20 Horror Movie Openings That Are Practically Perfect
12. 28 Weeks Later - Don Runs For His Life
Perhaps it'd be unfair to call 28 Weeks Later outright bad per se, but it was a disappointing follow-up to a modern horror classic and there's no getting away from that.
That beginning, though.
In this sequence, Don (Robert Carlyle) makes the traumatic decision to abandon his own wife and sprints away from a pursuing crowd of infected, all while John Murphy's all-timer of a track 'In the House, in a Heartbeat' thumps frantically over the whole fraught spectacle. The fantastically intense editing and Robert Carlyle's vivid portrayal of terror and guilt make this a sucker-punch of a beginning that hinted at a far better sequel than the one we actually got.
Interestingly, Danny Boyle (who directed 28 Days Later) didn't return as director for this one but he did do a bit of second-unit directing, most notably on this scene. That goes a long way towards explaining why this sequence was so much better than the rest of the movie, which saw director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo try to ape Boyle's frenetic style to inferior, migraine-inducing effect.