Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later (Fox Searchlight)
Danny Boyle revives the zombie film for the new millennium with 28 Days Later (opening at Madstones Hazard Theaters, AMC La Jolla and other San Diego area theaters on June 27).
Technically, the creatures in 28 Days Later aren't really zombies. Zombies, as invented by the movies, are undead or reanimated cadavers. The first movie zombies were created through voodoo ( White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie) . But classic zombies--as defined by George Romero's Dead Trilogy and the spaghetti horror films of Lucio Fulci--were the dead risen from the grave and eager to feast on human flesh. After Romero (whose films spanned three decades with 1968's Night of the Living Dead ; 1978's Dawn of the Dead ; and 1985's Day of the Dead ), the genre fell into jokiness that lost sight of the terror and social criticism that Romero's films offered. But Boyle brings back both the element of fear and the bite of social commentary with his flesh-eating, viral-infected creatures of the night.
