15 Facts About the 28 Days Later Film Franchise

From the gritty, fast-paced terror of 28 Days Later to the chaotic sequel fallout of 28 Weeks Later, the 28 Days Later franchise has redefined modern zombie horror for the past two decades. Now, with 28 Years Later set to hit theaters, the infected legacy continues.

Here are some must-know facts about the expanding franchise—past, present, and zombified future.

1. 28 Days Later (2002)
2. 28 Weeks Later (2007)
3. 28 Years Later (2025)

28 Days Later (2002)

The idea for 28 Days Later began in a pizza place.

Before a single word of 28 Days Later was written, screenwriter Alex Garland pitched the concept over a meal with producer Andrew MacDonald at a pizza place on Charlotte Street in London.

As Garland put it:  “I said, ‘Look, I’ve got an idea for a film. It’s about running zombies and it’s got daylight and it’s in London. … He said, “Oh, sounds really cool.” … And then I went off and did it as a spec script.”

Danny Boyle—who had previously directed the 2000 adaptation of Garland’s novel The Beach, and had also worked with MacDonald on Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, and more—came on board to direct.

Blame video games for the fast “zombies.”

While 28 Days Later owes a clear debt to American filmmaker George A. Romero’s groundbreaking horror film Night of the Living Dead, Garland also drew from less expected, non-cinematic sources, including author John Wyndham’s 1951 sci-fi novel Day of the Triffids and the video game series Resident Evil.

The idea of fast-moving infected—now a genre staple—came directly from Garland’s gaming experience. “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,” he told Inverse in 2024. “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 original film technically wasn’t a film at all.

When the movie hit theaters in 2002, it wasn’t just the fast-moving infected that felt new. Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, whom Boyle recruited after seeing his work in the 1998 Dogme 95 movie The Celebration, shot much of the movie using the Canon XL-1, a $4000 consumer-grade camcorder that saved footage to MiniDV tapes.  

The “empty London” shots were achieved through timing and desperation.  

The most iconic shots of the movie—of Cillian Murphy wandering by empty London landmarks like Big Ben—weren’t achieved with CGI, but with a much cheaper trick: waking up early.

With no budget to shut down major parts of the British capital, the crew filmed at dawn and simply asked passersby to pause just long enough for quick shots. “They would ask people to stop walking, and then the art department would run in and dress it really, really quickly,” Murphy recalled. “And they had cameras all over the place.”

On the home video commentary, Boyle added that some shots, like the toppled bus outside 10 Downing Street, would be impossible to pull off today.

“We did this before September 11,” Boyle said. “To put a bus on its side in Whitehall, literally just outside Downing Street … you just wouldn’t be allowed to now, I don’t think. We only got away with it by the skin of our teeth and by the inventiveness of Mark Tildesley, the [production] designer, who swore blind to them that he could get it in and out of there in 15 minutes. And he proved himself right.”

Filmmakers couldn’t decide how to end 28 Days Later.

The ending viewers know, where a smiling Jim and the others are seemingly rescued while holed up in a cottage in England’s Lake District, is just one of four known endings planned for the movie.

In the original scripted version, Jim dies from his gunshot wound and Selena and Hannah simply leave. “The hospital ending was the ending I’d written,” Garland explained to Inverse. “Jim dies and the two girls [Hannah and Selena] set off into the world—who knows what happens to them? It tested really badly. Not just badly but really badly.”

Another variation of this version adds Jim dreaming of the pre-apocalyptic bike accident that put him in a coma, where we find him at the start of the movie—but he dies anyway.

Then there is the so-called “Radical Alternative Ending,” which was never shot but was storyboarded during post-production. In this version, instead of Hannah’s father Frank dying, Jim undergoes a full blood transfusion to save him after the group discovers a secret lab at the military blockade.

28 Weeks Later (2007)

28 Weeks Later got a new director.

Five years after Boyle scared the hell out of audiences with 28 Days Later, he tapped Juan Carlos Fresnadillo to continue his post-apocalyptic story with 28 Weeks Later. (Boyle had other commitments, specifically directing 2007’s Sunshine.) The sequel saw military forces attempting to secure a small “safe zone” for survivors in London while zombies raged all around them.

Boyle sought out Fresnadillo because of his previous film, Intacto. “We were looking for a filmmaker of some individuality who could bring something different to the film,” Boyle said in the film’s production notes. “London was such a big part of the first film we thought that getting somebody from outside the UK to come in and direct would be an interesting approach as they would give the capital a fresh look.” Fresnadillo, his producing partner Enrique López-Lavigne and screenwriter Jesus Olmo further developed the script, bringing in the family element of Don, Alice, and their children, Tammy and Andy.

But just because Boyle wasn’t in the director’s chair doesn’t mean he wasn’t a part of 28 Weeks Later. He served as one of the film's executive producers and did end up stepping behind the camera—at least momentarily. He also directed second unit footage of the opening scene.

The actor who played Don had previously worked with Boyle before.

Robert Carlyle was no stranger to working with Boyle; the two had previously worked together on Trainspotting and The Beach. Before accepting the role of Don, Carlyle had actually turned down the Major Henry West part in 28 Days Later (a role that eventually went to actor Christopher Eccleston). “I was kind of worried at first because the first film was very good,” he said. “But then there were a couple of moments in the script, in which I thought, actually, this is brilliant.”

Production designers were inspired by literature and history.

Production designers used literary and historical inspiration for the scenes of post-apocalyptic London: The empty and desolate street scenes were modeled after descriptions from Charles Dickens novels and from photos taken during the London Blitz from World War II.

There was some cheating to nail London after the end of the world; most of the end scenes were shot “day for night” to make it look like all the lights were out in London. If they actually shot at night they would have had to use costly CGI to remove the lights from shots. There was still plenty of CGI, though—the production had to finish 400 CG shots in just two months.

Some tweaks were made to the infected for the sequel.

Everyone playing an infected person in the movie was required to have a movement-based artistic background. The final cast included ballet dancers, gymnasts, circus performers, and mimes.

Movement specialist Paul Kasey—who had played one of the infected in the previous film—was brought on board to assist with camera tests and perfect the movement of the new infected. “Juan Carlos had very precise instructions on how he wanted the infected to perform," Kasey said. “He liked the movement of the infected soldier chained up in the house in the first film. His movement was very animalistic, sort of animalistic with rage, and he was making very effective human growling sounds. This is what Juan Carlos wanted more of this time around.”

The infected attended a workshop “to create the infected behaviors so that everyone understood the movement behind the performance so it was consistent,” Kasey said, and it was a huge success: “I had to hold them back, their rage was becoming so powerful and so crazed. It was pretty scary to be opposite 60 people who were infected.”

The coda of 28 Weeks Later was shot last.

The filmmakers came up with the idea for the coda just two weeks before production wrapped. Fresnadillo traveled to Paris with a limited crew and only HD cameras to shoot it in one afternoon.

28 Years Later (2025)

The trailer for 28 Years Later was a viral hit thanks to a 122-year-old poem.

The trailer for the long-awaited third film made waves not just for Boyle’s direction and returning cinematographer Dod Mantle’s haunting visuals—it also stood out for its chilling interpolation of a 1915 recording of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots.” The poem, which was first published in 1903 and was written to mimic the relentless march of British soldiers in World War I, was recited by American actor Taylor Holmes in the recording. That same recording is used by the U.S military during SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training as a form of psychological conditioning.

The original idea for the third sequel involved Russia.

Boyle floated the idea of a third installment of the 28 Days Later series way back while doing the press tour for 2007’s Sunshine. The upcoming film, which hits theaters on June 20, 2025, features a group of survivors on a small island off the British coast—but Boyle’s original concept was different. “I did have this other idea,” Boyle said at the time. “I don’t know whether it’ll happen or not … the third idea has more to do with Russia, but that’s all I can say.”

The production built innovative rigs to film 28 Years Later.

The film blends footage from traditional cameras, drones, and even iPhones—some mounted on custom-built rigs that hold eight, 10, or more devices at once. “There is an incredible shot in the second half [of the film] where we use the 20-rig camera, and you’ll know it when you see it,” Boyle said. “It’s quite graphic but it’s a wonderful shot that uses that technique, and in a startling way that kind of kicks you into a new world rather than thinking you’ve seen it before.”

Garland’s screenplay for the second sequel draws inspiration from an unlikely British classic.

For the threequel, Garland found inspiration in the 1970 film Kes, director Ken Loach’s very non-zombie-related movie about a boy from a dysfunctional working-class family who raises a young kestrel.

“Very unexpected thing to rip off in a zombie movie,” Garland says, citing tone and the British landscape as some of the reasons the film inspired him. “Mainly, it’s that Kes hangs around a really startling performance by a child actor. … It absolutely gave me [the hope], or something like that, that one could do that within this other context, and it would work.” 

Audiences won’t have to wait long for the next chapter of the 28 Days Later series.

Not long after 28 Years Later wrapped filming in July 2024, cameras were rolling on its sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta, due to hit theaters in January 2026. That movie is the second installment of a planned new trilogy, with Alex Garland writing all three scripts. Boyle has reportedly confirmed that he’ll be back in the director’s chair if the as-yet-untitled new third film gets made.

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A version of this story ran in 2017; it has been updated for 2025.