There had never been a zombie film like 28 Days Later. Not least because its zombies technically weren’t zombies. Back in 2002, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland ripped up the undead rulebook – with hordes of flesh-eating former-humans that weren’t actually reanimated corpses, but infected with viral rage; who didn’t shuffle and shamble like Romero’s zombies, but legged it full-pelt; and who brought societal collapse not in the United States, but across the UK. Now, Boyle and Garland are back with 28 Years Later – evolving the apocalypse decades beyond the events of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later, and kicking off an expansive new saga to boot. Non-zombies are, once again, all the rage.
After years of noodling around on possible ideas for where 28 could go next, Garland eventually came to Boyle with a version he wanted to make. “It was a wholly different approach,” Boyle tells Empire. “It was about what that 28 years gives you.” Notably, a very different state of affairs. 28 Days Later depicted the early days of the outbreak; even 28 Weeks Later only moved the story forward around six months (per the demands of its title). But in 28 Years Later, Britain’s straggling survivors (the rest of the globe remains relatively unaffected, leaving the UK to fend for itself) have learned to live in a full-on post-apocalyptic world.
Here, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Jamie, Jodie Comer’s Isla, and their 12-year-old son Spike (Alfie Williams) are part of a community on Holy Island, aka Lindisfarne, connected to the UK mainland by a causeway only briefly accessible when the tide recedes each day. “It’s a closed and necessarily very tight community,” says Boyle. “There are very strict defence laws, obviously, to survive that long in what is effectively an ongoing hostile environment. They’ve created a successful community, as they see it.” It soon comes time for young Spike to take a rite-of-passage trip beyond the safety of Lindisfarne, to open his eyes to the true state of the nation. Needless to say, things don’t go to plan.
That’s just the beginning. What becomes of Jamie, Isla, Spike, and the rest of the UK is set to be depicted across an entire trilogy – beginning with Boyle’s 28 Years Later, continuing in Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (which has already shot), and culminating in a third, Boyle-helmed entry, which won’t go into production until audiences respond to the first film. For screenwriter Garland, the trilogy is no cash-grab, but purely story-driven. “This is very narratively ambitious. Danny and I understood that,” he explains. “We tried to condense it, but its natural form felt like a trilogy.” Get ready, then, for an infected epic. “You just don’t get to do a story on this scale in this country,” says producer Andrew Macdonald. “To do something in Britain that feels like it has [size], it’s great.” Rage on.
Read Empire’s full 28 Years Later cover story – speaking to Danny Boyle, Alex Garland, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes and more about the long-awaited return of one of the 21st century’s greatest horror stories – in the March 2025 issue, on sale Thursday 16 January. Pre-order a copy online here. 28 Years Later comes to UK cinemas from 20 June.