Andrés Emil González

When Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a coma near the beginning of Danny Boyle’s classic zombie film, 28 Days Later (2002), he does so wholly alone. This is not so surprising in a film and, indeed, a whole subgenre of horror fixated on the idea of societal breakdown and the survival of the individual in its aftermath, but it is a choice worth reexamining in light of Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland’s return to the franchise with 2025’s 28 Years Later. For starters, the social world that was toppled by a handful of animal rights activists at the start of the first film is firmly back at the outset of this third and most recent entry, albeit in a particularly monstrous form. This time, when 28 Years protagonist Spike sets off on his perilous journey, his social world is not nearly as empty as the streets of London that Jim walked upon his return to life. As the film does, we might ask: what happened in between? If the story of the 28 Days Later series turns on this question with respect to quarantined Britain and Ireland, it also poses a broader question about zombie narratives in the twenty-first century, and particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. What does actually happen to society when it faces a global viral threat?

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