“The big discovery was thinking about our own behavior after Covid,” Boyle says.
In the first weeks or months of the pandemic, you probably washed your hands for a full 20 seconds every time you got home, and you wore a face mask outside. You might have even sanitized your groceries. But as lockdown dragged on, you likely stopped some, if not all, of that behavior.
“You start to take risks over time,” Boyle says. “It was something we could all relate to. We all had stories.”
Boyle and Garland applied that same thinking to the world of 28 Years Later. Their sequel follows a community living on an island off the northeast coast of England and connected by a single causeway that floods each night with the tides. The community of Holy Island (a real place in the UK) manages to keep out the Rage Virus completely, and, over the years, they begin to explore the mainland, despite the inherent dangers.
“Twenty-eight years after an infection, there would be risk-taking,” Boyle says. “There’d be enormous amounts of risk-taking, because they’d have worked out the parameters of how far they can go and still stay safe.”
He brings up the dangers of getting the virus if the blood of an infected enters your body: “In the original movie, if you got a fleck of blood on you, you were hacked to death by your fellow survivors. Whereas in this one, they can operate. That was really interesting, and that came out of Covid for us.”
The Legacy of 28 Days Later
In the 22 years since Boyle’s genre-redefining movie, zombie storytelling has changed dramatically, thanks in large part to screenwriter Garland’s vision for fast-moving Infected. (In interviews, Garland has revealed he drew inspiration from the zombie dogs in the Resident Evil video games.) Subsequent movies like World War Z, Zombieland, and Train to Busan all borrowed liberally from 28 Days Later.
But while Boyle is proud of his influence on the zombie film landscape, he’s mostly abstained from watching any of those movies himself.
“I’ve tended to stay away from them,” the director says. “I always thought it was useful that Alex was an expert and I wasn’t. That was a good dynamic in the way we’d approach the films. You have to be careful about either being too reverential or too avoidant. They’re both equally dangerous instincts.”
Boyle adds that he relied on Garland to warn him when 28 Years Later felt too similar to another zombie movie, while admitting that the writer also took some inspiration from more recent additions to the genre.
“I know he’s an enormous admirer of The Last of Us game,” Boyle says. “In fact, I think that was influenced by 28 Days Later. One hand washes the other, in that respect.”
Ultimately, 28 Years Later is just one of many movies pushing the zombie genre forward through both storytelling and technological innovations. And while the wait for a proper sequel has been long and winding, it appears to be arriving at the exact right time. Then again, as my time with Boyle comes to a close, I can’t help but wonder why he didn’t wait a few more years until 2031, when the film’s title would have literally described the span of time between the original and its overdue follow-up.
When I pose the question, Boyle’s answer reveals his unique perspective—dark, witty, and unmistakably British—that made the franchise a hit all those years ago.
“It would have been cute, as the Americans say, and very neat for marketing, but I couldn’t guarantee I’d still be alive by then,” he says with a wicked smile. “So we thought we should move now, just in case.”
