Director Danny Boyle has said his latest film 28 Years Later could be seen as an allegory for Brexit.
Boyle’s original zombie horror, 28 Days Later, was a groundbreaking film which revitalised the genre.
Now, his follow-up 28 Years Later gives an insight into how much of humanity is still standing almost three decades after the deadly Rage virus took hold.
“It’s a very ambitious picture of what’s happened to the British mainland 28 years after the original infection,” he tells Sky News.
The film shows how mainland Europe has cut Britain off, the country is isolated, with the remaining population left to fend for itself, which Boyle says could be seen as an allegory for Brexit or the pandemic.
“There is an element of that… horror is a wonderful genre because you can put transparencies against it, you can put COVID against it… you can put Brexit against it as well, and you read things into it like that and it’s deliciously flexible,” he says.
Central to this new story is a new character, a young boy called Spike, played by newcomer Alfie Williams, whose character has been raised on a remote coastal Island with Jodie Comer starring as his mum.
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“To get to see how Danny and his team work on set and then see the final product, it’s been a dream,” Comer says.
Fans won’t have to wait quite so long for the follow-up to this, with a triptych of films planned this time around. While the second has already been shot and is due out next January, the really scary thing for Boyle currently is securing the financing to make the last instalment.
“We’re hoping we do well enough to get the third film financed… we want there to be three films ultimately,” he says.
‘A wonderful tribute’ to Sycamore Gap
Boyle’s film also features a digital recreation of the Sycamore Gap tree, which the director says he hopes will be “a wonderful tribute” to Northumberland’s iconic tree.
Eagle-eyed viewers will spot the tree is still standing in scenes for Boyle’s apocalyptic horror despite being felled in September 2023.
Boyle explains: “It had already been destroyed by the time we came to film, so we recreated it for the same reasons that you see the Queen in this… all the things that have happened to us in the last 28 years have not happened.”
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As well as forming a part of people’s personal lives, as the scene of wedding proposals, ashes being scattered and countless photographs, it had already held a place in pop culture, featuring in the 1991 Kevin Costner film Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves.
It is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the film, but Boyle said given how much of what they shot is filmed in the beautiful Northumbria countryside, to resurrect “one of their most beautiful icons” was a “real privilege which we felt we couldn’t ignore”.
“So we’ve recreated it deliberately to say that it was still growing… which is a wonderful tribute,” he adds.
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28 Years Later is out on 20 June.
