Interviews
’28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ Director Nia DaCosta Dials Up the Horror with the Jimmies [Interview]
There’s a stark contrast between good and evil in the sequel, 28 Years: The Bone Temple.
At the opposite end of empathetic Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) and his poignant monument to death is psychopathic Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) and his Satanist clan, “The Jimmies.” The bad news for poor Spike (Alfie Williams) is that the events of the previous film put him directly in Jimmy’s crosshairs.
Nia DaCosta (Candyman 2021, The Marvels) takes the directorial reins from Danny Boyle for the second installment in the planned trilogy, helming from a script by Alex Garland (28 Days Later, 28 Years Later). The filmmaker drives up the horror of Spike’s nightmarish plight for the sequel, presenting a grim vision of the British Isles years after the Rage virus decimated its population.
Speaking with Bloody Disgusting ahead of the film’s release on January 16, 2026, via Sony, DaCosta gave insight into the dual storylines and dialing up the horror to highlight just how eroded humanity has become, at least as far as The Jimmies are concerned.
“I mean, they are satanists essentially. They believe in charity, which is what they call it, and cruelty, and it really is inhumane. And as you say, on the other hand, you have a very humanist character in Kelson and his relationship with Samson, with that weird thing. For me, the balance of those two things is super important.” The filmmaker cites one ghastly scene as an example. “The barn scene in particular is horrifying, but it’s because you realize, wow, these people are disconnected from their beating heart, from their conscience, from, some would say, their souls. It’s because of the world they live in. But we also have Kelson, who chooses another way and is in the same world as they are.
“So to me, that dichotomy really asks the audience, ‘what do you choose on a day-to-day basis?'”
That question certainly extends to Erin Kellyman‘s Jimmy Ink, a morally dubious but trusted member of Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal’s merry band of psychos, one who takes Spike under her wing.
Kellyman said of connecting with her character, “I think from reading the script, I made the connection quite quickly that she had been in this cult for a while. Then, when we opened up that discussion with Nia, it was, I think, you were on the same page with that. But I think the backstory always helps when you’re bringing a character to life just to understand them a little bit better.”
For Dr. Kelson’s story, The Bone Temple delivers deeper insight into the Rage-infected, especially that of Alpha Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry). DaCosta was excited to explore the world of the Infected a bit more.
“I just really trust in the script,” She says. “I really trust my collaborators, myself, I guess, as well. I just really felt like, ‘Oh, I know how to do this.’ Even when it was shooting what we shot and getting the script, and then in post being like, ‘Oh, what if we actually shifted this instead so it’s even more in the point of view of this character?’ Making all those little choices accumulated to something really special.”
Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) and Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) in Columbia Pictures’ 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE. Photo credit: Sony.
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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