\u201cThe big discovery was thinking about our own behavior after Covid,\u201d Boyle says.<\/p>\n
In the first weeks or months of the pandemic, you probably washed your hands for a full 20 seconds every time you got home, and you wore a face mask outside. You might have even sanitized your groceries. But as lockdown dragged on, you likely stopped some, if not all, of that behavior.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou start to take risks over time,\u201d Boyle says. \u201cIt was something we could all relate to. We all had stories.\u201d<\/p>\n
Boyle and Garland applied that same thinking to the world of 28 Years Later. Their sequel follows a community living on an island off the northeast coast of England and connected by a single causeway that floods each night with the tides. The community of Holy Island (a real place in the UK) manages to keep out the Rage Virus completely, and, over the years, they begin to explore the mainland, despite the inherent dangers.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwenty-eight years after an infection, there would be risk-taking,\u201d Boyle says. \u201cThere’d be enormous amounts of risk-taking, because they’d have worked out the parameters of how far they can go and still stay safe.\u201d<\/p>\n
He brings up the dangers of getting the virus if the blood of an infected enters your body: \u201cIn the original movie, if you got a fleck of blood on you, you were hacked to death by your fellow survivors. Whereas in this one, they can operate. That was really interesting, and that came out of Covid for us.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Legacy of 28 Days Later<\/p>\n
In the 22 years since Boyle\u2019s genre-redefining movie, zombie storytelling has changed dramatically, thanks in large part to screenwriter Garland\u2019s vision for fast-moving Infected. (In interviews<\/a>, Garland has revealed he drew inspiration from the zombie dogs in the Resident Evil video games.) Subsequent movies like World War Z, Zombieland, and Train to Busan all borrowed liberally<\/a> from 28 Days Later.<\/p>\n But while Boyle is proud of his influence on the zombie film landscape, he\u2019s mostly abstained from watching any of those movies himself.<\/p>\n \u201cI’ve tended to stay away from them,\u201d the director says. \u201cI always thought it was useful that Alex was an expert and I wasn’t. That was a good dynamic in the way we’d approach the films. You have to be careful about either being too reverential or too avoidant. They’re both equally dangerous instincts.\u201d<\/p>\n Boyle adds that he relied on Garland to warn him when 28 Years Later felt too similar to another zombie movie, while admitting that the writer also took some inspiration from more recent additions to the genre.<\/p>\n