Why 28 Years Later Is So Much Better Than Most Zombie Movies and Shows

This article contains a Jimmy’s worth of spoilers for 28 Years Later!

Humans are the real monster.

That’s the realization moviegoers likely had while watching 28 Days Later back in 2002. After surviving all of the horrors of the Rage Virus that overtook England, Jim (Cillian Murphy), Selena (Naomie Harris), and Hannah (Megan Burns) arrive at a military outpost operated by a seemingly kindhearted leader (Christopher Eccleston). However, they quickly learn that the soldiers there have unpleasant plans for the women, leading to a disturbing climax in which Jim proves that he’s able to access rage without the help of any virus at all.

Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland repeat the idea in their sequel 28 Years Later. Late in the movie, young Spike (Alfie Williams) takes his troubled mother Isla (Jodie Comer) deep into the mainland to find Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who others warn is just as dangerous as the infected who surround him. However, despite his strange red appearance and the towers of bones and skulls he constructs, Kelson is the exact opposite of Eccleston’s Major West. He’s an oasis of kindness and constancy in an otherwise brutal world. He is an expert and doctor who, despite what the paranoid and distrusting rant, you can trust.

With Dr. Kelson, 28 Years Later not only pivots away from its 2002 predecessor but also from the zombie stories that have saturated popular culture.

Making Movie Monsters

28 Days Later felt like a bolt of lightening when it unleashed its rage-filled zombies into the world in 2002. Back then the zombie genre was barely shambling along, having faded from the initial boom following George Romero‘s introduction of the flesh-eating zombie in 1969’s Night of the Living Dead.

Thanks to that lull in the genre, 28 Days Later‘s final twist packed a real punch, even though it was far from original. After all, humans have out-menaced the monster in horror movies ever since the 1930s when films such as Frankenstein (1931), Freaks (1932), and King Kong (1933) ruled the movie palaces. Even within the zombie subgenre, which shifted from traditional mind-controlled creatures in films such as White Zombie (1932) to flesh-eating ghouls with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), human characters often behaved worse than the walking dead. Just look at the unhinged, racist father in Night of the Living Dead or the bikers who invade the mall in Dawn of the Dead (1978).

However, modern zombie stories don’t have that same benefit. In that many, many zombie stories that have followed in 28 Days Later‘s footsteps: humans constantly do more damage than their mindless counterparts. The Governor (David Morrissey) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) terrorize people on The Walking Dead (2010-2022); the citizens of Centerville, Ohio, ignore the obvious warnings in The Dead Don’t Die (2019); and couple of antisocial jerks (Ty Burrell and Mekhi Phifer) disrupt what could have been a safe haven in the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake from Zack Snyder and James Gunn.

Thus The Last of Us feels like something of a zombie itself in its recent second season when it focuses almost exclusively on the misery surrounding Ellie (Bella Ramsey) and Abby’s (Kaitlyn Dever) missions of vengeance. As theese once normal, likable people commit increasingly greater acts of brutality, we viewers are neither shocked by their actions nor challenged by the show’s depiction of society. We’re just bored by the dull, obvious storytelling.

And that’s what makes the subversion in 28 Years Later all the more compelling.

Death to Life

At the end of 28 Years Later, Dr. Kelson drugs Spike so that he can kill Isla, burn the flesh from her bones, and present the boy with his mother’s clean skull. And it is one of the most moving acts of compassion ever committed to screen. Of course Kelson drugs Spike as much as an act of necessity as kindness. Upon examining Isla, Kelson determines that cancer has infected both her body and her brain, stripping away her cognition and identity. She chooses to die on her own terms, and Kelson agrees to help her. Knowing that Spike will fight against the decision, yet also knowing what needs to be done, Kelson (with Isla’s permission) tranquilizes the boy while he and his mother embrace one last time.

Even the decision to present the boy with his mother’s skull is one of mercy. Kelson has already talked about how each skull is just a Memento mori, not the person to whom it once belonged, and that the memory of the person is what matters. By allowing Spike to carry Isla’s skull to a prominent place in the bone temple, Kelson empowers the boy to embrace his mother’s memory and to have agency amid the chaos.

To be clear, Boyle and Garland do not present Isla’s death as a pleasant or easy thing. It still occurs in response to a horrid and debilitating disease, one made worse by the fact that the United Kingdom is quarantined from the rest of the world. The movie takes time to show the sorrow gripping both Spike and Isla, giving respect to their sadness. 28 Years Later knows that the characters live in a brutal world surrounded by death, but (to borrow a phrase from another Boyle film), the movie chooses life.

In fact, much of 28 Years Later is resolutely life-affirming. There’s the beauty of the sky when Spike and his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) run across the bridge from an Alpha. There’s the moment of bravery when Isla comforts an infected woman giving birth. There’s the kindness that Jamie shows Spike when the boy feels guilt over his beginner’s mistakes when shooting the infected. Heck, there’s that insane ending.

28 Years Later may have zombies, but it’s fundamentally about human beings, and it celebrates the way humans continue on even at the end of the world.

Reviving a Genre

To be sure, the humans of 28 Years Later aren’t saintly. And given the Jimmy Saville-style dress and extreme brutality of Sir Jimmy (Jack O’Connell) and his merry band, there may be a lot more person-on-person nastiness to come this January when the sequel 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple hits theaters. Yet even if the story takes a more cynical look at humanity, it’s already set itself apart from the standard zombie stories that were released between 2002 and now.

Yes, humanity can be monstrous. But it also understands that humanity can be wondrous, full of kindness and caring. It’s downright raidcal that a zombie story should remember that.