The 28 Days Later series is a British horror film series created by Alex Garland.
After an infected chimpanzee escapes from a lab, people start being infected with the deadly Rage virus, which turns people into rabid killers, causing British society to collapse. The films follow various survivors as they attempt to survive in a radically changed world. Lots of Jitter Cam, Tears of Blood, and chase scenes ensue.
While not intended as a Zombie Apocalypse franchise, most people would consider it one, and it ended up being a huge Genre Turning Point for zombie media. The winning idea that this franchise made popular was turning the undead from slow, lumbering sacks of rotting meat, into fast and aggressive predators. The Infected have no Zombie Gait to speak of, being able to leap over blockades and blast down barricades with sheer force. In addition, bites from the Infected turn their victims almost instantly, avoiding the Zombie Infectee trope and keeping things fast-paced.
Almost every zombie work released afterwards will owe some of its inspiration to the films. Most modern zombie variants will tend to be still living humans driven to murder by an external force, sprinting towards their prey in hordes, as opposed to the slow, reanimated dead hungry for brains.
The series released two installments in the early 2000's before going on an extended hiatus. In 2025, the franchise would make a return with a trilogy of new movies called Twenty Eight Years Later.
Works in this series
Film- 28 Days Later (2002)
- 28 Weeks Later (2007)
- 28 Years Later (2025)
- 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)
- Untitled Fifth Film (TBA)
Comic Books
- Twenty Eight Days Later The Aftermath (2007)
- Twenty Eight Days Later (2009-2011)
This series contains examples of the following tropes:
- Ambiguous Situation: The state of the other British Isles besides the mainland and Holy Island. On the one hand, the exposition title cards of 28 Weeks Later and 28 Years Later both place emphasis on the virus being confined to mainland Britain, and the franchise as a whole makes a point that it would be physically all but impossible for a virus that specifically works the way that Rage does to cross seas without extenuating outside assistance, like a Carrier or a military transport of biological samples. On the other hand, the quarantine map in Years shows that all the Isles except for Shetland are inside a no-fly, "unconditional isolation zone", leaving it ambiguous whether the virus somehow found ways to cross the sea onto other Isles, or the other Isles including the whole of Ireland remained infection-free but were cut off from the outside world by NATO anyway as a necessary sacrifice to further ensure the virus couldn't spread.
- Apocalypse How: Regional Societal Collapse. All modern order, society and public services on the British mainland have been completely dismantled and the population decimated by the Rage virus outbreak, but the virus has been kept out of the rest of the world so other countries are still functioning normally.
- Arc Number: The events of each movie take place 28 units of the given time after the initial catastrophe.
- Arc Symbol: Posters make frequent use of the biohazard symbol, although they're ironically almost never seen In-Universe.
- Armies Are Evil: Military forces are barely ever portrayed in a positive light, with consistently heroic soldiers generally being the exception rather than the rule. In the first movie, the surviving remnant of the British military are all violent murderers and would-be kidnapper-rapists who've gone mad from the apocalypse; in the second movie, the U.S. military are extremists who ruthlessly slaughter infected and uninfected alike (albeit only when the situation gets desperate enough to warrant that if they're to have any hope of containing the virus' resurgence), posing just as much a danger to the main cast as the infected do; in the third movie, NATO has left Britain's uninfected survivors to fend for themselves inside the quarantine for almost three decades, and even the Swedish NATO soldier who gets stranded in Britain without hope of ever going home and allies with the protagonist ends up almost murdering his allies and a newborn baby before he's taken out himself.
- Coming of Age Story: Mixed in with being zombie horror movies, the series rather surprisingly has a Central Theme of growing up in order to survive a harsh world:
- Days: Jim's character arc involves the death of his parents, whom he had been living with before the outbreak and his coma, and needing to harden himself in order to survive the infected. One scene has him forced to kill an infected boy that has serious symbolism about ridding himself of any childlike innocence. Hannah is also forced to contend with the death of her father, Frank, who also ended up something of a father figure to Jim.
- Weeks: The film follows Andy and Tammy, who are the only adolescents among the newly returned population of London and both are forced to come to terms with the fates of their parents in the duration of the second outbreak.
- Years: Spike's journey is the most obvious one of the series, as his arc heavily involves coming to understand that his parents are imperfect human beings and learning to accept death as a natural order of things, after which he decides to Walk the Earth.
- The Bone Temple flips it a bit to show the results of one refusing to grow and mature as a person: Sir Jimmy Crystal, severely traumatized by the brutal death of his family, becomes a Psychopathic Manchild by clinging onto nostalgic imagery like The Teletubbies, Jimmy Saville, and his father's religiousness. He never learns any lesson as the number of his group steadily dwindles and dies crying for his mum, showing a dark reflection of how Spike would've turned out if he never accepted his losses.
- Death of a Child:
- In Days, Jim is forced to kill an infected boy.
- A boy is attacked when infected break into the cottage at the beginning of Weeks — while it's thankfully offscreen, it's made clear that his infection or death is guaranteed.
- In the opening of Years, infected enter the house and violently maul all the children inside, save for Jimmy, who manages to escape.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: The movies do not hold a high opinion of humanity, focusing on their propensity for violence and self-destruction. Years even shows nature in the British Isles prospering with humanity being forced into a medieval lifestyle as isolated villages. That said, many characters demonstrate the perseverance humanity is capable of, and often shows even some antagonists protest any cruelty they are forced to partake in.
- Improbable Infant Survival: While it's made clear that children can and will die in this new world, there is always at least one of the youngest characters that survives in circumstances that seem impossible:
- Days: At the age of 14, Hannah survives the whole movie. Downplayed, though, in that dead children are shown and die onscreen.
- Weeks: The child Andy and very young teenager Tammy are the only adolescents around, and they survive the entire movie, including the "hammer down" order that's designed to kill everyone in the vicinity, and get to some sort of safety. It's implied that they die in between the ending. and the epilogue of Weeks, but their deaths are not shown or confirmed onscreen.
- Years: In the opening scene, several young girls are murdered by the Infected. However, Jimmy manages to flee successfully from the house to the church, and then from the church as his father is infected and the Infected storm the church, and survives to adulthood. The newborn baby from the Pregnant Infected survives uninfected and Spike sends her to the safety of Holy Island. Apparently, the placenta protected the baby from the virus, and neither Spike nor Isla contaminated the baby in delivering her from her Infected mother. Spike also survives the entire movie.
- The Bone Temple: Spike is the youngest of the Jimmies and survives, alongside Jimmy Ink, who isn't suggested to be much older than him. Similarly, the heavily pregnant Cathy manages to escape the Jimmies' brutal torture and murder of the entire rest of her group. Like Tammy and Andy, her odds don't necessarily look good (in her case, she's roaming the Infected-ridden fields as a lone pregnant survivor), but she is last seen alive and well.
- Militaries Are Useless: Put simply, failing to contain the first outbreak of a virus which incubates in 15 seconds and turns every host into a homicidal, hyper-efficient vector of further mass infection is probably the most understandable of the military's failures throughout the franchise. Generally speaking, civilian action survivors with no formal combat training and even children fare better against the Rage virus than military personnel do in all of the movies.
- Our Zombies Are Different: The infected are not dead; they are humans that, although alive, are solely driven to attack the noninfected. They also have near-infinite stamina and retain minimal problem-solving skills.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: The biggest indicator of an Infected besides the manic psychosis and profuse bleeding is the red eyes they have. 28 Years Later has two characters try to show that they're clean by showing that their eyes are normal.
- Rousseau Was Right: Despite the underlying message of Humans Are the Real Monsters, there's also a recurring theme of survivors willingly helping other survivors in spite of high risk to themselves.
- Time Skip: The initial three movies take place quite some time after the previous one, with the title of the series itself coming from a title card after the prologue with the infected chimps.
- Trope Codifier: For the Technically Living Zombie and zombies being fast and agile.
- The Virus: The Rage virus is highly contagious; even one drop of infected blood in your body, and you will turn into another infected in a matter of seconds.
- Zombie Gait: Averted hard. One of the most notable aspects of the infected is that the disease has not hindered their agility, and they will sprint towards any unfortunate survivor.