Halloween Film Of The Day: 28 DAYS LATER

If Romero’s zombie film Night Of The Living Dead reinvented the genre as social satire, Danny Boyle’s 2002 post-zombie apocolypse 28 Days Later feels almost like a reaction to the previous year’s terrorist attacks on New York City. A simple bicycle currier awakes from a coma to discover that London has been evacuated for the safety of the countryside, which he strikes out for with a small band of survivors. What caused such an exodus? An engineered virus released from a laboratory has turned a majority of the population into rage-fueled, nocturnal beserkers. A variation on the zombie motif, though Boyle is careful to never use the word in the movie. Ironically, the fast moving creatures of this movie are reportedly the inspiration for the fast moving zombies in Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn Of The Dead.