“I want that sense of suffocating intensity where you cannot escape this world,” says director Danny Boyle of 28 Years Later. “At the same time, that world must sometimes be pleasurable, and horror can be pleasurable, especially when the intensity of the experience is a communal one. I want audiences to sit down and say, ‘I’m here, I’m part of this now.’”
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
Academy Award-winning director Danny Boyle and Academy Award-nominated writer Alex Garland reunite for 28 Years Later, a terrifying new “auteur horror” story set in the world created by 28 Days Later.
It’s been almost three decades since the rage virus escaped a biological weapons laboratory, and now, still in a ruthlessly enforced quarantine, some have found ways to exist amidst the infected. One such group of survivors lives on a small island connected to the mainland by a single, heavily defended causeway. When one of the group leaves the island on a mission into the dark heart of the mainland, he discovers secrets, wonders, and horrors that have mutated not only the infected but also other survivors as well.
“The Rage Virus laid waste to the UK. It was driven back from continental Europe. The British mainland was quarantined to contain the virus. Survivors were left to fend for themselves.”
Since his feature directorial debut with Shallow Grave, Danny Boyle has been recognized as one of today’s most innovative filmmakers and a true visionary known for pushing the boundaries of storytelling.
With 28 Years Later he has crafted a terrifying and gritty tale that will resonate with fans of the landmark original, 28 Days Later, as well as attract new audiences to the world he and Garland created.
Garland, an esteemed director in his own right, is known for his thought-provoking films, and in 28 Years Later has written an uncompromising and suspenseful script that takes this world in electrifying and startling new directions.
He and Boyle have once again created a visceral and thrilling cinematic experience unlike any audiences have experienced before.
Boyle’s unique vision is heightened by his and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle’s use of the 2.76:1 widescreen aspect ratio with an eye to creating an immersive feel as audiences return to the Rage Virus-ravaged UK.
“We used a very widescreen format in this one,” Boyle says. “We thought we’d benefit from the unease that the first film created about the speed and the velocity, the visceral [aspect] of the way the infected were depicted. If you’re on a widescreen format, they could be anywhere… you have to keep scanning, looking around for them, really.”
Indeed, the goal for Boyle with 28 Years Later was to embrace both an epic and immersive feel and find new ways to depict the infected, all the while focusing on the smaller moments of character that made the original a horror classic.
Rites of Passage
Boyle and Garland bring us into a world that exists 28 years after the outbreak of the virus that has decimated the UK. Society has been forced to rebuild from the ground up, forming new communities.
“We imagined how a world would remake itself after an apocalypse, when everything – all the ‘stuff’ – that had surrounded us now feels irrelevant or even useless,” says Boyle. “How would you go about making sure to have the essentials, like food and fuel?”
28 Years Later is partially set on Holy Island, a thousand-acre section in the northeast coast of England, in a small community that has sealed itself in, to keep the infection out.
This tight but fragile community is protected by a causeway, which helps create a semblance of a safe space for the islanders. “The island and causeway felt like a great starting point for our story,” Boyle elaborates, “because the causeway can be defended when it’s exposed by the tide. A community could thrive. Instead of a post-apocalyptic state, it looks like a town from the turn of the twentieth century. But the mainland then becomes somewhere ‘over there,’ offering both promise and threat.”
The causeway also serves as a reminder of the island’s one ironclad rule: If you don’t come back from an expedition to the mainland, no one is permitted to look for you. There are no search parties or rescues.
As Boyle points out, “With this kind of film we can explore characters by deciding what rules they’re setting and following. It helps define how they think, what they prioritise, and who they are.”
For Garland, that kind of self-sufficient society stems from the global reaction to the infection, which has plagued Britain but left the rest of the world largely untouched. “We considered what the infection would look like,” he remembers. “What happens to the country being quarantined and essentially abandoned by the rest of the world? For those answers, just look at the real world, there’s a kind of ruthless, pragmatic, dog-eat-dog dimension to the ways things play out when a nation collapses. Broadly speaking, people not affected by the collapse ignore it and just go about their lives.”
That kind of deep dive into both global politics and horror is a potent mix, says producer Andrew Macdonald: “We wanted to make a film with a unique kind of epic scale. Using 28 Years Later to accomplish that has been very exciting. It felt like the perfect time for us to return to the infected.”
On the film’s closed-off island, a family is making the best of it. Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson) is a loving and protective husband to his wife Isla (Jodie Comer) and father to his young son Spike (newcomer Alfie Williams). When we meet them, Jamie is preparing Spike for a major rite of passage: a journey to the mainland and an opportunity for Spike to kill his first infected. At the same time, they are taking care of Isla, who has been stricken with a grave illness that has yet to be diagnosed, as there are no doctors or modern medicines remaining in this secluded community.
In addition to amping up the thrills and terror, Boyle and Garland embraced focusing on this family, “which allowed us to explore characters and relationships,” Boyle notes. “Alex came up with this idea centred around a family. It is inventive writing, in a way that was exciting for everyone involved and helped make us feel like we were making an original film, and not a sequel.”
“28 Years Later is a family story,” Garland confirms. “What happens when one member becomes ill, not infected, but still very sick. How do the other family members react?”
A New Generation Of Infected
Twenty-eight years since the emergence of the rage virus – a virulent, bloodborne infection that sends its hosts into a state of extreme, uncontrollable rage – new variants have emerged. The resulting infected are physically different from those we’ve met before. The so-called “Slow-Lows” are fat, fleshy, and slow, and move on all fours with their stomachs low to the ground. Then, there are the first generation infected – those who were stricken during those fateful first waves nearly three decades earlier, and who are etched in muscle, with veins protruding in freakish knots. The clothes they were wearing when infected have long since disintegrated, so they roam the mainland naked and animalistic.
“We wanted to show how they have evolved, because ‘nature always finds a way’ to evolve,” Boyle notes. “It doesn’t stop, no matter how ugly, repellent, or even beautiful the process. With this movie, we’ve accelerated the change, because it’s been only 28 years since the initial infection, which in evolutionary terms is the blink of an eye. We compress it and force it forward. Different elements emerge from the infected. There are even families within them, and groupings begin to form.”
Who needs an iPhone when you have 20 (and 2:76:1 widescreen)?
28 Days Later was famously shot on digital video, which gave it a uniquely homemade feel. So, when it came time to make the new film, the team’s attempts to figure out unique production methods was partly inspired by that approach.
“I suppose you could ignore it, but we decided to carry it as an influence,” says Boyle, who explains that on the first film he and Garland had the “meta idea” that since domestic video cameras were everywhere at that time, there would be low-fi recordings of the horrors of the apocalypse lying around everywhere.
Taking that idea 28 years later, the iPhone was the now-ubiquitous version of 2002’s camcorder. For depicting the apocalypse, Boyle believes “it’s wonderful to give yourself parameters that you use to try and depict it and have technical limitations.” That would include using iPhones to shoot certain sequences, sometimes as many as 20 of them at a time. But that was just one of the methods the filmmaker implemented.
Several production techniques were used to achieve that immersive feeling, including attaching cameras to actors, special sensors, designing rigs to house multiple cameras, drones, and working with a wide variety of camera types and lenses. And that included three special rigs for the iPhone sequences.
“One for eight cameras, which can be carried very easily by one person, one for 10 cameras, and one for 20,” explains the director of the iPhone rigs. “I never say this, but there is an incredible shot in the second half of the film where we use the 20-rig camera, and you’ll know it when you see it. … It’s quite graphic but it’s a wonderful shot that uses that technique, and startlingly that kind of kicks you into a new world rather than thinking you’ve seen it before.”
Boyle equates the 20-camera rig to “basically a poor man’s bullet time.” It allows flexibility for the filmmakers in terms of light and ease of use on location shoots, and it can be attached to cranes or a camera dolly or built into a location even.
“Wherever, it gives you 180 degrees of vision of an action, and in the editing, you can select any choice from it, either a conventional one-camera perspective or make your way instantly around reality, time-slicing the subject, jumping forward or backwards for emphasis,” he says. “As it’s a horror movie, we use it for the violent scenes to emphasise their impact.
“I also like it for the same reason I love jumping the line,” he adds. “For a moment the audience is inside the scene, the action, rather than classically observing a picture. You feel like you’re in the room with Jodie Comer and her son, venting her rage at Aaron Taylor Johnson, like you’re in the abandoned train with the naked Alpha and the unzipped spine and head.”
“I never say this, but there is an incredible shot in the second half of the film where we use the 20-rig camera, and you’ll know it when you see it. … It’s quite graphic but it’s a wonderful shot that uses that technique, and in a startling way that kind of kicks you into a new world rather than thinking you’ve seen it before.
”Dod Mantle also used more conventional cameras, but in unconventional ways. For jarring smash cuts to animals and infected roaming the mainland. “I was basically photographing thermal energy and moving it through them,” he explains. “Moreover, to maximize the impact and “ick” factor of the new Slow-Low variants of the infected, Dod Mantle attached cameras to them, producing what he calls “very disturbing” views of their bounteous flesh moving close to the ground. “I call it embedding the audience through the lens, and Danny and I really love that,” he elaborates. “I want audiences to feel like they’re riding on the back of the Slow-Lows.”
Boyle’s decision to employ the 2.76:1 widescreen aspect ratio – an unexpected choice for a film of this nature, as 2.76:1 is often used for IMAX or Ultra Panavision 70mm epics, such as Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, and Ryan Coogler’s recent Sinners – heightens the immersive feel.
It all points to Boyle and Dod Mantle’s drive to always push the envelope. “This is the tenth picture on which Danny and I have worked together, which means we can cut to the chase quite quickly,” the cinematographer says. “We both like maverick ideas, techniques, and technology that are insistent in their language and push boundaries. We believe in testing, challenging, and breaking conventions, and wanted to do all of that with this film.”
Now, these practices serve Boyle’s vision for 28 Years Later to be an auteur horror theatrical event best experienced on the big screen. “I want that sense of suffocating intensity where you cannot escape this world,” he states. “At the same time, that world must sometimes be pleasurable, and horror can be pleasurable, especially when the intensity of the experience is a communal one. I want audiences to sit down and say, ‘I’m here, I’m part of this now.’
DANNY BOYLE (Director / Producer) reprises his role as director of the original film, 28 Days Later. Prior to 28 YEARS LATER, Boyle directed the films Yesterday, Steve Jobs, Battle of the Sexes, 127 Hours, and Slumdog Millionaire, for which he won the Academy Awards for Best Directing and Best Picture. His debut film, Trainspotting, was nominated for a BAFTA for Outstanding British Film.
ALEX GARLAND’s (Writer / Producer) latest film Warfare, which he co-wrote and directed with Navy SEAL veteran Ray Mendoza, was released April 11, 2025. Garland teamed with A24 on Warfare, as he did on his 2024 film Civil War. Garland directed the 2022 horror film Men, the 2018 film Annihilation, and the 2014 film Ex Machina, for which he was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards,
as well as three BAFTAs, including Best Original Screenplay. Garland created, wrote, and directed Devs, an eight-part miniseries for FX starring Nick Offerman, which premiered spring 2020.
