2. The first 27 days of the infection, 28 Days Later… (2002)
The superiority of director Danny Boyle’s lo-fi zombie flick 28 Days Later… should be understood at this point. One of the best horror films of the 10 ten years, Boyle’s intimate heart-stopper opens with a brief prologue in which animal rights activists free an infected chimp from its cage and unintentionally launch a viral epidemic that turns nearly all of England’s population into mad, enraged, lightning-fast ghouls.
Immediately following the prologue, 28 Days Later… picks up four weeks into the horror; what transpires from there is constantly visceral and emotional, but also somewhat disappointingly light on actual zombies. And when we do see the “infected,” Boyle’s kinetic edits and camerawork offer mostly glimpses of the new-age zombies. Just imagine how insane an entire film’s worth of infected attacks, uncontrollable mayhem, and citizen desperation would be—it’d be a lot like the relentlessly brutal opening scene of the sequel, 28 Weeks Later, only a solid 90 minutes longer.
