Fast zombies are back: multiple sequels to '28 Days Later' in the works

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, the director and screenwriter of ‘28 Days Later’, have reunited for ‘28 Years Later’, the third movie in the saga. But that’s not all; Garland and Boyle intend to create a new trilogy of sequels to ‘28 Days Later’, making a total of five feature-length films in this series of horror and zombie movies.

Alex Garland and Danny Boyle to make a trilogy of sequels to ‘28 Days Later’

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Alex Garland and Danny Boyle, the two men most responsible for ‘28 Days Later’ (2002), have come together to create not only the third film, called ‘28 Years Later’, but two more to form a new trilogy set in this post-apocalyptic universe of running zombies. The budget for each of these three films would be in the $75 million range.

‘28 Days Later’ already had a sequel in 2007 called, appropriately enough, ‘28 Weeks Later’. Boyle and Garland were only involved as executive producers, while Juan Carlos Fresnadillo directed and wrote the script.

The idea of a new movie in the saga has been in the minds of these two creatives for some time. The potential name for the third film was ‘28 Months Later’ to continue the escalation from days to weeks and weeks to months, but recently the idea of a sequel in the more distant future took hold, hence the choice of ‘28 Years Later’.

28 Days Later” starred a very young Cillian Murphy, then 26 years old. In the movie, a group of activists raid a laboratory in Britain and release a chimpanzee with a pathogen called the “rabies virus,” which is highly contagious and makes all those infected extremely violent. The activists succumb to the virus and a chain of infection begins, culminating in the total collapse of society. Murphy plays Jim, a bicycle courier who wakes up in a hospital after twenty-eight days in a coma due to an accident. When he goes outside, there is no sign of life...until he encounters those infected by the virus.

The first minutes of the movie are tremendously overwhelming, with great shots of a deserted and visibly devastated London. Another of his great achievements was to make the “zombies” fast. The “rabies virus” makes the infected very agile (they can run and climb), which was an original twist on the classic depiction of zombies as clumsy and slow monsters.

The film’s cultural impact was great, even reaching into the world of video games; Valve’s Left 4 Dead duology also features “fast zombies”. Although Boyle does not consider 28 Days Later to be a zombie movie, the feature film helped revive the horror subgenre in cinema.

We recently saw Cillian Murphy in ‘Oppenheimer’ (2023), a feature film directed by Christopher Nolan, which triumphed at the last edition of the Golden Globes with five statuettes, including Best Picture.