It’s not always what happens during the zombie outbreak that proves important, but what happens afterward. George Romero’s re-envisioning of the risen-undead concept in Night of the Living Dead was pioneering, yet part of what has allowed that vision to endure was his willingness to revisit, revise, and update it over the decades that followed. It’s a tradition that zombie innovators Danny Boyle and Alex Garland uphold as their long-awaited sequel, 28 Years Later, arrives on Netflix, presumably to an even broader audience than its summer 2025 theatrical run.
Horror sequels are practically obligatory. Rare is the financially or culturally notable scary movie where a followup isn’t at least considered, if not outright rushed into theaters. 28 Years Later itself already has a sequel locked and loaded, with 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple set for January 2026, and another movie to follow if Bone Temple does well enough. But back in 1978, Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was more of an outlier in that respect. Remember, this was the same year as John Carpenter’s Halloween. Slasher sequels barely existed, and the Universal monster series had been dead for decades. In this environment, Romero made a decade-later sequel to Night of the Living Dead with new characters, zombie gore rendered in vivid color rather than more austere black-and-white, and newfound social satire by following survivors holed up in a shopping mall, where the undead shuffled along, half-remembering their consumerist routines from previous lives. 1985’s Day of the Dead pivots again, even more focused on humanity’s failings. It’s a particularly jarring movie to watch right after Romero’s funniest zombie outing.
28 Years Later may have taken some audiences even more by surprise, because audiences have become more accustomed to legacy sequels that pay tribute to their long-standing fandom. The original 28 Days Later, released in 2002 in its native Britain and 2003 in the U.S., became one of the most popular and influential zombie movies since Romero’s prime thanks to the early-2000s equivalent of documentary-like black-and-white: early digital video that gave the movie a realistic immediacy and, at times, an uncannily beautiful found-art look.
A sequel, 28 Weeks Later, followed in 2007, already featuring a different aesthetic and cast of characters (without much involvement from the original film’s creators). But director Boyle and screenwriter Garland reuniting for 28 Years Later makes it feel like a “true” sequel to the original, even though this movie also employs a decidedly different visual approach and follows a completely new set of characters. It’s a legacy sequel that explores the legacy of the original’s world, rather than catching up with old-pal characters.
Set, well, you know, the story picks up with an island colony that has established itself in the wake of Britain’s quarantine from the rest of the world. (The zombie infection’s spread to mainland Europe, depicted in the closing moments of 28 Weeks Later, is walked back.) Through rigorous discipline and commune-style living, this group protects its members, including 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Wiliams), who lives with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and mysteriously ill mother Isla (Jodie Comer).
Boyle and Garland make Spike their anchor, and initially, 28 Years Later looks like a father-son story, as Jamie takes Spike off the island for his first zombie kill — a ceremonial occasion, not an actual necessity. The island’s children are trained to defend themselves with bows and arrows, and traveling ashore to kill a zombie or two is a rite of passage. Though things go wrong, as you might expect from a horror movie, Spike’s encounter with the infected doesn’t have the expected outcome for him or the first-time viewer. Just as Romero pivoted his zombie series between movies, Boyle and Garland shift gears multiple times over the course of 28 Years Later, right up until its unexpectedly sequel-baiting and culturally specific final scene.
Some audiences found this all quite disorienting well before the film’s bizarre gambit of an ending, perhaps in part because, while 28 Days Later’s outbreak setting made it a clear modern analog to Night of the Living Dead, the new movie doesn’t follow specific Romero leads. Though it has some funny moments, 28 Years Later isn’t as satirical or irreverent as Dawn of the Dead. It’s also not as bleak-minded about humanity as Day of the Dead. In fact, the newer movie has a contemplative section involving an infection-free human nonetheless living in the zombie-infested wilds that the movie primes to be an example of man’s zombie-like inhumanity. Instead, it stands as a beacon of, if not exactly hope, at least some empathy.
Boyle’s film does share a little bit of common ground with Romero’s later revival Land of the Dead (which arrived, probably not coincidentally, in the wake of 28 Days Later, back in 2005). There, Romero jumped ahead to depict a society attempting to rebuild in the wake of the zombie outbreaks, with protected outposts built on rigid class divides — positioning the exiled zombies as the ultimate underclass. Boyle and Garland don’t seem particularly interested in the economic metaphor, but they do approach the question of whether the zombies might be evolving toward something more recognizably human, especially when Spike and other travelers come across a pregnant zombie who gives birth to an uninfected baby.
That’s the sort of swerve that might feel, at first, as if 28 Years Later is compiling scenes Boyle and Garland cooked up during the many years that the series remained dormant, without regard for a sustained tone or single developing storyline. Yet this material does come together beautifully, as a coming-of-age story that has the dizzying ups and downs of adolescence. That’s something Romero’s classics don’t really cover: the experience of growing up in a zombie-infested world, and how it might affect an adolescent’s growing understanding of death, the othering of unknown people, and how best to live in a world apart from your parents’ worldview.
With that in mind, the amped-up clarity and sometime frenzy of the movie’s imagery makes a lot of sense. 28 Days Later used its digital video to resemble consumer video or surveillance footage, with the footage’s smearier qualities sometimes turning abstract or briefly painterly amid the realism. 28 Years Later, shot largely with iPhones that have far more image-processing power than old DV cameras, is more hyperreal: bright colors, crazy angles, instant-replay loops. Watching it, your senses are heightened; there’s a feeling of hormonal-emotional discovery that fits the protagonist.
It adds up to a surprisingly open-hearted, even moving, dispatch from a zombie-infected world. Though Romero could be sincere in his despair for humanity, he was also frequently sardonic in his observation of raffish characters banding together for survival. Despite starting with a community, 28 Years Later focuses much more on an individual journey. And like Romero’s best work, it offers an often-dazzling reminder of what zombie movies can do.
