(Credits: Far Out / Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Thu 19 June 2025 9:00, UK
Danny Boyle’s 2002 post-apocalyptic horror thriller 28 Days Later has become so deeply ingrained in the fabric of cinema that it’s hard to remember that no one expected it to be a hit. Written by Alex Garland, who would go on to direct similarly unnerving movies like Annihilation and Civil War, 28 Days Later stars Cillian Murphy as Jim, a bicycle courier who wakes up from a coma in a London hospital to find that the city has been emptied after a catastrophic event. A virus spread by human contact with lab chimpanzees has turned people into zombie-like creatures who prowl the streets and kill anyone still living.
The film’s low-budget aesthetic managed to make the hollowed-out streets of present-day central London look all too real, and it set the template for zombie movies and post-apocalyptic horror for the next two decades. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, 28 Days Later had a cautionary immediacy to it that felt more spine-chilling than the actual zombies themselves. On a budget of $8million, it did modest business in the UK but struck gold in the US, raking in $45m despite a limited release.
That low budget was a boon in many ways. The fact that there were so few visual effects meant that it still doesn’t look dated, and the lack of big-budget set-pieces in favour of abandoned motorways and an echoey manor house creates a sense of eerie realism that no amount of explosions or armies of the undead could outdo. Despite all the penny-pinching, however, the production did eventually run out of money.
After Jim and his companions Selena (Naomie Harris) and Hannah (Megan Burns) are held captive by a group of sadistic soldiers at a country estate outside Manchester, they manage to climb into a car and barrel towards the closed gates. A freeze-frame shows them screaming as they take their one shot at freedom. Then, the scene cuts to another 28 days later, where the three of them are recovering in an idyllic cottage in Cumbria. As the sound of a jet approaches, they spread bundles of fabric on the ground to create an enormous ‘HELLO’ for the pilot to see.
Initially, they’d had to stop filming after that freeze-frame. “I just had to say one day, ‘We haven’t got any more money,’” producer Andrew Macdonald told Inverse. “And we packed up and left. We didn’t finish the film.” Garland echoed this memory. “There literally wasn’t an ending,” he said, explaining that, for a while, the freeze-frame was the final shot in the film.
After they scraped together some extra cash, they filmed the ending that Garland had written. It took place in a hospital where Jim has come full circle. Instead of waking up from a coma, though, he dies, leaving Selena and Hannah to navigate the world together. When they showed the film to test audiences, it did so poorly that the studio threw money at them to make another. Garland came up with the Cumbria cottage scene, but made sure to leave it open-ended. We never find out if the pilot sees them.
The trouble with this slightly less morbid ending was that a CGI jet was going to cost them £70,000, an amount they absolutely did not have, even after the studio gave them a wad of cash. That might have been the end of it. They could have simply stuck with that tragic original ending or even left it on the cliffhanger of the freeze frame. Instead, they realised that an actual jet was going to cost them significantly less than a computer-generated one. After the film turned out to be a huge hit in the States, the studio allowed Garland’s original ending in the hospital to be tacked on to the end credits.
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