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28 Years Later (Boyle 2025)
Marshall Smith, PhD, and Laura Patterson, PhD, offer a sociological discussion of the 2025 film 28 Years Later, written, produced, and directed by D. Boyle.
While zombie movies are not particularly interesting to Laura, Marshall loves zombie movies … if they contribute something to the sub-genre, the lore, or the conceptual parallels between zombies and culture. For Marshall 28 Days Later was an absolute top tier moviegoing experience. After waiting 23 years for a true sequel, we get this?
This is a movie that could have been an email. Splitting this film into two parts just made us not want to see the second part. And so far, we haven’t.
Given that this is the first return to the 28 franchise by Garland and Boyle since the original film, we spend the first half an hour or so covering 28 Days Later. Then the rest of this episode is a lot of Marshall ranting about just how disappointed he is with what Boyle and Garland did here. What a wasted opportunity!
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SPOILERS IN THIS EPISODE
Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper 1973)
TOPIC INDEX – 28 Years Later (Boyle 2025) (times are approximate)
0:30 – Introductions
3:30 – Film discussion begins without spoilers
3:30 – Laura’s history with the 28 universe
7:00 – Marshall’s history with the 28 universe
9:00 – SPOILERS section begins
9:00 – SPOILERS for Texas Chain Saw Massacre and 28 Days Later
12:30 – revisiting 28 Days Later with spoilers
15:30 – gender norms in 28 Days Later
23:00 – alternative progressive version
28:30 – discussion of 28 Years Later begins NO SPOILERS
35:30 – SPOILERS section for 28 Years Later begins
35:30 – Marshall rants about the “innovations” in zombie lore
48:00 – dad
56:00 – nuclear familial imaginary
1:03:00 – death
1:13:00 – alpha
1:17:00 – Jimmy
1:22:00 – Danny Boyle’s oeuvre
1:28:00 – Laura brings it all home
1:36:30 – zombies as othering or inclusive
1:41:00 – grading the film using the Collective Nightmares Evolving Rubric of Social Responsibility
1:46:30 – the doctor
1:49:00 – end matters
1:50:00 – phantasms: altering consciousness, body swapping, teaching in the AI era
Related Episodes
Quiet Place Day One (Sarnoski 2024)
The Lodge (Fiala and Franz 2019)
Related Films
Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper 1974)
Mad Max Fury Road (Miller 2015)
Midnight Mass (TV miniseries) (Flanagan 2021)
Night of the Living Dead (Romero 1968)
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“Horror films are our collective nightmares.”
Episode 147