How the sequel '28 Years Later' shows a 'compassionate' side of horror

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In 2002, the British horror hit '28 Days Later' helped repopularize the zombie subgenre, leading to post-apocalyptic entertainment like 'The Walking Dead' and 'The Last of Us.'
Ever since, director Danny Boyle has been saying to anyone who'll listen that the people infected with a rage virus aren't zombies. They're just like us but sick, not undead. And in the new sequel '28 Years Later' (in theaters June 20), the infected have changed a lot, even showing qualities that hint they're much more than mindless, flesh-eating machines.
'Obviously, 28 years is quite a compressed amount of time for evolution to really establish itself. But they are evolving just like humans evolve,' Boyle says.
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With '28 Years Later,' Boyle and original writer Alex Garland have returned to this post-apocalyptic world with something akin to the recent 'Halloween' revamp. The new film is a direct follow-up to '28 Days,' pretty much ignoring the events of 2007's '28 Weeks Later,' and begins a planned trilogy that will continue with director Nia DaCosta's '28 Years Later: The Bone Temple' (in theaters Jan. 16).
Garland sees 'Days' and 'Years' as coming-of-age stories of a sort with 'a young person in a state of innocence who's then having that innocence robbed,' the writer says. In the original film, it's bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy), who wakes up in a hospital after an accident finding a London devoid of people. He learns the hard way how much the world has changed since the rage virus started, with the infected running and biting at him, and Jim in a sense 'becomes an infected' by giving in to his own rage to save people important to him.
'28 Years Later' fast-forwards nearly 30 years, with the rage virus contained to the borders of the United Kingdom. Twelve-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) lives with his parents, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Isla (Jodie Comer), in a small, heavily defended community on Holy Island. In an old-fashioned society where everyone has a job to do, children are taught what life used to be like and 'the infected play a role in their mind. They're being told that they will one day meet them,' Boyle says. "So they mythologize them a little bit.'
Jamie takes Spike on a rite of passage to the mainland for the first time to kill an infected. Father and son barely make it back alive, but when Spike learns of a mysterious doctor who could help his sick mom with her undiagnosed ailment, he returns to a dangerous landscape on a journey more about protecting life than taking it.
'He chooses not to follow in his father's footsteps,' Boyle says of Spike. "That's one of the things that always gives us hope with teenagers. Even though they might drive you mad, they want their own challenges."
Spike ultimately meets the man he's searching for, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). He's built a Bone Temple of skulls as a memorial to victims of the infected, and Kelson sees survivors and infected people as alike.
'A key thing about how we approached the zombie genre was we didn't make them supernatural. They're not reanimated dead people. If you were a doctor, that would be the correct way to look at it," Garland says. One of themes of the movie is "how much should a sick person be differentiated from a healthy person? And why is that differentiation fair?'
Over three decades, the infected of '28 Days Later' – the fast-running "zombies" that freaked moviegoers out in 2002 – have evolved and organized. Most of them are still scary quick, skinny and now naked. Bigger, stronger Alphas have emerged like the leader Samson, while 'Slow-Lows' are fat, bloated and 'closer to the ground,' Boyle says. 'They expend a lot less energy but they're nevertheless very dangerous if they're provoked or disturbed or stimulated.'
And like the original film, the '28 Years Later' trilogy explores humanity in inhuman times among its pockets of survivors.
Whereas Christopher Eccleston's Major Henry West in the original film "28 Days" is a soldier "who has gone crazy and collapsed into a more violent, degenerative state than the infected have,' Garland explains, Kelson is the inverse to him and creates "a different kind of commentary on people, which has something to do with being reasonable and compassionate in the face of an incredibly difficult situation."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: '28 Years Later' sequel explores horror and post-apocalyptic hope