28 Days Later started a zombie debate that’s still raging today – Yahoo

28 Days Later is not just one of the best British horror movies of all time, but a film that changed the zombie genre on the big screen forever. While it might not have been the first movie to feature zombies running like they were about to miss the next bus to Asda, it was certainly the film responsible for popularising speedy creatures on the big screen. 28 Years Later, released in UK cinemas this week, continues in that vein.

Of course, the creative team behind the original movie — director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland — have always maintained that it isn’t a zombie film at all. And technically, they’re right. The terrifying and macabre beasts in the movie and its sequels are not undead humans, but people infected with the Rage virus. But nonetheless, 28 Days Later’s marauding monsters ignited a debate about speed that hasn’t gone away in the years since.

Though zombie movies stretch back as far as 1932’s White Zombie, the genre as a mainstream success can really be traced back to the work of George A. Romero and, specifically, his 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. That movie’s first zombie is actually pretty nimble and light on his feet but, by the time 1978 sequel Dawn of the Dead came around, Romero had settled on shambling, shuffling, inevitable embodiments of decay.

“Zombies are a mirror image of death,” says Greg Rudman, managing director of immersive experience company Zombie Infection. “What makes them terrifying is that they look like us. They strip away fantasy and force us to confront our own mortality.”

By the early 2000s, zombies had started to fade from the cinematic zeitgeist. The one-two punch of British movies 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead changed that, with the former making a particularly big impact with its high-speed infected. But as early as 1980, when Italian filmmaker Umberto Lenzi unveiled the preposterous Nightmare City, the undead occasionally found their running shoes. In that film, a nuclear accident creates undead cannibals who move at a much greater speed than Romero’s trudging terrors.

Meanwhile, by the late 1990s, the Resident Evil video games were experimenting with fast-moving zombies — again created by a viral outbreak rather than traditional death and resurrection. Rudman notes that “the speed of a zombie often depends on the type of infection”.

He adds: “In Night of the Living Dead, there’s no virus — just decay — so the undead shuffle. But with something like the Rage virus, it’s predatory. It reanimates the body with a singular purpose: to spread. What’s truly unsettling is how closely these fictional plagues mirror real viruses. The line between horror and reality starts to blur.”

Romero’s opinion was pretty set on the matter, with the legendary horror maestro noting in a 2008 interview with Vulture that “I don’t think zombies can run [because] their ankles would snap”. He added: “To me, [slow zombies are] scarier: this inexorable thing coming at you and you can’t figure out how to stop it.”

The same year, lifelong Romero fan and Shaun of the Dead star Simon Pegg wrote an op-ed for The Guardian in which he railed against the trend for fast zombies in response to Charlie Brooker’s satirical Channel 4 miniseries Dead Set. He wrote that “the genre was diminished” when fast zombies began to spread on the big screen.

“Speed simplifies the zombie, clarifying the threat and reducing any response to an emotional reflex,” Pegg wrote. “It’s the difference between someone shouting ‘Boo!’ and hearing the sound of the floorboards creaking in an upstairs room: a quick thrill at the expense of a more profound sense of dread.”

Pegg doesn’t necessarily blame 28 Days Later for this, noting that viral zombies are entirely different to the traditional undead. Instead, he points to Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, which was as much a high-octane action movie as a horror story, shedding much of the original film’s social satire in order to feature sprinting corpses.

Read more: How 28 Years Later links to the previous films (Yahoo Entertainment, 5 min read)

Fast zombies have since become as much of a part of horror history as their shambling cousins, with modern genre classics like REC and Train to Busan — as well as mainstream blockbusters like World War Z — finding real fear factor in speedy zombies. The social context of Romero’s stories might be gone, but there’s an entirely different thrill at play.

Dr Steve Jones, who leads the Horror Studies Research Group at Northumbria University, notes that there’s a complexity to this debate that eludes some horror fans. He tells Yahoo UK that fast-moving zombies are “scary for a different reason” than their slow-moving predecessors.

He says: “For some fans, fast-moving zombies take them out of the film by undercutting its sense of realism. For others it is that, traditionally, zombies are not particularly threatening one-on-one; fear is induced by the slow congregation of zombies as a mass. That is what makes zombies distinctive from other horror comparable archetypes, like vampires. If zombies move quickly, the source of fear also changes: then, they are mainly threatening because they will eat or infect the human characters.”

The fast-moving zombie trend is now firmly ensconced in popular culture, with as many cantering corpses on our screens as slow ones. Arguably the most prominent zombie media of the last few years has been The Last of Us — both the original video games and their TV adaptation — which features a type of infected zombie specifically referred to as “Runners”.

Read more: Hold the zombies – how The Last of Us became the best TV show about modern fatherhood (The Independent, 5 min read)

Speedy zombies are here to stay, with 28 Years Later joining The Last of Us in ensuring that infected, decaying humans are sprinting through cinemas and living rooms in 2025 like Usain Bolt fleeing a wasp. But it’s just part of the wide variety of stories enabled by these unique threats, which have fascinated filmmakers and audiences for decades — and will do so for years to come.

As Dr Jones says: “Filmmakers have employed the zombie to explore identity issues, prejudices, the impacts of capitalism, and other political matters because they upset the assumptions that help us to make sense of our lives, and they threaten to overturn our normal social structures. Zombies give filmmakers a way to reimagine how we live and what is important to us.”

That’s all true whether they’re shambling or sprinting. Either way, they force us to confront death — and they’re scary as hell.

28 Years Later is in UK cinemas from 19 June.

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