28 Days Later

The empty London of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later is not a digital trick, it is a scheduling solution. Anthony Dod Mantle shot on Canon XL1 consumer camcorders and ran up to eight of them at once for the deserted city plates, because streets could only be closed for ninety seconds to two minutes at a time, with volunteer marshals, students and friends, holding back traffic. After dawn the crew had roughly forty five minutes. You can see the price in every frame: soft resolution, muddy colour, smeared motion. On a large screen that reads as a defect, and it is also the entire source of the film’s urgency. The closing section was shot on 35mm and the change in texture is visible. Halfway through, the danger stops being the infected and becomes a military unit: a handoff between genres, not an escalation within one. The released ending is the survival one. All three alternate endings that were actually filmed kill Jim, and a fourth built around a blood transfusion was storyboarded and abandoned. A good fit if you want the cheapness of the camera to become the tone rather than an apology. Not a fit if a long stretch holding the threat of sexual violence on screen is more than you want to sit with.