The zombie movie was born in 1968 with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but it wasn’t perfected until 2002.
Ask five horror movie fans to pick their favorite zombie flick, and you’ll likely get at least a dozen different answers. But at least one of those answers will undeniably be a certain low-budget box office hit that changed zombies forever with one simple word: rage.
Due to a tangled web of legal rights (more on that later), 28 Days Later has been nearly impossible to watch online for the past few years, but ahead of a highly anticipated sequel from the original writer-director team, 28 Days Later just made its triumphant return to streaming on Hulu.
Here’s why it’s worth watching (or rewatching) what is arguably the most influential zombie movie of the 21st century—and what you should know before you do.
How 28 Days Later changed zombies forever
The origins of 28 Days Later can be traced back to screenwriter and video game enthusiast Alex Garland, whose next project will be adapting the dark fantasy role-playing game Elden Ring into a movie for A24. But back in the late ‘90s, Garland was an aspiring writer who’d just published his first book and was about to get his hands on Resident Evil, the survival horror classic that launched a video game franchise still going today.
In an oral history of 28 Days Later published by Inverse, Garland explained how Resident Evil inspired his own take on the zombie genre.
“What I found out playing Resident Evil was that, in a funny way, the zombies themselves didn’t pose much of a threat because they were so slow-moving,” Garland said. “The tension did not come from the zombies, it came from the fact that you didn’t have many bullets to deal with them. I thought: What if the zombies moved as quickly as the dogs?”
The answer was 28 Days Later, which takes place in the aftermath of a zombie outbreak powered by a man-made “Rage Virus.” The virus, which is inadvertently released by a group of animal rights protesters trying to free a lab monkey infected with Rage, passes easily between humans through blood and saliva, transforming its victims into violent monsters whose only goal is to attack and bite other people.
The movie stars a then-unknown Cillian Murphy, who wakes up from a coma and finds himself in a London hospital 28 days after the outbreak. The film is full of memorable characters, both good and evil (like Romero before him, director Danny Boyle is particularly interested in how quickly the niceties of human civilization disappear in a crisis), but the image that undoubtedly sticks with you is those rage-filled zombies sprinting after their victims. It’s a concept that turned the entire genre on its head—slow zombies are scary enough, but fast zombies? forget about it—and influenced the next three decades of movies that followed.
The legacy of 28 Days Later
In the wake of 28 Days Later, which made $86 million on a budget of just $8 million, Hollywood pumped out a wave of imitators, hoping to capitalize on what it perceived as a zombie fervor. In the years that followed, horror fans were treated to a never-ending buffet that included Shaun of the Dead (2004), World War Z (2006), I Am Legend (2007), Planet Terror (2007), Dead Snow (2009), Zombieland (2009), and Warm Bodies (2010). The first issue of the comic book series The Walking Dead also debuted in 2003, and the TV adaptation followed in 2010.
Eventually, Hollywood’s zombie obsession tapered off (replaced in part by “elevated” horror in the 2010s like Get Out, It Follows, and The Babadook), but that core premise of the rage zombie continued to inspire some of the genre’s best movies—both within the mainstream movie industry and beyond. Rec, a 2007 found-footage horror movie filmed in Spain, features fast and angry zombies. So does the critically acclaimed South Korean thriller Train to Busan (2016). Even The Last of Us, the 2013 video game that’s now an HBO series, which put its own spin on the genre with its fungus-infected zombies, follows the blueprint of 28 Days Later and its aggressive antagonists.
But while the legacy of 28 Days Later endures even today (and despite a mediocre sequel in 2007 that both Boyle and Garland wanted nothing to do with), the movie is about to make a major mainstream comeback.
The return of 28 Days Later (and why it disappeared in the first place)
For the last few years, 28 Days Later has been nearly impossible to watch online. You couldn’t even rent it on Amazon, let alone stream it on Netflix or Hulu. The reason why is complicated in the way that movie rights often are.
28 Days Later was filmed on a tiny budget with no studio support, but once the movie was finished, 20th Century Fox stepped in to help distribute it. That meant that Fox had the rights to 28 Days Later at some point, but not total ownership. The movie was stuck in a weird state of limbo, which only got more tangled up after Disney bought Fox in 2019.
Finally, in 2024, Andrew Macdonald, who produced and financed 28 Days Later, was able to reacquire the rights. He promptly turned around and sold an entire sequel trilogy to Sony, with Boyle and Garland attached as director and writer, respectively. The first entry in that trilogy, 28 Years Later, premieres in theaters later this month.
In that context, it makes a lot of sense that 28 Days Later is finally returning to streaming. Not only have those tricky rights issues been sorted out, but with a new sequel on the way, there’s never been a better time to revisit the classic movie that changed zombies forever and inspired some of the best takes on the genre in the two decades since.
28 Days Later is streaming now on Hulu.
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