back from the dead; Zombies were buried in the B-movie graveyard but

A zombie is never just a zombie. Unlike vampires, killers in masks and other movieworld bogeymen, zombies have no real agenda of their own. They are just motorised instinct, and that instinct is usually to shamble around and eat the living right down to the bones. This revolting single-mindedness makes zombies empty vessels for satire or allegory or whatever deeper meaning a film-maker wants to invest them with. George Romero, the director who first made corpses walk the earth with his ferocious 1968 indie movie Night Of The Living Dead, saw them as essentially identical to the average American - dumb but blankly aggressive herd animals. Ten years later he refined his vision with the gloomily satirical sequel Dawn Of The Dead, set almost entirely in a shopping mall the day after doomsday, with zombies as the ultimate docile consumers.

In 28 Days Later, the strange and intense new movie from British director-producer team Danny Boyle and Andrew MacDonald, the zombies aren't technically zombies, as defined by the pedantic specifications of the horror genre. They're living people infected with a virus called rage. It works in 10 seconds and wipes out Britain in weeks, transforming crowds into neon-eyed, blood-vomiting monsters, locked in a fatal state of contagious killing frenzy. And it's rage, primarily but not exclusively, that Boyle and co are really talking about.

"I thought it was a brilliant spin on this kind of story in that the disease is psychological and not clinical," says Boyle. "And the real germ of it is the wild anger and intolerance you see around you, and in newsreel footage these days. Every inner-city hospital has security guards now. There are these incidents of air-rage, which the papers seem to think are good for a laugh. Violence itself has always been around - my dad says that Bolton FC matches in the 1950s were far more violent than any football games today - but this total fury is definitely something new."

Boyle is a serious director, and a thoughtful man, and it was unlikely he would make a film back in Britain that wasn't actually about Britain on some level. Not after the fairytale American whimsy of A Life Less Ordinary and the flashy, backpacking globalism of The Beach, both of which dissipated the early energy of the so-called "Trainspotting Team".

"You try to work out where all this anger comes from," says Boyle. "And you go back to Thatcher, when she said there's no such thing as society - it's all just individuals. Consumerism leads us to believe that we're each empowered, but you phone any company and they'll tell you that you're important to them and then put you in a queue. You're not f***ing important to them at all. The truth is we're meaningless, and we're all part of a whole that we can't dominate and people become infuriated by that."

Sure sure. But this film is still a death-gripping chill- thriller, right?

"Oh yeah," he nods. "There's a certain extent to which you want to crowd-please. But within that you're trying to twist it. With Trainspotting, for example, we made a serious drug movie that's intensely enjoyable to watch, and there's an organic reason for that because drugs are intensely enjoyable at one stage. Leave people with something to think about and if they don't want to think about it, they really don't have to."

When he first had the idea that started all this, sometime novelist Alex Garland wasn't really thinking sociologically. After finishing his second book, The Tesseract, and watching Boyle, MacDonald and their regular writing partner John Hodge slog through their troublesome adaptation of his mega-selling debut The Beach, he was "only thinking about movies". He was daydreaming about the end of the world, which to Garland has never seemed like such a bad thing.

"I've always had a thing about post-apocalypse stories," he says. "They're attractive even though they shouldn't be. All bets are off; the characters can rewrite the rules as they go along; the stakes are incredibly high. It's just a great setting for drama and fantasy and you get to do things like looting a supermarket or nicking the Toyota landcruiser you always wanted."

The most powerful sequence in the movie comes almost at the start, 28 days after misguided animal rights activists release the rage virus from a secret lab. A good-guy Irish bike courier, played by Cillian Murphy (not particularly well known, even for his most famous role in the stage and screen versions of Enda Walsh's play Disco Pigs) wakes up alone in hospital to find London howlingly empty, desolate in broad daylight. Wandering under famous landmarks to the tensile strains of cult Canadian doom-orchestra Godspeed You Black Emperor (the first time this shadowy band have ever lent their music to anyone) Murphy is understandably freaked out. But there's also a weird element of wish-fulfilment in seeing that choked, infuriating city made perfectly vacant. Except for the zombies, obviously.

"I know what you mean," says Murphy. "I love living in London now, but as an outsider I always hated it. When you're alone it's a really hard, oppressive city."

"A lot of people hate the place," agrees Garland. "And there's far more psychological impact in seeing London deserted than LA or the cities these stories are usually set in."

Garland himself has become an unintentionally enigmatic figure over the past few years. Massively likeable but pretty reclusive, he lit up the "youth culture" end of the book world like a fruit machine with The Beach, then wrote a more mature, complex and far less popular second novel, then dropped out of literature altogether. The rumour since has been that he just sits around playing video games and tinkering with screenplays.

"That's an astonishingly accurate rumour," he acknowledges. "I don't know where you heard it from - my brother presumably. I play a lot of video games and I don't really socialise and I'm not planning to write another novel."

Despite the hassles of The Beach, a film that he has "no objective opinion about", Garland had seen and appreciated the positive aspects of the screenwriting process. (Boyle thinks it's "all right" but admits he "cut far too much out of it".) "I'd never written collaboratively before and it looked like fun," says Garland. "With this film, right from the start, I'd do a few pages and then sit down with Danny and Andrew and discuss them. You're writing and you're talking to people, and I didn't realise you could do that."

The result is a story that seems to have evolved fairly organically from Garland's early drafts - which were, by all accounts, filled with wild, Romero-style satire, bleakness and genre- heavy zombie-mania. The film was shot almost entirely on digital video, which, according to Boyle, "allows you to keep control by keeping the cost down". Which is to say, the exact opposite of Boyle's experience making The Beach.

"I love big films," says Boyle. "We all do, especially when you see them pulled off really well. But at that price, they're always a product, which means pressure. If you want to make a film about your own country, then you have to work on a much smaller scale because then you can use the actors you want to use and so on."

But as well as being the "new world of film", digital video is so fast and flexible that you can put the film together in sequence and "develop ideas as you go along".

The result is a film with a vivid look somewhere between otherworldly and a documentary - one that expresses the story's off- kilter fusion of the real, the surreal and the hyperreal. Every step of the film is grounded in common logic and practicality - civilian survivors mourn their dead, band together into surrogate families, stave off the infected and turn to soldiers for protection. But there are electric horror-movie flourishes throughout, with eye-gougings and zombie priests and a dark mansion showdown in a lightning storm.

The restricted (pounds) 5 million budget works in the film's favour. Murphy admits he "comes pretty cheaply as a leading man" but the fact you don't know him, or any of the cast (except maybe Brendan Gleeson as a good-hearted cabbie and Christopher Eccleston as a viciously pragmatic army officer) means that Garland and Boyle can largely stick to Romero's rule for tension - anybody could die at any moment.

While they were shooting, they came up with the idea of reducing the scale of the virus itself, which increases the impact of the whole scenario - the implication being that Britain alone has been infected, and quarantined from the rest of the world. Which should teach us a lesson for our piggish isolationism.

"I think that's become the most interesting point about the film," says Boyle. "Deflating Britain's opinion of itself. We have to have a relationship with the mainland but we don't, we cling to this bullshit idea of self-reliance and that notion that we stood alone in the war. That's all bollocks."

Boyle's next project is apparently a movie about the Euro, where he'll presumably expand on these ideas. Garland, meanwhile, has been thinking about "maybe writing comic books". But he might just "do nothing, and get sucked in again by the X-Box and the Gamecube". He's a big fan of the Resident Evil games, where a zombie is just a zombie.

28 Days Later is released on Friday l Film reviews: Pages 12&13

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