FILMS SHOT ON IPHONES INCLUDING 28 YEARS LATER

While there is endless filmmaking equipment out there costing from hundreds to £80,000 (and more), you would have thought the most anticipated horror film of 2025 might be using gear at the higher end of the scale… Right?

Wrong. If you’re saving up for the best camera in the business to film your next project, you may just be wasting your time.

Why not just use your iPhone? Everyone else is, including Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, which Metro has given 5 big fat emotional stars in our review.

It’s not the first time this has happened, either. Here are all the films you might not know were filmed primarily using an iPhone. One even made it to the Oscars.

28 Years Later

Hitting cinemas on Friday and starring Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the hotly-anticipated sequel to 28 Days Later used an adapted iPhone 15 for the job, making the Hollywood thriller – with its $75million budget – the biggest film to be shot with a phone to date.

In 2002, 28 Days Later was one of the first Hollywood feature films to be shot with a Canon XL-1 for an intentionally low-fi look. This new flick – which kicks off a new trilogy for the franchise – took inspiration from its original.

Boyle recently explained why he used an adapted iPhone 15 for the job during the London premiere of the film.

The director told The Independent: ‘We decided to shoot it on the upgrade of a domestic video camera. That’s smartphones, they’re everywhere. They are lightweight in the countryside. You can create special rigs with them, filming the violence. But also you can give it to the actors and they can film themselves sometimes.

‘Horror movies let you refresh the palate – you don’t have to go classical.’

He also added to Business Insider: ‘Any smartphone now can record at 4K, indeed up to 60 frames per second, which is more than enough resolution you need for cinema exhibition.’

Boyle went on to reveal how they utilised farm animals to help, explaining: ‘We did strap a camera to some animals a couple of times — yeah, a goat.’ Nice.

Big Man

Stormzy’s new film Big Man was fortunate enough to get their hands on an iPhone 16 Pro for filming… Eat your hear out Danny Boyle. Slow-motion scenes were captured in 4K 120 fps, while cinematic mode was also used to blur backgrounds.

Apple’s short film tells the story of Tenzman, a fed up musician played by Stormzy whose life is changed by two youngsters when they embark on a journey together.

‘I’ve never shot an entire piece of narrative filmmaking on an iPhone before, and it’s been a really invigorating process,’ director Aneil Karia said.

‘iPhone is much smaller than the traditional cameras used for television, film, or music videos, and the lightness and flexibility that comes with that is boundless in a sense.

‘I like trying to strive for an intimacy with characters, and sometimes a big camera is not particularly conducive for that.’

Unsane

Psychological thriller Unsane, starring Claire Foy and Joshua Leonard, was filmed entirely on an iPhone 7 Plus.

Unsane follows a stalking victim called Sawyer Valentini (Foy) who is trapped in a mental institution against her will.

‘I started shooting this film with a Super 8 camera, which is pretty expensive stuff. I completely ran out of money. I had just a very few shots left, but I needed those shots,’ he told CNN in an interview.

‘I realised that there was this app on my iPhone and I tried it and it looked basically the same.’

The iPhone App in question was called 8mm Vintage Camera, which did a decent job at imitating a real 8mm camera. Good to know.

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2025-06-19T23:17:13Z