The zombie has never been a particularly subtle metaphor, in its brainless, slobbering wave of mass consumerism and mass hysteria. It was a good fit for director Danny Boyle, who almost always takes the path of bravado and noise, because he knows it will eventually lead him to an image as striking as Cillian Murphy, in scrubs, walking around bewildered on a desolate Westminster Bridge.
That moment was the crown jewel of 28 Days Later (2002) and, now, 23 years later, we have 28 Years Later, in which Boyle and his co-writer Alex Garland circle back to the genre they helped reinvent. It’s fairly standard for your zombies, now, to run fast, attack intelligently, and to never actually be referred to as “zombies”: just look at The Last of Us. Boyle and Garland were key to cementing that new standard.
