WE BRITISH FOLK: 28 Years Later is a Folk Horror Triumph
28 Years Later is a legacy sequel crafted by creatives that understand the weight of their opportunity. It is an unmissable film, especially in the cinema where Mantle’s cinematography oozes impeccable horror and beauty through iPhone lenses and the unsettling sound design chatters relentlessly to add to the endless sense of threat. I’d also be remiss not to mention the phenomenal ‘Boots’ sequence that propels the trailer’s use of Rudyard Kipling’s poem to an even more outrageous level. This film doesn’t succumb to the familiar trap and divest into more more more of the same, rather it opens up a wealth of ideas, a critical thesis, and leans on a devastating emotional heft bolstered by outstanding performances from Comer, Taylor-Johnson, Fiennes, and the young Williams.
WORDS by Beth Bennett
PHOTOGRAPHY by Miya Mizuno. Courtesy of Sony Pictures
28 Years Later feels so new because it isn’t. Not because it’s a sequel to a film from the early oughts; but because, in both story and in texture, the film takes us to a British cinema tradition that has struggled to find its footing in the last few decades. Modern interpretations, American interpretations, have come and gone with some fanfare but the traditional British Folk Horror is so specifically crafted that these new films lacked the bite. Until now.
When we arrive on Holy Island, we feel like Edward Woodward landing his plane at the coast of Summerisle in Hardy’s cult phenomenon The Wicker Man. When we move between the woods of mainland England, we are thrust into the black mass of Blood on Satan’s Claw. In the world of 28 Years Later, the Britain we were born into, that we grew up with, has become folklore to these characters, providing an essential mythology that dignifies this film as Folk Horror. It doesn’t succumb to the distant, pre-Roman past, treading the predictable, well-worn path. Instead, it builds a new religion of the near-past. In this film, artefacts of late nineties Britain are heralded like Pictish stones or Celtic carvings, the ruins of a Happy Eater have the reverence of Stone Henge. In that divisive closing moment, the long white hair and velvet tracksuits of Jimmy Saville are as iconic as The Green Man insignia. What this does is open up a new world of Folk Horror that retains the genre’s sensibilities but has finally brought this genre into the modern age.
This film is two artists returning home and (in Garland’s case, finally) demonstrating a thesis that they’d been wrestling with across other projects of the last two decades: that the horror of civilisation has never been the bad hand of science, or the supernatural - the horror of civilisation is the civilians in it.
Though mostly remembered for the birth of the Rage Virus and those sweeping shots of Cillian Murphy wandering through an abandoned capital, back in 2003, the original 28 Days Later provided a scathing representation of military mentality with a ghoulish performance from Christopher Eccleston that remains the most unabashedly critical and complete view of men and the military Garland has ever penned. What allows 28 Days Later to haunt us all these years is further recognised in our return to mainland Britain. It’s our, we British folk, reactions to the Virus that is the true horror.
Danny Boyle himself has confessed that the sequel exists because of the pandemic and the reaction he saw to it. When the rest of the country falls, what happens to those lucky enough to escape? Do they unite? Seek each other out? Merge their skills to find a cure? No. Rather, they remain fragmented. Solitary communities in locales off the coast, or isolated completely and creating their own little rituals. They mythologise each other, demonise in some regards. And when a little boy asks why their commune doesn’t reach out to the doctor on the mainland, they scoff and tell him those myths to frighten him away. The devilish mystic is to remain unvisited lest our sanctum be corrupted.
Yet, when Spike defies his teachings and discovers the truth of the doctor’s action, it is an essential deviation for the modern audience. It’s one of hope, optimism. When Spike chooses not to return to the commune, instead carving his own path on the mainland in search of the real truth in all of this, it is a call to us to make that choice too. It is for us to stand up, defy on the side of what is good, and become the change.
28 Years Later is out in UK cinemas now.