28 Years Later trailer: The zombie apocalypse rears its ugly head, again

Technically, by the time 28 Years Later is released in June 2025, it will have only been 23 years since 28 Days Later, but you can’t deny the symmetry in the name.

The first trailer for the upcoming threequel dropped overnight and it’s triggering the same zombie-anxiety we felt the first time we were all terrified by Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s horror film.

In the years that have passed, we’ve survived one 2007 sequel, a bunch more zombie flicks (Zombieland, Shaun of the Dead, Army of the Dead and The Dead Don’t Die among them) and a global pandemic. It’s time.

Boyle returns as director alongside screenwriter Garland. As does original star Cillian Murphy, now a bona fide Oscar winner for Oppenheimer. Newcomers to the franchise include Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes.

Nearly three decades after the outbreak that originated in that pesky, infected chimpanzee, the rage virus makes a comeback.

The film seems to be set in an isolated island community where life has wound back to agrarian times. Horses plough the fields and jobs includes sewing and animal husbandry. There’s only one causeway off the island and it’s watched over from a tower.

But the infected have infiltrated and it’s all-out war.

The trailer is quick-cut of scenes, some featuring Taylor-Johnson, and another with Comer, Fiennes, a young child and a baby walking through a grisly pagan-like outdoor temple which features columns constructed from human bones and a pyramid of skulls.

At first glance, Murphy does not feature in the trailer. But the internet is confident that he is hiding in plain sight as a zombie. There is one ghoulish figure who, as the collective online wisdom dictates, bears a striking (or tenuous) resemblance to Murphy in that the zombie has striking cheekbones and a similar bone structure.

If Murphy’s character of Jim is now a zombie, that would be a blow to the near-happy ending he was gifted in the original film.

Jim (23-year-old spoiler alert) survived the gunshot wound he sustained and was recovering in an isolated cottage in the English countryside with the characters played by Naomie Harris and Megan Burns. They spot a plane flying overhead and try to draw the pilot’s attention.

The production for 28 Years Later reportedly shot scenes at the same location, Ennerdale valley in Cumbria, that 28 Days Later used for its ending.

Murphy was also in the same spot in September, during filming for the follow-up film, 28 Years Later: Bone Temple, which was shot back-to-back with 28 Years Later.

That’s right, it’s not just one 28 Years Later movie, it’s going to be three. The producers are making up for lost time.

Garland said he will write the screenplay for a new trilogy. Boyle only directed the first, which was filmed on an iPhone, but will produce all three. Candyman helmer Nia DaCosta is directing the second.

The original film, 28 Days Later, was Garland’s first screenplay. Before that he was best known as the author of the novel The Beach, which Boyle adapted into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

In the time since, Garland has become a force in filmmaking. He wrote more screenplays but in 2014, started to direct his own work, starting with the universally acclaimed Ex-Machina and most recently with this year’s release, Civil War.

The original film re-entered the zeitgeist at the start of the Covid pandemic when 28 Days Later’s scenes of an abandoned London was compared to a similarly eerie locked down London.

Murphy played a man named Jim, a bike courier who had been in a coma when the zombie plague spread and woke up weeks later in an empty hospital only to be confronted with the end of the world.

The movie is currently not available on streaming or digital platforms in Australia. Producer, Andrew Macdonald, bought the rights to it from Disney, which now owns Fox Searchlight, and onsold it to Sony, which is releasing 28 Years Later.

Expect it to be available to watch at home sometime before the release of 28 Years Later. If you’re impatient, there are DVD and Blu-ray copies available on eBay, or even try your local council library which likely has a DVD collection.

The 2007 sequel, 28 Weeks Later, is available on Disney’s streaming platform. Murphy and the original cast did not return for it, nor did Boyle direct it, but he did personally hire Juan Carlos Fresnadillo to take over. Garland did uncredited rewrites on the screenplay.

The sequel starred Robert Carlyle, Imogen Poots, Jeremy Renner and Rose Byrne as characters unrelated to the original story but was set in the same universe. At the end of that film, the virus had spread beyond the UK and made it to France and, presumably, the rest of Europe.