If you’re expecting 28 Years Later to go big in the way most sequels do with more infected, more explosions, global stakes, director Danny Boyle has a curveball for you.
The long-awaited follow-up to his game-changing 2002 film 28 Days Later isn’t trying to outdo the apocalypse. It’s trying to understand what’s left after it.
Speaking to IGN, Boyle revealed that he and writer Alex Garland initially flirted with the typical sequel playbook.
“In fact, Alex wrote one script at one point, but they were kind of what you’d expect, and by that I mean things that you expect from a sequel, like the virus is weaponized by a military or a government or a shady [organization]… That kind of thing. And neither of us were very taken by it.”
Instead of following the infection across continents in a World War Z-style expansion, Boyle and Garland made a sharp U-turn. They chose to pull the focus inward.
“We began to discuss this idea of doing a much bigger project, which was a series of films that sort of did the opposite of spreading it to Europe and the world.”
This reflective approach lines up with what Boyle believes horror can do best by holding up a mirror.
“We turned back and looked at ourselves and we thought … it was very much like an England [type] film. So we kind of narrowed it down. We did the opposite of what you’d expect and it was because we had a lot to think about.”
That “thinking” touches on the real-world fractures that have emerged in the years since 28 Days Later first hit theaters. Boyle mentions Brexit and the UK’s shifting identity, hinting that this new chapter won’t just be about rage-infected hordes, but about how a nation processes trauma.
“That’s what you use these films for. They’re not lectures or anything like that, but they do reflect, or there is a reflection in them, of where you are and what’s happened to you really as individuals and as people.”
The sequel stars Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Ralph Fiennes, and centers on a group of survivors who’ve been living in relative isolation on a remote island. When they return to the mainland, they’re confronted not just with the infected, but with the haunting question of what’s changed, and what hasn’t.
If 28 Days Later redefined what a zombie film could be in the early 2000s, 28 Years Later is looking to flip the genre on its head once again, this time with an eerie calm and a deeper question at its core.
28 Years Later opens in theaters June 20, 2025.
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