Escaped lab monkeys in South Carolina are reminding the internet of '28 Days Later'

Forty lab monkeys have escaped from a research facility in South Carolina and given Twitter/X’s affinity for the bleak and the pessimistic, people are already comparing it to the plot of Danny Boyle’s critically acclaimed 2002 zombie thriller 28 Days Later.

As fans of the film will know, it saw the apocalypse brought about by infected monkeys being freed from a laboratory by animal rights campaigners.

Residents in the US state have been told by Yemasee Police Department to keep their windows and doors shut to “prevent these animals from entering homes” and to report any sightings or discoveries to 911.

And no, you can’t keep them.

Police chief Gregory Alexander told the Post and Courier: “Just don’t try to take these things home or pet them. We’re getting a lot of that on our social media. That’s a felony because they don’t belong to you.”

The monkeys are actually owned by Alpha Genesis, which provides “nonhuman primate products and bio-research services” and is "one of the largest and most comprehensive nonhuman primate facilities, designed specifically for monkeys, in the United States".

Federal data states its facility houses more than 6,000 monkeys.

It’s unknown if the monkeys were part of a particular clinical trial, and therefore whether they had had any tested carried out on them before they escaped the lab.

And to many Twitter/X users, all of this sounds familiar:

It’s not the only movie comparison being made, either:

Paging Cillian Murphy…

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