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Alex Garland drew inspiration from the beloved 'Resident Evil' for his latest project.
Apart from the gamers, everyone had heard of the 'Resident Evil' franchise — a series of survival horror games that later spawned a string of action-packed movies. While the movie adaptations have a mixed legacy, with only the first movie earning relatively favourable reviews, the original video games left a deeper and more lasting impression on the horror genre. One of the most acclaimed modern zombie films owes its existence to the chilling atmosphere of the first Resident Evil game.
Alex Garland, the writer behind '28 Days Later' and its upcoming sequel '28 Years Later', has openly credited the original 'Resident Evil' game, released in 1996 for the PlayStation, as a key inspiration behind his script. After playing the game in the late ‘90s, Alex Garland was struck by how much he missed quality zombie stories in cinema. The experience reignited his passion for the genre and became the spark that led him to start writing his own take on the undead.
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Image Courtesy: IMDb
The Birth of Fast Zombies: From Game Controller to Script Page
Although Alex Garland has acknowledged that '28 Days Later' borrows elements from older horror works — including the 1963 sci-fi classic 'The Day of the Triffids', whose opening scene similarly features a man awakening in an empty hospital to find civilization in ruins — it was the unique fear induced by 'Resident Evil' that truly pushed him to create something different.
What fascinated Alex Garland was how the game shifted the rules of traditional zombie horror. While the human zombies became predictable once players got used to them, the zombie dogs introduced a whole new level of terror. These creatures were fast, aggressive, and nearly impossible to outrun — a major contrast to the slow-moving, shambling undead most audiences were used to. Garland realised that speed could make zombies genuinely frightening again, and he applied that idea directly to '28 Days Later', which helped redefine how zombies could behave on screen.
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Image Courtesy: IMDb
Science Over Superstition: A Realistic Approach to the Apocalypse
Alex Garland didn't just want to recycle old zombie tropes. A self-described science enthusiast in the ‘90s, he was reading about emerging theories in physics, including ideas like the multiverse. This scientific curiosity found its way into his writing. Rather than relying on the supernatural or mystical origins often seen in zombie fiction, he grounded the outbreak in '28 Days Later' in a man-made virus — something that felt disturbingly plausible.
He believed this scientific basis made the story scarier, as it mirrored real-world concerns about pandemics, experimentation, and biological weapons. The horror, in this case, came not from fantasy but from a version of reality that didn’t feel too far off.
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Image Courtesy: IMDb
From Inspiration to Innovation: The Legacy of '28 Days Later'
While '28 Days Later' didn't invent the concept of fast zombies, it certainly popularised the idea and influenced a wave of horror films that followed. Alex Garland's decision to break from tradition and make the undead more agile added a sense of urgency and unpredictability to the genre. It reimagined what survival horror could look like and helped bring zombies back into mainstream popularity with a fresh, terrifying edge.
For all Garland’s modesty about the film’s originality, '28 Days Later' played a crucial role in evolving the zombie narrative. Just as 'Resident Evil' revived his interest in the genre, his film reignited a passion among audiences for smarter, scarier, and more grounded horror stories.
