28 Days Later Used A Simple Casting Trick To Create Its Groundbreaking Zombies

George Romero's 1968 film "Night of the Living Dead" used Pittsburgh locals to play zombies. Their performances may not have been Oscar-worthy, but Romero's indie production went on to become one of the most groundbreaking horror films of all time, and those "townie" zombies are still terrifying in 2026. But what do you do when you're casting for an amped-up pack of rage-filled zombies? This is precisely the debacle that filmmaker Danny Boyle found himself in when hiring talent for his 2002 zombie film "28 Days Later." His solution was to cast the fastest people on the planet: athletes.

In an interview with PeopleTV in 2019, Boyle elaborated on his thought process of targeting the fitness-inclined to fill zombie roles: "To be really scary, they can't just stumble around going 'argh', 'cause otherwise you'd just walk away from them. There's an agency where athletes [go] after they finish their careers... and they get hired to open supermarkets, turn tumbles, and they find work like that. We hired them to be the zombies, so when they ran at you, it was pretty scary."

The result of that strategy became a timeless classic. The adrenaline-fueled ghouls of "28 Days Later" would go on to inspire zombie behavior for years following the film's release, with their impact still felt in genre staples like "Army of the Dead," Zack Snyder's underrated zombie movie that you can now stream on Netflix.

Zombies have a forever-home in the horror genre, but their exploits have also been spun into a handful of horror-comedies, including films like "Shaun of the Dead," "Zombieland," and "Warm Bodies." But Danny Boyle's zombies aren't trying to make you laugh; they just want to rip you apart.

More recent zombie-inspired movies and shows, like HBO Max's "The Last of Us," owe many an arm and a leg to the creatives behind "28 Days Later." The fungal zombie-like hordes of "The Last of Us" are frenzied to the max. Now the many sequels to "28 Days Later" — "28 Weeks Later," "28 Years Later," and "28 Years Later: The Bone Temple" — have expanded Boyle's and screenwriter Alex Garland's (yes, the director of "Ex Machina" and "Warfare") original vision into a full-bodied franchise.

Would we consider "28 Days Later" to be one of the best horror movies of all time? The jury's still out on that one, but the film is exceptional for more than just its athletic monsters. The movie was shot in 480p to make for a raw "found-footage" look, and let's not forget the incredible opening sequence where Cillian Murphy's character wanders the streets of a shockingly empty London.