It hasn’t been a full 28 years since 28 Days Later, but it’s getting very close. We almost can’t fully process just how influential and innovative the original movie was in 2002. Not only did it provide a jumpstart to the zombie (or zombie-like creature) genre, it gave the world fast-running hordes. Technologically, the movie’s use of handheld digital cameras proved equally as cutting edge, even if it looks quite rough by today’s standards. On returning to the story with 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland wanted to do more than just rehash. They wanted to explore the premise through a 2025 lens.
Nerdist spoke to Boyle and Garland, as well as actors Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, about 28 Years Later and blending family drama with rage-infected scares.
“I think we wanted to do something different,” Boyle told us. “You have to be sensible. You are obviously basing it on the original movie. There is a debt that you hold and that you have to acknowledge, but we wanted to make it as minimal as possible. So much so that although we had Cillian [Murphy]’s agreement to be involved and he’s part of [the later films] and that freed us up to try and make an original film with, like I said, a certain acknowledgement of the debt.”
The movie’s story, while still about people surviving a plague-destroyed landscape, is very different from the first movie. Great Britain has been completely quarantined from the rest of the world. Mainland Europe has managed to eradicate the rage virus, but no British person is allowed to leave. This means the people who live there have had to manage in a new agrarian society and fortify their communities. At the same time, the infected have had almost 30 years to evolve.
“We want to move them on through the 28 years time passage to see how they’ve evolved,” Boyle continued. “To see how the infection, the virus has moved to survive itself. Just like the survivors have established a world that they built from zero about how they can survive without electricity, without technology. So the instinct was to be as original as possible, as much as possible throughout.”
“To me it’s just sort of what life is like,” Garland said of the rest of the movie’s world ignoring the plight of Britain. “While we are talking right now, there are some incredibly serious conflicts happening at this exact moment and here we are talking about a movie release. The world does have a really eerie, slightly creepy ability to compartmentalize and does it very naturally.”
“What the film is doing,” he continued, “is just putting Britain in the state of one of those sort of acknowledged but also concurrently forgotten. And yes, the world carries on, has Amazon drivers, has people augmenting their face with collagen or whatever it is they do, and just carrying on as per normal.”
The reality, the normal, is a major part of the lives of the characters in the movie. The relative safety of the small, offshore community allows for the family drama element to come to the forefront. At the center, we find Jamie (Taylor-Johnson) prepared to take son Spike (Williams) on his first “hunt,” while wife/mother Isla (Comer) remains largely bedridden with an unknown illness.
“I think the beauty of that is Alex Garland wrote a story where these characters are so rich,” Taylor-Johnson explained. “On the page, it’s a very intimate family drama. So I think you kind of just play into the reality of that and the groundedness. But it’s weird. You don’t almost play into the horror aspect. You’re sort playing into the truth.”
“We also had a two week rehearsal period before we started shooting,” Comer added. “Then our first week, at least, my first week on set, was in the house [together]. We went from the rehearsal room where Danny had set up the bedroom, we had all the props, and then we went straight into that set, which was amazing.”
She continued, “Danny would often play out multiple scenes in order to get momentum and to really create an energy on set. It worked, and I think the rehearsals helped all of us. It was great for us to meet each other, get familiar, and kind of create some history between us.”
The society of the island also feels fully realized and the people have gone back to an older, more traditional existence. Boyle says this, too, reflects our own times. “[It’s been] happening around the world over the last maybe 10 years,” the director continued. “This tendency to look back to the glorious past and to imagine that one might be able to live there again. Faced with the lack of electricity and the lack of technology, they have almost naturally regressed back to us almost 1950s-type existence.”
Part of that, he continued, was reverting to traditional gender roles. “The boys and the girls have been separated and gender become identified again as your key roles are to do with your gender. So the boys are trained to fight and to kill and the girls to prepare the food at home. And it was just that looking backwards was really, I think a key part of the journey of the world building of them.”
But Spike, as our lead character, doesn’t fully conform. “The boy has a decision to make by the end of the film,” Boyle explained. “Will he return to his father as his father’s whole role model suggests and steps into the footsteps of his father and life progresses in that way. Or will he try and find something else? He’ll, of course, find out what he’s going to step into is very, very dangerous indeed.”
You can see the danger for yourself when 28 Years Later hits cinemas on Friday, June 20.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.
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