristic third act, The Road does the same. As Man and Boy travel the American wasteland, gangs of cannibals make the dreary, despairing landscape feel all the more inhuman and deadly. They are the walking dead. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Shaun Of The Dead doesn’t just derive its perfect parody from a single undead source. Rather, the Edgar Wright comedy draws from George Romero and all his acolytes to craft a state-of-the-zombified-union film that’s both riffing on and paying homage to all its genre predecessors. Much of the film is devoted to classicism. But that opening bit where Shaun (Simon Pegg) stumbles, in a groggy haze, through a world that changed overnight into a hellscape? That’s a meticulous, detailed gag that works all the better because it came just a few years after Cillian Murphy’s bewildered walk around an abandoned London at the start of 28 Days Later. The awareness of its characters is inverted, and Londoners go from victims to punchlines, but the general idea is the same: The world could change and leave you behind overnight. That Shaun caps things off with an “it wasn’t actually rage-infected monkeys” joke, one that conveys a bit of playful animosity towards its revisionist peer, is just icing. [Jacob Oller]

Though it falls under the same not-quite-a-zombie zombie movie designation as 28 Days Later, the success of Boyle’s film and the James Gunn-penned remake of Dawn Of The Dead made Gunn’s directorial debut, Slither, possible. Following the latex mold of gory ’80s horror-comedies like Night Of The Creeps and Return Of The Living Dead, Gunn’s gooey splatter movie tested how far major studios were willing to let this Troma-educated filmmaker go. He found the limit. After a meteorite collides with a small South Carolina town, bringing a herd of space slugs with it, the townspeople find themselves under attack by their slug-controlled neighbors, following the hive mind instructing them to take over the world. They’re not totally zombies, but it’s close enough. [Matt Schimkowitz]

On paper, the connective tissue between Danny Boyle’s game-changing zombie movie and director Yeon Sang-ho’s 2016 South Korean thriller is obvious: Rabid, vicious creatures who stop at nothing to attack their prey. The fear of not being able to outrun a fate worse than death, with hardly anyone to truly support you, is the compelling hook of both films. But a similar type of terror and cool action sequences aren’t the only things that influenced Train To Busan. Much like Boyle’s eerie visuals of empty London streets and rat-infested tunnels, Sang-ho’s film depicts how quickly society crumbles. Here it’s mostly glimpsed through the perspective of people trapped inside a train, who watch as the world around them slowly turns into hell. And, like any classic survival tale, both 28 Days Later and Train To Busan ultimately conclude that finding a community is the only way to endure, even if it takes a great amount of sacrifice to get there. [Saloni Gajjar]

The unapologetically comedic, lighthearted tone of Wasting Away is about the furthest thing from the sober opening moments of 28 Days Later, but this imaginative indie zombie comedy hits upon an interesting idea nonetheless, one that has rarely been explored in zombie media: What if the undead don’t know they’re zombies? What if from their perspective, it’s the rest of the world that has changed, that has gone mad and left them behind? Wasting Away plays with perspective in this way, flip-flopping between color cinematography and black-and-white to illustrate how the world reacts to a threat, and how we recontextualize that threat when we can’t see the danger we pose to others. We think back to Jim, waking up in the hospital in the opening moments of 28 Days Later: How can he be certain that he’s not already dead, and in his own private hell? Wasting Away manages to provide a lighthearted extrapolation of that thought process. [Jim Vorel]

It took almost exactly a decade for the infected offspring of the Rage Virus to reach their blockbuster peak with World War Z. This was the fast zombie at its logical conclusion: Corpse as force of nature. Forming tidal waves of rushing undead, the zombies of this troubled (and very loose) Max Brooks adaptation pursued Brad Pitt as he zipped around the world like so many generic straight-to-streamers would in the years to come. The film took the quarantined plague of 28 Days and turned it into a prescient global pandemic seen through the maximalist lens of a disaster movie. Its energetic hordes, operating now as a quick collective, drew their movement and their metaphor from their smaller-scale predecessors, but the film took its chaos to a big-screen extreme benefitting its bestseller source. [Jacob Oller]

In retrospect, it’s surprising that it took this long for some pioneering indie horror director to take the outline of the classic zombie film and fuse it to the thrumming chassis of the Mad Max-style vehicular apocalypse. Leave it to another Aussie to take inspiration from George Miller’s iconic creation, in the form of Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead‘s Kiah Roache-Turner. This film is a fascinating fusion of styles and tones: It’s scary without being dour, emotional without feeling pompous, and gory without completely descending into the violent slapstick of something like Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive. Echoing the road trip embarked on by Jim and co. in 28 Days Later as they flee London into the seeming safety of the English countryside, Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead likewise descends into a backwoods zombie hunt—albeit one that includes ramshackle death cars powered by flammable zombie blood, and a character who can psychically command hordes of the dead. Wyrmwood: Road Of The Dead is both more and less ridiculous than it sounds, evolving the sci-fi properties of its ghouls in hilarious ways while still simultaneously anchoring itself in a castigation of the male paramilitary mindset that is targeted in 28 Days Later; men who convince themselves that they’ll manage to “bring back civilization” with only a modicum of the atrocities they’re happy to allow others to suffer through. [Jim Vorel]

A zombie comedy that wouldn’t exist without the genre being in a boom era in the first place (it originated as a spec script its writers put together a few years after 28 Days Later), Zombieland is even more textually self-aware of its genre tropes than Shaun Of The Dead. Summed by the rules for survival recorded by Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) and his roving roadtrippers—though rule one, “cardio,” is even more important to the world of sprinting undead—the film’s codified genre knowledge, the stuff audiences had been yelling at the screen from Dawn Of The Dead to 28 Days Later, kept the film feeling sharp no matter what breed of walker you grew up on. The script also gave its wanderers plenty of pithy, pessimistic dialogue that tapped into the black humor coursing underneath Boyle’s bitter hellscape. But without a zombified end of the world already being common pop cultural knowledge on the big screen, a snarky film riffing on audiences’ inherent understanding of that setting wouldn’t get too far. [Jacob Oller]