Trailer Reaction – 28 Years Later

Holy. SHIT.

Okay so the trailer for 28 Years Later dropped and I’ve watched it four times and I have thoughts. Many thoughts. Mostly good thoughts.

First of all — Danny Boyle is back. That matters. 28 Days Later wasn’t just a great horror movie, it reinvented zombie movies entirely. That grainy digital video look. The running infected. The bleakness. It changed the genre. And then 28 Weeks Later was good but it was missing Boyle’s specific energy. Now he’s directing again and you can FEEL it in this trailer.

The footage. Okay. England has become some kind of quarantine zone. The infected are still there but humanity has adapted. There are communities. There’s structure. But there’s also this religious cult element that feels new and terrifying. Cillian Murphy is back as Jim — aged twenty-eight years, obviously — and he looks haunted. Not physically worn down necessarily but spiritually. Like he’s seen things. Which. I mean. He has.

There’s a shot in this trailer of Murphy standing in a field and the camera slowly pulls back and you realize the field is FULL of infected standing perfectly still. That’s the shot that got me. That’s when I knew they understood the assignment. Horror is in the waiting. The anticipation. 28 Days Later knew that. This movie seems to know it too.

Alex Garland wrote the screenplay. He did the first one and then went on to do Ex Machina and Annihilation. The man understands dread. He understands the horror of systems breaking down, of humanity confronting something it wasn’t designed to survive.

I have questions the trailer doesn’t answer. Is this a direct sequel following Jim’s story? Or is he one of several protagonists? What happened to Selena? The trailer shows what looks like new characters — younger people who’ve grown up in this world. That’s interesting. A generation that doesn’t remember before.

The visual style looks different. Still handheld, still gritty, but more refined than the original. That makes sense. Boyle’s visual language has evolved. I just hope they don’t polish it TOO much. Part of what made 28 Days Later effective was how ugly it was. That DV cheapness made it feel real.

Release date is June. Summer horror movie. Not typical but 28 Days Later was also a June release so there’s poetry in that.

I’m in. I’m completely in. I was going to be in regardless because of the first film but this trailer actually looks GOOD. It doesn’t look like a cash grab. It doesn’t look like a legacy sequel made by people who don’t understand what made the original work. It looks like Danny Boyle had something to say and waited twenty-eight years to say it.

June can’t come fast enough.