Summary

28 Years Later is inspired by The Last of Us and features fast, aggressive zombies like in 28 Days Later.
The film showcases a child-parent dynamic similar to Joel and Ellie's adventures, with themes of survival and dangerous secrets in a quarantine zone.
Garland reworked the script for 28 Years Later, taking inspiration from The Last of Us, aiming for a more sophisticated and impactful storyline.

Anticipation is building for the long-awaited sequel, 28 Years Later. Alex Garland's next outing in the zombie genre has just got a new trailer, and it's clear that this follow-up has been inspired by another popular undead franchise.

28 Days Later was a milestone in zombie cinema. It was the British take on a well-known genre that had existed in Hollywood for many years. Directed by veteran filmmaker Danny Boyle, known for his work on Trainspotting (1996) and Slumdog Millionaire (2008), and written by Alex Garland, whose extensive filmography includes more recent projects like A24's Civil War (2024). Together, these two creative voices updated zombies for a modern audience. In 28 Days Later, the zombies are of a different breed from Hollywood's more old-fashioned, slow, and lumbering undead. The 28 Days zombies are fast, aggressive, highly contagious individuals that aren't undead, but instead infected with the Rage Virus, a blood-borne disease that induces extreme anger in its victims. They are incredibly deadly, and their speed redefined how audiences viewed these corrupted corpses. It also led to other series like The Last of Us (2023) adopting this style of zombie, pushing the medium forward with its own iconic twists.

‘I Still Love an Apocalypse’ 28 Years Later Director Unveils Latest Trailer While Revealing Financing Still Needed To Complete Trilogy

The second trailer for the horror 28 Years Later has been showcased at CinemaCon, revealing funding is still needed for trilogy.

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By Rachael Fiddis

In a recent episode of Creator to Creator, Alex Garland and the creator-writer of The Last of Us, Neil Druckmann, discussed how they have extensively influenced each other's work over the years. The Last of Us has had a huge effect on the zombie scene itself. It carried over many of 28 Days' themes. Druckmann's world has infected humans, who roam its dystopic landscape. However, instead of basing the disease on a fictional, over-the-top form of rabies, Druckmann decided to root the undead's creation around a real-life fungus known as Cordyceps. Specific strains of Cordyceps can take over smaller lifeforms like ants, embedding in the brain, bending the host to its will, and eventually, controlling them even after death. The Last of Us takes a small evolutionary jump from insects to mammals by claiming the fungus evolved due to changing climates, but its incredibly close ties to our current reality make it all the more terrifying than 28 Days.

The zombies in The Last of Us also carry over 28 Days fast, rage-filled zombies. However, given the fact that video games require in-built escalations as the difficulty increases, Druckmann devised several different stages for his Cordyceps-infected; something that 28 Days lacks. The Last of Us zombies progress from runners, to stalkers, to clickers, to bloaters. Druckmann's work also follows 28 Days exploration of the human condition, and how humanity can actually be the greatest danger in this kind of apocalypse. In many ways, The Last of Us ups the stakes of the human threat massively by imagining a world filled with cannibals and roaming packs of scavenging hunters. Its world is much darker societally than 28 Days. Its disease is much more entangled with the emotional struggles of its characters, given that Ellie is immune to Cordyceps, and Joel's dashing of humanity's hope for a cure to rescue her is the perfect encapsulation of the awful choices people face in its post-apocalyptic landscape.

The 28 Days Later Writer Raves About How The Last of Us Has Inspired His New Film

28 Years Later is clearly inspired by Druckmann's work. The film is set in a small community called Hosy Island, walled off by the sea, comparable to that of Jackson or the FEDRA quarantine zone in Boston. Garland's new story heavily features a child-parent dynamic between Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Spike (Alfie Williams), which is reminiscent of Joel and Ellie's adventures through the wilderness. 28 Years Later's most recent trailer also teases cult-like death-worshipping communities on the mainland, a more evolved version of the Rage Virus, and a creature that looks very similar in appearance to that of a bloater.

In the Creator to Creator podcast, Garland flat out admitted that The Last of Us was a vast improvement on his creation. The writer heaped praise on Druckmann:

"The Last of Us’ is better than ’28 Days Later.’ The thing about ‘The Last of Us,’ I was like, this is so much more sophisticated. It was very nice for me with ‘The Last of Us’ to sort of feel like someone saying, ‘Where’s your game?'”

Garland went so far as to reveal that a previous script for 28 Years Later had been around as early as 2019, but the writer could sense that former colleague and director Danny Boyle was not interested in his COVID-19-themed script: "Danny Boyle read it and he kind of said, ‘Yeah, OK. I sort of want to do this.’ But I know Danny very well and I could see that he didn’t really want to do it at all.” This led Garland to pursue a completely brand-new rewrite of the script, upping his game very much, and what he ultimately ended up with is something that is closer to The Last of Us in terms of its story. In Garland's own words: "‘Last of Us’ had such an impact on me." Druckmann returned the appreciation by highlighting that the "Infected" from the world of The Last of Us was directly inspired by Garland's work in 2002:

"There’s a direct line between the fast infected [in ’28 Days Later’] and the infected in ‘The Last of Us.'"

Garland also elaborated on the origins of 28 Days Later, beginning with inspiration from the Resident Evil series, a survival zombie video game from 1996. It's fascinating to see the zombie zeitgeist that exists across the different mediums of film and gaming feeding off one another in this strange symbiosis that would give the Cordyceps brain infection a run for its money. Now, the movie that inspired The Last of Us is closing the circle with a new addition releasing this year that will continue to push the genre to new, interesting places. 28 Years Later is the beginning of a new trilogy after all, not simply a sequel to its early 2000s predecessors.