28 Days Later opens with chimps chained in front of multiple TV screens, forced to watch video footage of every variation of atrocity humans have inflicted on each other (strangely, no Big Brother clips are included). It’s hard to imagine exactly what epiphanies on animal behavior the scientists were seeking, but they need look no further than this film for valuable insights into the human response to cataclysm. End-of-the-world films seem to have fallen out of vogue once worldwide fears of Cold-War nuclear devastation faded from preeminent popular concern, and at the time they served as provocative opportunities for self-examination: once the veneer of civilization is stripped away, would I really have what it takes to continue? Or am I helpless without the “modcons,” or modern conveniences, to which I’ve become accustomed? (No a/c? Pass the cyanide pill.)

Such is the dilemma facing “Jim” (Cillian Murphy), a former bicycle courier in London who awakens from a coma of indefinite duration (a car had cut him off during a delivery) and finds the entire hospital deserted. And the surrounding streets. And every place in sight. Electricity is absent, outdated newspapers speak of some sort of national emergency, and flyers posted on walls (in a very 9-11 touch) attest to endless numbers of missing individuals. When a graffito proclaims that “the end is extremely f*cking nigh,” you know Jim’s facing an internal paradigm shift as he wanders around in disbelief.

Most horror flicks initially present a copacetic status quo that, once the film’s particular threat is confronted and vanquished, can return and allow everyone to sleep peacefully. But what if, even if you do “win,” the world will never be the same? (See Deep Impact or The Day The Earth Caught Fire for effective examples.) You can understand Jim’s insistent denial – for all he knows, he’s still happily comatose and dreaming – but once he enters a cathedral (is he a religious man? or about to become one?) and he sees the piles of corpses strewn across the pews, he can safely surmise all is not well in the United Kingdom. Not to mention when he calls out “hello?”, and a couple of the bodies turn to get a look at him.

It’s easy to assume that he’s entered the standard territory of the zombie film, and 28 Days Later’s marketing campaign is content to let you believe as much, but as Jim evades these spooks, and runs across a couple other survivors of this mysterious plague, it becomes increasingly clear that this film’s particular cast of bogeymen bear scant resemblance to those George Romero introduced into the cultural consciousness. Let’s review the basics of the Living Dead series’ ghouls: they’re dead, they have poor motor skills, they want to eat the living, and once you’re feasted upon you join their ranks, if there’s enough of you left to start hobbling around.

Director Danny Boyle (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary) is certainly known for going his own way, and he’s forging new ground here as well: the ashen-faced, red-eyed bezerkers that chase after Jim (and his fetching new female partner Selena, who saved his skinny butt in the church) aren’t dead, but infected with “rage,” some sort of virus that hit the human population after animal-rights-activists freed the aforementioned monkeys from their cages. “It’s something in the blood,” Selena explains as best she can, and while the infected don’t want to eat you, they do want to tear you to pieces. If you do find one of them imposing themselves upon your person, you’d best pray they’re through with you before there’s any inadvertent exchange of bodily fluids – the infected tend to vomit a lot – and if any of their blood or saliva gets in your system while you’re alive, you become one of them within twenty seconds. (Strangely, they don’t seem to care to attack one of their own kind. Two kinds of death, I suppose – either way, the you that you knew is no more.)

An aversion to sunlight seems to be their only downgrade from their cinematic predecessors, so daytime is the only time you dare venture into the open; once the sun goes down, or you’re in a dark building, you’ll discover how fast these wraiths can run or climb or pounce, and how relentlessly they desire to do you harm. It’s an eerie revision of the zombie myth, one where the not-yet-dead-but-hardly-alive seem to have all become Olympic sprinters – so the next time you want to reintroduce experimental monkeys into the wild, make sure they get a complete physical first.

There’s no longer any government, police, army, TV, radio, or power, says Selena to catch Jim (and us) up to speed; “staying alive is as good as it gets.” A bleak prognosis, to be sure, and one Jim’s not entirely prepared to accept just yet. Selena’s a tough cookie, eminently capable in all sorts of dire situations, but when the duo finds an uninfected father and daughter making the best of things in a barricaded high-rise, and hear radio broadcasts from an army troop to the north declaring “you’re not alone,” they entertain the hope that there may yet be more to life then mere survival.

What 28 Days Later does borrow from the established horror formula is the pacing of calm, waiting, quiet, and then something jumps out. It’s hell on your nerves, but it’s far from an unexpected stylistic choice. (And not all that removed from reality: imagine what the average American soldier in Iraq goes through these days.) At first Jim’s so tense he can’t even sleep, but in time he seems to have finally accepted his lot, and in one instance he deliberately seeks out some of the hyperactive miscreants so he can bash their heads in as a stress reliever. Finally resigned to this latest twist in the course of the human race, he next has to confront a potentially more insidious threat: men, with guns, who have declared themselves the boss of whomever and whatever they run across.

So goes the eternal cycle of mankind: the order falls apart, a new order arises, and you can either submit to the new authority or risk the consequences. If you’ve seen enough movies, you know well enough Jim’s entourage shouldn’t immediately trust the band of soldiers who’ve holed up in a countryside mansion and surrounded it with razor wire, kliegs, and land mines (with apologies to the late Princess Di), but it must be a tremendous relief just to know you’re not all that remains of uninfected England. That’s small comfort, though, when these heavily-armed blokes feel justified in behaving little better than their infected counterparts, and comport themselves less than civilly towards their newest colleagues.

Alex Garland’s script thus hands us another familiar element from scary movies: characters we wouldn’t mind meeting a bad end. And here’s where Jim’s processes of adaptation take an unexpected step: he decides the extermination of the human race is better than these military troglodytes inheriting the earth, and he introduces sufficient zombie chaos into their fortress to severely test their whole might-makes-right dictum. It’s possibly a quintessentially British dose of anarchy Boyle taps into, and while Selena and Jim admit “it’s still all f*cked,” at least they had the freedom to choose just how f*cked.

This is a film worthy of its gradual climb up the weekly top-grossers list, despite its occasional flaws, such as Jim snapping out of his coma completely naked (no linens? no diaper?), the unlikelihood the infected wouldn’t attack each other if no one else was around (assimilate or die?), and the stunt-driving skills of their teenage girl companion Hannah. Boyle more than compensates for any non sequiturs with visual flourishes like a slo-mo petrol station explosion seen from various distances, numerous goldfish fighting for room in a fishtank slowly running out of water, swarms of rats behaving like London was the sinking Titanic, artificially-painted flowers colorizing the British countryside, and aural touches like the perpetual choking sound uttered by the infected and a more than adequate music track. It’s a fascinating, if unfortunate, journey Jim and crew make across England, as each site they stumble upon offers instances of post-apocalyptic archaeology (and at least one very British jab at the European Union’s abhorrence of non-organic produce, since the only fruit that’s lasted in the deserted grocery stores are the irradiated bunches). Boyle’s to be commended for his ingenious use of locations and of digital video, and for concocting a thoroughly tense experience that you won’t quickly shake off - oh, and for confirming my worst fears about what happens when you watch too much TV.