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Oli Welsh is senior editor, U.K., providing news, analysis, and criticism of film, TV, and games. He has been covering the business & culture of video games for two decades.
The first trailer for Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Years Later — follow-up to their 2002 zombie banger 28 Days Later and its 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later — has landed. And it’s really quite terrifying.
The trailer opens with a flashback to the beginning of the “rage virus” outbreak, with its fast-moving, aggressive infected. The 2002 vibes are immediately established by a shot of Teletubbies playing on a (soon to be bloodied) CRT television set with one of those wavy CD racks next to it.
Then the trailer takes us forward 10,228 days to a virus-ravaged Britain where small groups of survivors cling on. Here’s the official synopsis:
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 other survivors as well.
We see Aaron Taylor-Johnson prowling through fields with a bow and arrow; Jodie Comer clutching a child to her; Ralph Fiennes looking oddly like John Locke from Lost amid a creepy temple of human bones; and an extremely emaciated zombie rising to its feet which, unless I’m imagining it, bears a striking resemblance to Cillian Murphy. The Oscar-winning Oppenheimer actor starred in 28 Days Later, is an executive producer on this new film, and has hinted he might make an appearance in it. It would be a typically grim joke if that was it.
The trailer is set, incredibly effectively, to a scratchy recording of an old-timey voice reciting a poem with metronomic, rising hysteria. This is Taylor Holmes’ 1915 recording of Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots,” a poem about the monotony of British infantry marches during the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of the 20th century. Apparently, Holmes’ eerie recording has been used in military training for its psychological effects, and I can well believe it.
28 Years Later is directed by Boyle and written by Garland, and was shot entirely using an iPhone 15 Pro Max, ensuring it retains something of 28 Days Later’s gritty, early-digital-film look. It’s intended to be the first of a planned new trilogy of films about the rage virus outbreak, all written by Garland and produced by Garland and Boyle. Candyman and The Marvels director Nia DaCosta has been linked to the second of these films as Boyle’s replacement.
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