28 Days Later provided a singular twist on a horror trope: As a substitute of the useless rising up from the graves, the “zombies” of Danny Boyle’s zombie film can be regular people reworked by the man-made “Rage Virus.” They usually may run.

So, after years and years of Boyle and author Alex Garland debating whether or not to observe the maligned 28 Weeks Later with a correct sequel from the unique workforce — and finding out the sophisticated rights points to take action — Boyle tells Polygon that there was actually one objective for what to do subsequent.

“The thought of the movie in some ways was to be as authentic as attainable,” he says of this week’s 28 Years Later. “Its construction could be very uncommon. Its development is much more uncommon, and it’s fairly startling even at script stage to appreciate that the final third of the movie goes to be this shifting examination of mortality in numerous methods — and commemorate and have fun that.”

28 Years Later tells the story of a 12-year-old boy, Spike (Alfie Williams), who has grown up in a walled-off island city off the shore of the quarantine zone. He has by no means seen the skin world; nobody within the UK was permitted to go away after the Rage Virus decimated the inhabitants, and neighboring international locations proceed to patrol the perimeter to make sure normalcy for the skin world. Spike’s father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), believes it’s important for his son to develop into the hardest model of himself, a protector. Early on, they enterprise off into the wilderness to hunt, whereas Spike’s mom, Isla (Jodie Comer,) suffers from a mysterious sickness nobody of their microcosm is provided to deal with.

There’s a powerful human ingredient to 28 Years Later — Boyle and Garland have stated Ken Loach’s 1969 coming-of-age drama Kes was a significant inspiration, and the connection is deeply felt — but it surely manifests in additional than simply the survivors. Twenty-eight years after the primary publicity to Rage, the contaminated have persevered, reworked, and inched nearer to turning into their very own, separate species.

“One of many issues we’re doing in that is shortening the space between the people and the contaminated,” Garland says. “We’re acknowledging that they’re not completely different from us. They’ve an sickness which a health care provider would take a look at differently to the best way we’d instinctively react to it. So it’s as a lot to do with issues that seem like very completely different however have extra in frequent and might be addressed or noticed in numerous methods.”

From the start of improvement, Garland knew he wished to reap the benefits of the massive passage of time between the primary movie and the brand new sequel — 28 years is an extended, very long time for a crumbling society. And in extrapolating the route the world may go, he landed on two prospects that finally knowledgeable how the contaminated we see in 28 Years Later have developed. “One is: there aren’t any contaminated left and life has gone again to regular. So that may be one kind of movie you may do, kind of post-COVID movie because it had been. And the opposite is: no, the an infection remains to be alive. Nicely, how may it nonetheless be alive? These should not reanimated useless individuals through some kind of supernatural means. They’re individuals who have an sickness or a situation or a virus, on this case. And so, how are they nonetheless alive? They should eat power, they should drink.”

The survival instincts — and even the trend that fuels the contaminated’s unending hunt — exist in each character in 28 Years Later, zombie-esque or not. “For those who take a look at the movies intimately, it’s one thing that’s inside us all,” Boyle says. “There isn’t the sense that it’s an outsider’s illness or one thing, that there’s some illness that they only have and we don’t. Each character will get to exhibit a part of it, the potential for it inside ourselves.”

Boyle and Garland aren’t the kinds to place a wonderful level on the themes of their very own movies, however the author admits that there’s a certain quantity of frustration effervescent beneath the floor of 28 Years Later, and the better thought that each one of this horror is occurring to actual individuals on each side of the road.

“I believe this stuff are interpretive, however for me it might be about the best way by which over the past 10 to fifteen years, we’ve develop into more and more preoccupied by trying again quite than trying ahead, again to the best way issues was once. However then inspecting that extra, how a lot of that’s about selective amnesia, issues which are simply ignored about the best way issues was once, or misremembered about the best way issues was once, or simply selectively remembered? Cherrypicked? And so it’s a movie about an aggressive state quite than a progressive state, a minimum of partly.”

Out of the event hell that plagued a proposed 28 Months Later got here not simply 28 Years Later, however a full-blown trilogy of movies. The story feels full with the credit roll on 28 Years, by design, however in that exploration of world-building and commentary, Boyle and Garland clearly discovered extra to say — and it’ll discover its manner again to that authentic film ultimately.

“It’s important to acknowledge the primary movie, however to a minimal diploma, however we tried to make a standalone movie in its personal proper,” Boyle says. “However Cillian [Murphy, star of 28 Days Later], for example, who’d be the obvious technique to make the factor really feel steady with the primary movie, is an important function of the trilogy — however not simply but.”

28 Years Later opens in theaters on June 20.