REVIEW: 28 Years Later by Danny Boyle

Boyle’s England has undergone a striking de-Yookayification

It has been over twenty years since writer and director Danny Boyle transformed the zombie genre with 28 Days Later (2002), followed by 28 Weeks Later (2007). After a long break, Boyle is now back with a third installment of the franchise, 28 Years Later (2025). I was so excited for a new episode in one of horror’s greatest franchises that I barely stopped to consider Boyle’s subsequent career, but readers may know that he is also the mind behind the wildly successful Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and, perhaps most pertinently for a Pimlico Journal reader, the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony. The Guardian said of the latter that it ‘…had barely finished before it had become a byword for a new approach, not only to British culture but to Britishness itself.’ Perhaps one day we will say the same of 28 Years Later.

In 2002, Boyle’s film invented the ‘rage zombie’. Today, the ‘rage zombie’ is more-or-less the standard archetype, so it may be difficult (especially for younger readers) to appreciate how fundamental this change was, but it basically put to bed the idea of a zombie as a shambling corpse resurrected from a graveyard. Zombies lost the implications of voodoo or magic, and became lightning-fast, rabid ‘infected’, revitalising the genre.

This is one of the most important contributions to horror in the twenty-first century. For a decade or more, zombie media was inescapable. Dawn of the Dead (2004, a remake of a 1978 film) showed that classics could take on this new zombie concept. Rec (2007) showed the infected through found footage, still associated with The Blair Witch Project (1999) at the time. Even Davina McCall got a piece with Dead Set (2008). Twenty years on, there are so many zombie movies that zombie comedies alone could comprise a whole genre, with memorable classics like Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Zombieland (2009).

Eventually, the zombie craze would become a victim of its own success. The Walking Dead premiered in 2010 and has since become a symbol of the tired concept, with eleven seasons (or nearly six full days) of long episodes where nothing much happens and there’s really no zombie action at all. In 2013, World War Z, starring Brad Pitt, raked in half a billion dollars worldwide, but it was a dreadful, brain-dead watch. The genuinely exciting source material offered something new, but somewhere along the road that all disappeared. Despite the genre showing occasional signs of life, like Train to Busan (2016) and The Sadness (2021), it mostly became a stable background hum that generates revenue even though no one you know is actually watching. The Walking Dead has six spin-off series, two of which are still airing!

Back to the future

Boyle’s sci-fi England has undergone a striking de-Yookayification. The main plotline of 28 Years Later begins on the historic island of Lindisfarne, where the Viking Age began in earnest with the brutal raid of 793. It follows a young boy’s coming-of-age as he explores the mainland for the first time and takes a treacherous journey to heal his sick mother. Along the way, he sees a zombie woman give birth, but by the end he has dispatched the newborn to his former home and taken off to explore the green and pleasant land. A final scene hints at the sequel which will focus on a mysterious leader, ‘Jimmy’.

The merry locals, rites of passage, and plausible dynamic between father and son all feel true to reality, unlike the transparent pseudo-nationalism of 2012. However, in one respect it is notably different from the Britain of our reality: almost everyone in the cast is white. For whatever reason, perhaps consciously attempting to more closely mirror the demographics of twenty-five years ago, the casting department gave the only black man on the cast the non-speaking role of ‘well-endowed alpha zombie’.

The island community’s austere way of life is genuinely touching and nostalgic, and despite a brief glance at some harvested tree stumps it is presented as an oasis. I wonder what Boyle was thinking when he put the St George’s flag in pride of place on the island, but most interesting is the direct comparison he draws between the young men and medieval soldiers, whose images regularly flash across the screen. I kept waiting for a snide hint at this society’s supposedly dark underbelly, but it never arrived. There is enough conflict on the island to keep the story going, but one can be forgiven for thinking that Boyle’s film hints at a kind of insular utopia. Whether or not this was intentional on the author’s part is another question.

The past and future of England are almost overpowering themes in the film. Travelling across a rewilded countryside dotted with ruined churches and post-apocalyptic gas stations, Jodie Comer’s character remarks that the Angel of the North will be there forever, like the Great Pyramids. However, Britain’s cultural history stops at around the Millennium. Canonically, the outbreak of the rage virus began then, leaving us stuck at around the final season of Teletubbies and our 12-year-old protagonist unfamiliar with anything that could characterise the ‘Yookay’. When he asks a foreign soldier, ‘Why does your girlfriend look like that?’ (it’s lip filler), he repudiates the only incursion of twenty-first century culture into bucolic England.

I’m not sure why the next installment of the series — which was filmed back-to-back, and is set to be released in January next year — is based on a cult of Jimmy Savile look-a-likes. I expect that it might involve some tiresome social commentary. Either way, I found this particular storyline, which bookends the whole thing, to be the weakest part of 28 Years Later. Even aside from my worries about this plot direction, once upon a time, it was novel and exciting to have easter eggs for an eventual sequel littered throughout the film; these days, it’s more likely to earn you an eyeroll. I like the notion that there are things going on in the background that we don’t fully explore, but here it gave a feeling of incompleteness that could have been avoided; almost as if they were trying to bully me into seeing a sequel that I was going to watch anyway.

Take your girlfriend to see this film

As a horror film, 28 Years Later has a lot to commend it. It’s not just a family drama with monsters attached. In recent years, a hint of respectability has infiltrated the horror genre, and now the ‘smart’ audience is interested. Consequently, every time I want to watch a horror film I have to divine from a purposefully misleading trailer whether it’s going to be completely boring or not.

I am totally opposed to this trend because I think that any good horror film ought to terrify and/or disgust you. And in that respect, I’m grateful to Danny Boyle because I think he took a genuine interest in the concept of zombies and how they can keep up with the times. 28 Years Later retcons the biology of previous installments, which said that zombies simply starve to death when human prey die out. Here, it’s clear that they can survive by eating animals. Ignoring the hackneyed ‘alpha zombie’, which is admittedly more central to the plot, the real star of the show is the bloated and pathetic crawling zombie which survives off bugs and insects. This was real body horror, and a worthy addition to the lineage which started with the ‘rage zombie’.

By comparison, HBO’s The Last of Us (2023) has received much fanfare, but as a horror fan I was very disappointed. The fungal zombies of the popular video game series on which the show was based do present an interesting innovation in the concept, because they require survivors to mask up to avoid inhaling spores. However, for practical reasons the HBO show did away with much of this element of the story, gutting a lot of what was interesting about the concept despite incredible visual effects. Others more recent attempts, like The Girl with All The Gifts (2016), explored similar ideas but were visually undistinguished. Fifteen years after the video game Left 4 Dead (2008) put diverse zombie morphology front-and-centre, it’s curious to me that zombie films have been quite so rigid in their evolution.

Many reviewers think that acting, dialogue, and plot are what matters; far less attention is usually given to the design of monsters and their mythology. Fortunately, 28 Years Later excels at both. The dialogue is so natural and convincing that I barely noticed the explicit exposition that a film like this naturally requires, helped, I’m sure, by the casting. Ralph Fiennes plays two familiar English archetypes: the eccentric; and the doctor who likes euthanising people. He does so flawlessly. Jodie Comer’s performance was equally good.

Most of all, I was grateful that the plot was straightforward while treading new ground. You don’t have to be a horror veteran to be tired of the zombie fare of the last fifteen years, which has degenerated into an indistinguishable grey mass. When 28 Days Later added tyrannical soldiers to the zombie mix, ‘humans are the real monsters’ felt like a fresh note. The Walking Dead has since wrung every drop of blood out of that particular dry, old corpse.

Hopefully, the success of 28 Years Later will free horror filmmakers from the view that every story about zombies is actually an excuse to write about a micro-scale fascist government. These days, even a hint of a cult or an encampment in a horror movie gets my hackles up. Yet sadly, it seems worryingly likely that the direct sequel will be a return to this old bromide. The white-haired, eccentric, tracksuit- and jewelry-wearing ‘Jimmy’ with his band of look-a-likes seems primed to be a charismatic dictator. I can only assume that the previous decade’s explosion of Young Adult dystopian fiction has wreaked havoc on our collective consciousness and now every imagined future has to have a charismatic preacher who is also Hitler.

Danny Boyle nationalism?

Perhaps Boyle’s nationalistic themes are simply a set up for a more cynical take on Merry England in future installments. A central plot point, and addition to the zombie lore of the franchise, is that two zombies give birth to a viable and non-infected child, who ends the film in the care of the island settlement. I can’t see how this ends well for the audience. In the very worst case, we will have been set up to hear about a young girl dealing with prejudice from her community who becomes the future of humanity and bridges the gap between the real people and the feral monsters. I’ll give Boyle the benefit of the doubt and assume that the actual plot won’t be quite so stupid as this, but I struggle to understand why the plot has gone in this direction in the first place. Personally, I would have given a zombie baby straight to the nearest Member of Parliament.

It’s definitely curious why his take on the island community of 28 Years Later is so connected to the medieval history of England, and why it’s so agreeable in general. World War Two appears in a big way — as you would expect, since it was the last time we were besieged — but why a vocal republican like Boyle had Queen Elizabeth loom over children preparing for festivities is harder to say. Perhaps he imagined that the island community of 28 Years Later, like the 2012 opening ceremony, would become a byword for Britain itself.

Time will only tell if 28 Years Later has the potential to be a mythic history of England. Ravaged by a great evil, the good cheer of the Britisher survives against terrible odds on an isolated island — I think the material is all there. With parasitic enemies reduced to crawling in the muck, the spirits of Arthurian legend and Rudyard Kipling and the Teletubbies come together to teach the boys to blow the brains out of some zombies. Like Geoffrey of Monmouth, Boyle compresses a thousand years into a timeless legend that can help reinvigorate our nation.

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This article was written by Jude Jon, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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