28 Days Later offered a singular twist on a horror trope: Instead of the dead rising up from the graves, the “zombies” of Danny Boyle’s zombie movie would be normal humans transformed by the man-made “Rage Virus.” And they could run.
So, after years and years of Boyle and writer Alex Garland debating whether to follow the maligned 28 Weeks Later with a proper sequel from the original team — and sorting out the complicated rights issues to do so — Boyle tells Polygon that there was really one goal for what to do next.
“The idea of the film in many ways was to be as original as possible,” he says of this week’s 28 Years Later. “Its structure is very unusual. Its progression is even more unusual, and it’s quite startling even at script stage to realize that the last third of the film is going to be this moving examination of mortality in different ways — and commemorate and celebrate that.”
28 Years Later tells the story of a 12-year-old boy, Spike (Alfie Williams), who has grown up in a walled-off island town off the shore of the quarantine zone. He has never seen the outside world; no one in the UK was permitted to leave after the Rage Virus decimated the population, and neighboring countries continue to patrol the perimeter to ensure normalcy for the outside world. Spike’s father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), believes it’s essential for his son to grow into the toughest version of himself, a protector. Early on, they venture off into the wilderness to hunt, while Spike’s mother, Isla (Jodie Comer,) suffers from a mysterious illness no one in their microcosm is equipped to treat.
There’s a strong human element to 28 Years Later — Boyle and Garland have said Ken Loach’s 1969 coming-of-age drama Kes was a major inspiration, and the connection is deeply felt — but it manifests in more than just the survivors. Twenty-eight years after the first exposure to Rage, the infected have persisted, transformed, and inched closer to becoming their own, separate species.
“One of the things we’re doing in this is shortening the distance between the humans and the infected,” Garland says. “We’re acknowledging that they’re not different from us. They have an illness which a doctor would look at in a different way to the way we would instinctively react to it. So it’s as much to do with things that appear to be very different but have more in common and can be addressed or observed in different ways.”
Photo: Sony Pictures
From the beginning of development, Garland knew he wanted to take advantage of the large passage of time between the first film and the new sequel — 28 years is a long, long time for a crumbling society. And in extrapolating the direction the world might go, he landed on two possibilities that ultimately informed how the infected we see in 28 Years Later have evolved. “One is: there aren’t any infected left and life has gone back to normal. So that would be one sort of film you could do, sort of post-COVID film as it were. And the other is: no, the infection is still alive. Well, how could it still be alive? These are not reanimated dead people via some sort of supernatural means. They’re people who have an illness or a condition or a virus, in this case. And so, how are they still alive? They need to consume energy, they need to drink.”
The survival instincts — and even the rage that fuels the infected’s never-ending hunt — exist in every character in 28 Years Later, zombie-esque or not. “If you look at the films in detail, it is something that’s within us all,” Boyle says. “There isn’t the sense that it’s an outsider’s disease or something, that there’s some sickness that they just have and we don’t. Every character gets to exhibit part of it, the potential for it within ourselves.”
Boyle and Garland aren’t the types to put a fine point on the themes of their own films, but the writer admits that there is a certain amount of frustration bubbling under the surface of 28 Years Later, and the greater idea that all of this horror is happening to real people on both sides of the line.
“I think these things are interpretive, but for me it would be about the way in which over the last 10 to 15 years, we’ve become increasingly preoccupied by looking back rather than looking forward, back to the way things used to be. But then examining that more, how much of that is about selective amnesia, things that are just ignored about the way things used to be, or misremembered about the way things used to be, or just selectively remembered? Cherrypicked? And so it’s a film about an aggressive state rather than a progressive state, at least in part.”
Out of the development hell that plagued a proposed 28 Months Later came not just 28 Years Later, but a full-blown trilogy of films. The story feels complete with the credits roll on 28 Years, by design, but in that exploration of world-building and commentary, Boyle and Garland clearly found more to say — and it’ll find its way back to that original movie eventually.
“You have to acknowledge the first film, but to a minimal degree, but we tried to make a standalone film in its own right,” Boyle says. “But Cillian [Murphy, star of 28 Days Later], for instance, who’d be the most obvious way to make the thing feel continuous with the first film, is a very important feature of the trilogy — but not just yet.”
28 Years Later opens in theaters on June 20.
