Most films that try to be scary fail miserably. I just don't fall for the gimmicks. I mean, when you put the camera right in someone's face and have them walking down a dark hall, it makes it pretty obvious that someone is going to jump out at them. The act itself may be startling (provided the director is smart enough to play with the timing), but it can hardly be called frightening.

Often filmmakers equate gross with scary. And again, they fail. Gross is just gross and the ability to make an audience queazy has very little to do with the ability to scare them.

Those who really understand fear know that what really scares us is not what jumps out at us, or spills lots of blood. The really scary things are what we cannot see and what plays with our most basic fears.

Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, an homage to zombie films, understands the basic concepts of fear and this is what makes the film so effective.

We are offered a brief introduction that breathlessly explains a genetically mutated virus that is accidentially unleashed on the world. Television news reports show massive outbreaks of hostility and carnage.

And then we flash forward 28 days later.

Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a hospital bed. There are stitches in his head that suggest a serious accident (we will later learn that Jim was a bicycle messenger and was hit by a car). Apparently Jim went into the hospital prior to the outbreak of the virus because he has no memory of it.

There doesn't seem to be any doctors or nurses nearby. In fact, there isn't even any sound in the hospital and a sense of creepiness sets in. Something is terribly wrong. The hospital is completely empty and Jim stumbles out into the streets to look for someone.

One of our most basic fears is to find ourselves completely an utterly alone. In the film Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise's character has a dream in which he wanders around Manhatten and the city is completely empty. The scene is brief, but powerful. 28 Days Later takes this concept and ups the ante as our hero wanders around the streets of London. We see him walk through not just one landmark, but much of the city in a group of shots that are at once brilliant and horrifying. This isn't a dream and something truly terrible has happened.

We eventually learn more details of this virus after Jim meets up with Selena (Naomie Harris) and Mark (Noah Huntley). This virus, called Rage, is extremely fast acting. Apparently, it was invented as some sort of military weapon. It's purpose is to instill a mindless, murdurous rage into anyone infected. The infected are no longer able to think and their only purpose seems to be to kill and infect anyone else they meet. For all practical purposes, they are zombies imbued with the strength associated by mindless anger and adrenaline.

The virus is transmitted through bodily fluids and if there's a cure, no one has had time to find one. Once infected, it takes the virus about 20 seconds to take over the victim's mind an once that happens, the only way to stop them is to kill them. This has the potential to make fighting the zombies very tense because if one of your comrades is scratched, he may turn on you before you even know what's happened.

When Jim and his small group finally meet up with a military squad, they are hoping for some answers. Instead they learn that the military, or at least this outfit, knows about as much as anyone else. They have barricaded themselves into a stronghold and are slowly going mad by endlessly fighting the zombies.

About those zombies, they get very little screentime in the film and this a good thing. When we do see them, they are in quick shots with fast shutter speeds that only heighten our anxiety toward them.

Director Boyle knows that this isn't a film about the zombies, but rather about the survivors and their reactions. One of the best scenes in the film occurs when a key character becomes infected and the remaining survivors argue about killing him. They all know that they've only got 20 seconds to make up their minds before the victim fully turns and kills them all, but that 20 seconds of film forces us all to ask if we could really make the only correct decision in so short a span of time. This short segment of film understands more about real fear than all of the Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and countless other so-called scary movies combined.

I wrote a scathing review of Resident Evil not too long ago and I received quite a bit of heat over it from fans of the games and film. 28 Days Later is, in many ways, a very similar film to Resident Evil, but is so much smarter, scarier and better that it shames the other film into submission. It is the difference between a film that only wishes it knew how to scare us and a film that intimately knows what fear is.

The only real sour note in 28 Days Later is the ending, which seems just a little too out of place from the rest of the film. 28 Days Later pulled no punches for its first 112 minutes, so I'm not sure why it went soft in the last 60 seconds.