# 28 Days Later

28 Days Later is a 2002 British post-apocalyptic horror film directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland. It stars Cillian Murphy as a bicycle courier who awakens from a coma to discover the accidental release of a highly contagious, aggression-inducing virus has caused the breakdown of society. Naomie Harris, Christopher Eccleston, Megan Burns, and Brendan Gleeson appear in supporting roles.
Garland took inspiration from George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead film series and John Wyndham's 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids. Filming took place in various locations in the United Kingdom in 2001. The crew filmed for brief periods during early mornings and temporarily closed streets to capture recognisable and typically busy areas when they were deserted. John Murphy composed an original soundtrack for the film, with other instrumental songs by Brian Eno, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and other artists also being featured.
28 Days Later was released on 1 November 2002 to critical acclaim and financial success. Grossing more than $84.6 million worldwide on its modest budget of $8 million, it became one of the most profitable horror films of 2002. Reviewers praised Boyle's direction, the cast's performances, Garland's screenplay, the atmosphere and soundtrack.
Despite Boyle not considering it a zombie film, 28 Days Later is credited with reinvigorating the zombie genre of horror film and influencing a revival in the genre a decade after its release, with its fast-running infected and character-driven drama. Since its release, it has been featured in several 'best-of' film lists and maintained a following, particularly amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020s.
The film's success launched its titular film series, including 28 Weeks Later (2007), and 28 Years Later, which is scheduled for release in 2025. Additional sequels are currently in development, while a graphic novel titled 28 Days Later: The Aftermath, and the 2009–2011 comic book series 28 Days Later also expanded the series into other media.

## Plot

A group of animal rights activists infiltrate a laboratory in Cambridge which houses highly aggressive chimpanzees, taking a scientist hostage. One activist frees a chimpanzee, despite being warned by the scientist that it is infected with 'rage', a highly contagious virus; it attacks her, and within seconds of exposure, she succumbs to the virus. The scientist says the infected activist must be killed quickly to prevent an epidemic but is prevented from doing so by the confused activists who are then attacked by the infected activist as the chimpanzees look on. The virus spreads rapidly across Great Britain, resulting in total societal collapse.
Twenty-eight days later, bicycle courier Jim, who had a traffic accident and fell into a coma before the outbreak, awakens in St Thomas' Hospital in London to find it deserted. Leaving the hospital, Jim wanders the empty streets of London, discovers newspapers headlining a mass evacuation, and eventually enters a church which contains the aftermath of a massacre. Infected living humans appear and give chase to Jim, but he is rescued by healthy survivors Selena and Mark, who take him to their refuge in a streetside shop.
At Jim's request, the group travel on foot to his parents' house in Deptford. There, he learns that they died by suicide, leaving a note in which they prayed he did not wake up. As it is too dusky to return to their hideout, the group decide to stay the night. While the others are asleep, Jim lights a candle and reminisces over memories of his family. The infected, attracted by the light, break into the house. Mark is wounded as he fends them off. Before the infection can take hold of Mark, Selena immediately hacks him to death in front of a horrified Jim. Selena tells Jim she will not hesitate to kill him “in a heartbeat” as well if she suspects he is infected.
Spotting a makeshift signal from afar, Jim and Selena make their way up Balfron Tower. They encounter cab driver Frank and his young daughter Hannah in one of the flats. Frank shows them a military radio broadcast offering protection and a cure to the virus at a blockade outside Manchester. With supplies dwindling, Frank plans to take Hannah to the blockade, and the four agree to travel together.
The group set out for Manchester in Frank's cab, looting a supermarket along the way, and escaping ambushes when they stop to change a tyre and to refuel. When they find the blockade deserted except by crows, Frank, frustrated, kicks a tall gate on which a dead body is balanced. A drop of blood from the corpse falls into Frank's eye, infecting him. Realizing what is happening, Frank tells Hannah he loves her, and pushes her away as he begins to succumb to the virus. Hidden soldiers appear in surrounding vantage points and shoot Frank dead.
The soldiers bring Jim, Selena, and Hannah to a heavily fortified mansion under the command of Major Henry West, and treat their guests to a tour and banquet. West takes Jim and shows him Private Mailer, a soldier who had become infected several days prior. West had Mailer chained up for observation, and Jim asks West if he’s learned anything. West has concluded that the infected are incapable of anything other than killing, neglecting even basic survival mechanisms like eating. West states he is now simply waiting to see how long it takes for Mailer to starve to death. However, the sanctuary promised by the soldiers turns out to be a ruse. West reveals to Jim that his broadcast was intended to lure female survivors into sexual slavery. Jim and Sergeant Farrell refuse to go along with this scheme, so West orders them to be shot. Farrell tells Jim he saw a plane in the sky, and theorizes that it would be impossible for the infected to escape Great Britain so the rest of the world must be unaffected and merely watching the events unfold. Farrell distracts two soldiers who shoot Farrell and then argue, allowing Jim to escape.
Jim sees a jet contrail in the sky, showing proof of Farrell's theory of outside survivors. After luring West away from the mansion with a siren and killing a soldier, he returns and frees Private Mailer, to infect and kill the remaining soldiers. One, Corporal Mitchell, attempts to abduct Selena, but Jim kills him with such ferocity that Selena momentarily fears Jim must be infected, before kissing him, relieved. Jim tells her she hesitated longer than a heartbeat. Jim, Selena, and Hannah attempt to escape in Frank's cab, but West, who has hidden in the back seat, shoots Jim in the stomach. Hannah retaliates by putting the cab in reverse, allowing Mailer to pull West through the rear window and kill him, and drives off.
Another twenty-eight days later, Jim recovers at a remote cottage in Cumbria, where the infected are shown to be weakly lying on the roads and dying of starvation as West predicted. As a Hawker Hunter jet flies overhead, Jim, Selena, and Hannah unfurl a huge cloth banner spelling the word "HELLO". The three survivors wave for the jet and the pilot spots them. Selena then asks Jim, "Do you think he saw us this time?", as he stares off smiling.

## Cast

* Cillian Murphy as Jim, a bicycle courier who was previously in a coma
* Naomie Harris as Selena, a chemist and battle-hardened survivor
* Brendan Gleeson as Frank, a taxi driver
* Megan Burns as Hannah, Frank's young daughter
* Christopher Eccleston as Major Henry West, the leader of a group of renegade soldiers outside Manchester
* Noah Huntley as Mark, a survivor and Selena's partner
* Stuart McQuarrie as Sergeant Farrell, the only one of the renegade soldiers to oppose West
* Ricci Harnett as Corporal Mitchell, a renegade soldier
* Leo Bill as Private Jones, a renegade soldier
* Luke Mably as Private Clifton, a renegade soldier
* Junior Laniyan as Private Bell, a renegade soldier
* Ray Panthaki as Private Bedford, a renegade soldier
* Sanjay Rambaruth as Private Davis, a renegade soldier
* Marvin Campbell as Private Mailer, an infected soldier held captive
Additionally, Alex Palmer, Bindu De Stoppani, and Jukka Hiltunen portray the animal liberation activists, while David Schneider portrays a scientist at the laboratory. Christopher Dunne and Emma Hitching appear as Jim's parents. Toby Sedgwick plays an infected priest encountered by Jim.
On the DVD commentary, Boyle explains that with the aim of preserving the suspension of disbelief, relatively unknown actors were cast in the film. Cillian Murphy had starred primarily in small independent films, while Naomie Harris had acted on British television as a child, and Megan Burns had only one previous film credit. However, Christopher Eccleston and Brendan Gleeson were well-known character actors.

## Production
### Development

Early influences on writer Alex Garland included the George A. Romero films Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), which he loved as a child. Garland claimed to have largely forgotten about the zombie genre until he played the video game Resident Evil (1996), which reminded him how much he loved zombies after "having not really encountered zombies for quite a while". Director Danny Boyle liked Garland's screenplay for a proposed zombie film, having directed the 2000 film adaptation of Garland's novel The Beach.
Producer Andrew Macdonald had access to funding from the National Lottery, and pitched it to Universal Pictures, who declined to support it. Budget constraints proved to be an issue, with Christopher Eccleston having to take an emergency pay cut.
On the DVD commentary, Boyle and Garland frequently call the film post-apocalyptic and a horror film, commenting on scenes that quote from Romero's Dead trilogy. During the initial marketing of the film, Boyle tried to distance the film from such labels. Boyle identified John Wyndham's 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids as Garland's original inspiration for the story.
Five months after the film was released in Europe, video game publisher NovaLogic hosted a graffiti competition in a cross-promotion with the game Devastation. The connection was owed mainly to the similar theme of a devastated world. The prizes consisted of signed screenplay copies and posters along with DVDs. For the zombies, Boyle took inspiration from real-life diseases, particularly Ebola, with aspects of rabies. James McAvoy auditioned for a role as a zombie.

### Filming

The film features scenes set in normally bustling parts of London, such as Westminster Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, Horse Guards Parade and Oxford Street. To depict these locations as desolate, the film crew closed off sections of street for minutes at a time, usually on Sunday mornings. They typically had around 45 minutes after dawn to shoot the locations devoid of members of the public and traffic.
Portions of the film were shot on a Canon XL1 digital video (DV) camera, which was smaller and more manoeuvrable than traditional film cameras, which would have been impractical on such brief shoots. The scenes of the empty M1 motorway were also filmed within limited periods, during which a mobile police roadblock slowed traffic sufficiently to leave a long section of carriageway empty. The section of the motorway depicted runs near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, around 150 miles southeast of Manchester.
For the London scene in which Jim walks by an overturned double-decker bus, the film crew placed the bus on its side and removed it when the shot was finished, all within 20 minutes. The crew had asked Westminster City Council for permission to place the bus outside Downing Street, which was denied; when they arrived there at 4am and nobody from the council was present, they placed the bus there anyway.
The September 11 attacks took place during filming. Boyle notes the parallel between the "missing persons" flyers seen at the beginning of the film and similar flyers posted in New York City in the wake of the attacks. Boyle said his crew probably would not have been granted permission to close off Whitehall for filming after the terrorist attacks.
The mansion used in the film was Trafalgar Park near Salisbury. Many rooms, including the Cipriani-painted music room and the main hall, were filmed with minimal set decoration. The scenes set upstairs were filmed downstairs, as the mansion's owner resided upstairs. The old ruins used as the setting for an idyllic interlude in their journey to Manchester were those of Waverley Abbey, Surrey. The end scenes of the film with Jim, Selena and Hannah living in a rural cottage were filmed around Ennerdale in Cumbria.
The production team hired an optometrist to supervise with the red contact lenses needed for cast members playing the infected.
At a certain point, Macdonald announced to the crew that the production had run out of money, and filming ceased without a satisfactory closing sequence having been shot. After several different pitches for a new ending, with the original ending which featured Jim's death having tested badly with audiences, the studio granted more funding to shoot the ending eventually used. The crew arranged for a real jet to fly overhead for them to film, as this was cheaper than approximately £70,000 for a computer-generated one.

### Alternative endings

The DVD extras include three alternative endings, all of which conclude with Jim dying. One of these was filmed, which involved Jim dying of his gunshot wounds. In another, Jim dreams of the accident that left him in a coma as he dies from his gunshot wounds. The third, a more radical departure, was presented only in storyboards; instead of Frank being killed by soldiers after being infected, the other survivors tie him up and discover a research laboratory at the blockade, where Jim undergoes a blood transfusion in order to save Frank. The U.S. cinematic release included one of the alternative endings after the film's credits in response to intense online debates over whether or not it was a more appropriate conclusion than the official ending.

## Music

The film's score was composed by John Murphy, featuring electric guitar and atmospheric electronic production. It also features tracks from Brian Eno, Grandaddy and Blue States, and was released in a combined score and song compilation in 2003.
A heavily edited version of the track 'East Hastings' by the post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor appears in the film, but the track is excluded from the soundtrack, because Boyle could only obtain the rights to use it in the film.
28 Days Later: The Soundtrack Album was released on 17 June 2003. A modified version of the track 'In The House – In A Heartbeat' was used as the character Big Daddy's theme in the 2010 film Kick-Ass. The same song was played in the 2012 advertisement campaign of Louis Vuitton, 'L'Invitation au voyage'. In 2019, the song was remixed to include the theme of The Terminator by Brad Fiedel for the second trailer of Terminator: Dark Fate, and also eventually again remixed and used in the 2019 video game Metro Exodus.

## Reception
### Box office

28 Days Later was a considerable success at the box office and became highly profitable on a budget of about £5 million. In the UK, it took in £6.1 million, while in the US, it became a surprise hit, taking over $45 million despite a limited release at fewer than 1,500 screens across the country. The film garnered over $85.7 million worldwide.

### Critical reception

Critical views of the film were positive. On the film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 87% of 235 critics' reviews gave 28 Days Later a positive review, with an average rating of 7.40/10. The site's consensus reads: "Kinetically directed by Danny Boyle, 28 Days Later is both a terrifying zombie movie and a sharp political allegory." On Metacritic, the film received a rating of 73 out of 100 based on 39 reviews, indicating "generally favourable reviews".
Bravo awarded it the 100th spot on their list of 'The 100 Scariest Movie Moments' in a four-episode 2004 television series. The commentators explained that making the zombies move fast for the first time was a bright and effective idea. In 2007, Stylus Magazine named it the second-best zombie movie of all time. The film also ranked at number 456 in Empire's 2008 list of the 500 greatest movies of all time. Bloody Disgusting ranked the film seventh in their list of the Top 20 Horror Films of the Decade, with the article saying "Zombie movie? Political allegory? Humanist drama? 28 Days Later is all of those things and more—a genuine work of art by a director at the top of his game. What's so amazing about the film is the way it so expertly balances scenes of white-knuckled, hell-for-leather horror with moments of intimate beauty." In 2017, a poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers and critics for Time Out magazine ranked it the 97th-best British film ever.

### Cultural impact

28 Days Later had an impact on subsequent horror films, and is credited with starting a revival for the zombie genre, along with the Resident Evil franchise. The 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, for example, was influenced by 28 Days Later. 28 Days Later was followed by other infection films such as Shaun of the Dead (2004), Black Sheep (2006), Planet Terror (2007), Dead Snow (2009) and Zombieland (2009), as well as books such as World War Z (2006), Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) and Warm Bodies (2010), and zombie-themed graphic novels and television shows such as The Walking Dead. The zombie revival trend lasted for more than a decade after 28 Days Later, before eventually declining in popularity by the late 2010s.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, images of a national lockdown in the United Kingdom and stay-at-home orders elsewhere were compared to the opening sequence of 28 Days Later. In 2021, Megan Burns said of the film, "When I joined the cast of 28 Days Later I had no idea of how big a cultural impact it would have and what a game-changer it would be to the 'zombie' genre. Even now after all these years, (or perhaps especially now with the current situation,) people want to talk about the film and that's incredible." Director Christopher Nolan said he cast Murphy as Scarecrow in Batman Begins (2005) after being impressed by his performance in 28 Days Later.

### Accolades

* Best Horror Film (2003 U.S. Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films – Saturn Award)
* Best British Film (Empire Award)
* Danny Boyle (Grand Prize of European Fantasy Film in Silver)
* Best Director – Danny Boyle (International Fantasy Film Award)
* Best International Film – Danny Boyle (Narcisse Award)
* Best Breakthrough Performance – Naomie Harris (Black Reel)
* Best Cinematographer – Anthony Dod Mantle (European Film Award)

## Subsequent media
### Sequels

A sequel, 28 Weeks Later, was released on 11 May 2007. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland took producing roles alongside Andrew Macdonald. The plot revolves around the arrival of American troops about seven months after the incidents in the original film, attempting to restore order and revitalise a nearly desolate Britain. The cast includes Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Imogen Poots, Harold Perrineau, Catherine McCormack, Mackintosh Muggleton and Idris Elba.
In March 2007, Danny Boyle said that he would be interested in making a third film in the series, 28 Months Later. In 2019, he said "Alex Garland and I have a wonderful idea for the third part".
In January 2024, it was announced that a third film in the series, 28 Years Later, was in development. It is considered the first installment in a potential trilogy, with Boyle directing the first film and Garland writing all three. With a planned $75 million budget per installment, the duo will also produce the trilogy alongside the original producer Andrew Macdonald and former Fox Searchlight Pictures head Peter Rice. Cillian Murphy will reprise his role as Jim.

### Comic books

Fox Atomic Comics, in association with HarperCollins, released a graphic novel bridging the time gap between 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, titled 28 Days Later: The Aftermath, written by Steve Niles.
28 Days Later, a comic sequel also linking Days and Weeks and produced by Fox Atomic (until its demise) and Boom! Studios, began production in 2009. The series focuses on Selena and answers questions about her in the film and her sequel whereabouts.

## Digital availability

28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later became properties of the Walt Disney Company, following the company's acquisition of Fox in 2019. By November 2022, 28 Days Later had become unavailable on Disney-owned streaming services, including its removal from Disney+ Star internationally, hinting that Disney had lost rights to the film; only its sequel, still owned by Disney, was available on streaming sites.
In February 2024, it was revealed that producer Andrew MacDonald had bought back the rights to the film from Searchlight Pictures, promptly selling it to Sony Pictures along with the upcoming sequel 28 Years Later. In December 2024, following a largely favourable response from the public to the trailer for 28 Years Later, Sony announced that it would be making 28 Days Later available for purchase on digital and rental platforms from 18 December.