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The film 28 Days Later is a mishmash of influences (Omega Man, George Romero's zombie trilogy, John Wyndham's "cozy catastrophes"*), but it still packs a wallop. As fellow PreReviewer Sally McKay says in an email:
The fear in this film (Danny Boyle is director, from Trainspotting, etc.) is really contemporary. Globalization protest is an undercurrent, the main character is a bike courier, and the plot is a viral plague. All this content is punched home by the fact that it's shot with consumer-technology cameras. Sort of an open-source feel to the whole thing.The use of MiniDV is discussed in this article on Anthony Dod Mantle, the cinematographer, and the gritty, grainy texture of the video and the filmmakers' keen eye for composition & detail make an unbeatable combination. Seeing the movie a second time you become more aware of how artful (not arty) some of the images are (semi-spoilers): the eerie scenes of a completely depopulated daytime London (the Dod Mantle article explains how this was done); hundreds of colored plastic rain-collecting buckets spread like a Tony Cragg piece on the roof of Brendan Gleeson's flat; the Constructivist vortex of high tension wires outside the bike messengers's parents' home (in the extreme foreground of the shot); the weirdly Photoshopped rows of flowers on the road to Manchester; the heavy sheets of rain at the military checkpoint in the last reel; the messenger's view of the jet contrail through a tangle of silhouetted branches. Many of these shots would have been effective if done on regular film stock, but the video gives the movie a documentary urgency, so the best compositions seem accidental, which is even better.
*So called because, although apocalyptic, the action is largely confined to the British Isles and the protagonists never see the worst of it. Most germane here is the book Day of the Triffids. Giant ambulatory plants, offspring of crossbreeding experiments, are slow moving, responsive to sound, and lethal to humans--killing with a deadly stinger and feeding on the carrion. They aren't actually much of a threat until a strange meteor shower, watched all over the globe, strikes most of the population inexplicably blind. Recuperating from eye surgery perfomed before the meteors fell, a man removes the bandages from his eyes in a strangely empty hospital, and discovers a changed world...