28 Days Later proved too much for my 12-year-old self, when a VHS recording of its Sky Movies premiere made it to our house. Clearly, I was hooked though, because I returned to it shortly after, and have been hanging on every scrap of news about the franchise’s delayed returns ever since. With the final emergence of a trailer of 28 Years Later, I wanted to just finally bask in the feeling “this is actually happening”… but of course the industry of hasty, zero-research trailer reactions that has sprung up in the years since can’t allow me that simple pleasure.
I’m reluctant to write about trailers for movies. It tends to put you on a hiding to nothing; details you get excited about can purposefully mislead you, or may not even make the final edit released into theatres. At the same time, it’s frankly a bit trashy.
Every film review website and their dog will pump out endless clickbait articles ‘analysing’ the latest teaser to any given blockbuster, usually around the most trivial details or irritating discussions. That has even bled into the mainstream, desperate for clicks to boost dwindling ad-revenue – so usually, I see films after months of dodging trailers entirely.
Unfortunately, a really good teaser has just been released. It’s filled with interesting imagery and themes. It has excited me more for a film than any other trailer has managed in two decades… And the whole film-tattle industrial complex is fixated on the least interesting frame of the whole thing.
So, with some trepidation, let’s talk about the trailer for 28 Years Later.
Weeks became years
When I say I haven’t been this interested in a film’s trailer in almost two decades, the previous occasion I’m referring to was another sequel to 28 Days Later. The opening six minutes of 28 Weeks Later was leaked ahead of the film’s release – with Danny Boyle managing to boil down all the intensity and despair of the first episode into a perfect short-form distillation. It was an act of horror alchemy that left me desperate to see the final product – while also purposefully misdirecting me on a number of points.
First and foremost, it left me expecting noted Boyle-collaborator Robert Carlyle to be the main character of the coming movie. At the same time, it led me to expect something tonally similar to Days – when in fact it was the only film that Boyle directed, and Alex Garland had not returned to write. That wasn’t the end of the world (director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and co-writers Rowan Joffé, E.L. Lavigne and Jesus Olmo did something original and cutting, in-keeping with the first film, but adapting its themes to fit the anxieties of the period) – but it does suggest that anyone reading too much into the trailer for the long-long-long awaited 28 Years Later is setting themselves up to look like a tool in a few months.
From where I’m sitting, at least, it seems Boyle, Garland and whoever else is back for this happy reunion have not lost their touch – and are looking to do what Fresnadillo and his team did for the last sequel; reviving core themes, but evolving them to fit for the world the film is being released into. I suspect the reems of click bait around the status of Cillian Murphy in Years will prove redundant to that end – whipped up out of a single frame in order to drive web-traffic with minimum insight or input for the sake of everyone from Variety, to IGN, to the BBC.
What is shown in the trailer, for a fragment of time, is what some people say resembles Murphy’s character Jim, in infected make-up, rising from a field of flowers. Admittedly, when the frame appeared on my own watch-through, the possibility did occur to me – and the individual in question does have Murphy’s cheekbones. But even if it is him, the trailer is entirely divorced from context. We see lots, but know very little about their place in the world we are soon to enter.
Knowing Boyle and co’s propensity to mislead us with trailers, and their previous use of dream sequences and alternative endings in 28 Days Later, could it be so beyond the pale to suggest an infected Jim is what we’re seeing, but also is not real? In another frame, a graffitid cottage has the word “Jimmy” scrawled on its side, while later a character appears in a mask with bleeding eyes, and similarly bares features that might be likened to Murphy’s. Considering the cultish themes the rest of the trailer has, it could also be that the “surprising way” he is returning is as some Christ-like fable, who is always present in the lives of our characters without really being there at all.
Evolving nightmare
But all that is, frankly, celebrity-centric irrelevance. It is such a minor detail of the wider trailer, and there are many other things the short clip tries to spark debate about the coming movie, which are being overlooked. So, what else might we see?
The film will take place, as you might expect, 28 years after the events of the first film (the initial outbreak is briefly hinted at by what will undoubtedly be a harrowing sequence, as a panicked mother places her children in front of The Teletubbies before an ominous hammering at the door) – and over those almost-three decades, any shred of those last moments of normality seems to have been lost. We briefly encounter an agricultural island community, where survivors have been able to fend off the rage virus – thanks to a tidal causeway which means they are cut off from the mainland for large amounts of time, but can also send out parties to hunt and gather.
Presumably, there will be more than a little retconning to explain how, after all this time, there are any infected left at all. In Days it was made fairly explicit that they would eventually starve to death, because they are not traditional ‘zombies’, they are living human tissue, left in a rabid state by a laboratory-engineered virus. The skeleton-riddled streets of a deserted London in Weeks confirmed this. The need to move the goalposts here offers up one of many opportunities for Boyle and Garland to adapt their formula for our fears in the 2020s – in a world where we have been abandoned to “live with” a virus that continues to rapidly mutate and adapt.
At the same time, it does not seem that the survivors live an idyllic island life. A densely-populated graveyard might suggest that in a post-collapse world, the lack of modern medicine has left us exposed to a world of hidden dangers we mistakenly thought we had conquered – less dramatic, but just as deadly as the rage virus.
Meanwhile, a sign defines the roles in the community: hunting, working the land, harvesting crops, sitting on a council, being a seamster, or staffing a watch-tower. Footage of a barren stretch of land suggests that once again being at the mercy of the elements for our food is not going well – though the well-stocked armaments by the causeway suggest raw materials are not hard to come by for every facet of life. At the same time, the soundtrack – a chilling reading of Kipling’s war poem Boots by Taylor Holmes (about a soldier losing their sanity amid the ceaseless and inhumane demands of war) – escalates in intensity, as more signs of a creeping paranoia emerge, from desperate graffiti foretelling a second-coming, to Ralph Fiennes turning up in a Colonel Kurtz costume, amid a skeletal henge topped with skulls, in a segment that will have given ever folk-horror lover in the crowd palpitations.
But what does all this mean?
Well, as I mentioned, it would be foolish to say anything as if it were definitive at this moment. That being said, it’s hard not to get excited. After long careers elsewhere, Boyle and Garland seem to be unapologetically playing to their strengths for once (even though Shallow Grave and 28 Days Later show a real flair for horror, Boyle has indulged a pretentious streak that has seen him perpetually distance himself from the genre; while Garland showed in Men that he has a brilliant knack for folk horror, but inexplicably decided his next project had to be about a populist civil war in America). One image which suggests that to me, is a group of ragged, half-clothed infested, silhouetted against a great tree, which reminds me both of the nightmarish tunnel sequence in Days as well as the greenery of Men. But rather than returning to play the hits, importantly, Boyle and Garland also look like they want to take the 28 world in new directions.
From my perspective, I can’t wait to see the latest evolution of the thematic fears at play here. Each film so far has been built on a particular blend of real-life anxieties, tweaked a little each time. 28 Days Later reflected a Britain in the early 2000s, riddled with anxieties over pandemics – BSE and the apocalyptic images of Foot and Mouth were still at the front of the public’s minds, while tabloid panic around Bird Flu reached fever-pitch. In that context, a lot of the horror centred on what would happen if the rest of the world severed contact with the “diseased little island” – and abandoned everyone on it to their gruesome fate.
28 Weeks Later adapted the horror to the Iraq war era. What if, when things died down, a foreign military power took interest in that diseased little island again? What if their project triggered a situation which they couldn’t control – and how would things fall apart as they attempted to extract themselves from that mess? What distinctly human torments might they inflict on their captive population; from firing blindly into crowds, to drone strikes on civilian populations?
As for what 28 Years Later might do to this end, the diseased little island has, in reality, spent the last eight years trying to sever itself from the rest of the world. While amply stocking its armaments, it has left its population to stave. When people have tried to respond, it has worked to make its own civilian population its enemies, amid an era of paranoia and reactionary aggression.
What could be a better comment on this, than the world this trailer seems to be constructing? A joyless, border-obsessed plague-island, begging the question, “Even if we survive, how bad could things get?”