Interviews
How the Rage Virus Has Evolved ’28 Years Later’ with New Mutations [Interview]
It’s been almost three decades since the rage virus escaped a biological weapons laboratory in the new trilogy-starter 28 Years Later, and the infected have evolved since director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland teamed on 28 Days Later.
That presents a whole new set of obstacles and intense situations when young Spike (Alfie Williams) leaves the safety of his community and embarks on a dangerous mission. Especially considering that the infected are still human.
Despite sharing common ground, the rage virus is grounded more in reality and doesn’t transform its infected into zombies, no matter how ravenous or violent they can be.
Screenwriter Alex Garland broke down his approach to evolving the infected for 28 Days Later in a recent chat. He tells Bloody Disgusting, “I think it was the product of conversation, and essentially, it went like this: if infected are still around, how are they still around? And actually, what happens is things just get enforced by that. They’re not really inventions; they’re just logical progressions. The infected are not supernatural. They’re not reanimated dead people. They’re actually just people who are sick, but that’s all they are.”
An infected with the barcam on the set of Columbia Pictures’ 28 YEARS LATER. Photo Credit: Sony Pictures/Miya Mizuno
Garland continues, “So they need to eat, they need to drink. If they’re going to eat, how are they going to eat? If it’s protein, they’re going to hunt. Then you look at the animal kingdom, and you see the way, say, dogs or wolves can hunt in packs or various kinds of essentially pack-like animals, which humans absolutely are. So they hunt in packs, and then you get alphas, which traditionally come out of a pack, some kind of dominant figure within it. But then also, would all humans do that? Well, maybe not. Some of them might not be very suited to hunting in a pack. There are other forms of protein. You can get it through earthworms or beetles that actually can provide quite a lot of protein and nutrients and so on. They would move more slowly.”
Food and food sourcing is a crucial part of the equation, but Garland took it even further. “Then, after that, the question of sex arrives,” Garland continues. “In a way, how human are they or how animal are they? Which is the same thing in some respects. To throw that into relief, you have a character played by Ralph Fiennes, who is clearly not really distinguishing between infected and non-infected people. He’s seeing them as a compassionate, rational doctor would see them, where you don’t really divide sick people and non-sick people. They’re just people in different states, and they need to be memorialized or thought about, or cared about in the same way.
“But really, all of those tree branches come back to the same thing, which is the infected are not supernatural, and if they’re still alive, how are they still alive?“
Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) and Isla (Jodie Comer) in Columbia Pictures’ 28 YEARS LATER. Photo Credit: Sony Pictures/Miya Mizuno
28 Years Later star Jodie Comer (Alone in the Dark), who plays Spike’s mother, Isla, provided additional insight on what to expect on how the mutations have affected the infected and how the practical effects helped the actors’ performances. Comer explains, “[They] were inspired by mythology. There are certain aspects of these mutations that are representative of different species, and it was amazing to see the actors embody that, by the way.
“A lot of these actors were spending six hours in hair and makeup every morning and then coming to set and just taking on these forms, which made it so much easier for us because there was no green screen. It was all very real for us, which was very helpful.”
28 Years Later brings the rage virus back to theaters on June 20, 2025.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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