28 Days Later writer Alex Garland has revealed how the first Resident Evil game had a lot of influence on the zombie film. Zombies as a concept has been around for a long, long time across films, television, and video games, but they’ve had to evolve a lot in order to retain any kind of relevancy. The Last of Us has zombie-like creatures, but they’re based on a real fungal parasite known as cordyceps giving it not only a scientific explanation, but also a way to distinguish itself from other zombie apocalypse media. 28 Days Later was also a massively influential piece of zombie media and changed the way we looked at the genre.
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The extremely low-budget horror movie helped popularize the idea that the undead could be a lot more than just slow moving monsters and instead, they’d actually be a bit more frightening if they had some sense of agility to them. 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later were both excellent expansions of the genre thanks to Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle, something that will hopefully continue with the imminent sequels known as 28 Years Later. However, where did this idea come from? How did Garland land on the idea of putting a new spin on zombies? Well, the answer lies with in one of the most popular video game franchises of all-time.
How Resident Evil Influenced 28 Days Later
In a new interview with GQ, Alex Garland spoke about his most iconic movies and talked at length about 28 Days Later. Garland noted that he had played Resident Evil on PlayStation and it struck him so much that it inspired him to make his own zombie movie. He noted that his experience with the game made him realize there hadn’t been a zombie movie in a while, but once he got good at Resident Evil, he believed that the zombies weren’t scary anymore because of how slow they were. However, the answer to the problem still lied with in Capcom’s horror game. The infamous zombie dogs freaked Garland out far more due to their speed and influenced him to make a movie about fast-moving zombies.
“Not long before writing 28 Days Later, there was a game on PlayStation [called] Resident Evil,” said Garland. “It reminded me how much I loved zombie movies and I thought ‘I love those, but there hasn’t been one for ages.’ And there was another thought, after I got good at playing the game, I was thinking that the zombies aren’t actually very scary because you can kill them more easily or get away from them with a brisk walk. But there was something else in the game which were these dogs. The dogs moved really quickly and would give me a jump sometimes, and I think that was the thing that gave the idea of a zombie movie where the zombies move quickly. The quick zombies I think did come from Resident Evil.”
As already noted, Garland has penned a series of sequels known as 28 Years Later. Part one will release this summer while part two, titled 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, will release in early 2026 with a third film planned to follow sometime after that. As the titles imply, the film takes place almost three decades after the original movie and will likely feature some evolutions of the undead monsters that fans have come to fear.
Interestingly enough, the release of this new trilogy will also coincide with Sony’s upcoming big screen reboot of Resident Evil directed by Zach Cregger. Very little is currently known about the project, but it is slated to release in September 2026 with an imminent summer film shoot. It’s rumored that talented names like Mikey Madison are circling the new Resident Evil movie, but nothing has been officially locked in quite yet. Rumored plot summaries indicate that Resident Evil may not adapt any of the games directly, but it is expected to remain faithful to the Capcom series.
