After a war like John Wyndham’s, his agent might reasonably have expected something harrowing. Landing on Juno Beach just a few days after D-Day, Wyndham followed the 11th Armoured Division all the way to Falaise, the scene of one of the bloodiest episodes of the war. By battle’s end, more than twenty thousand men and horses lay bloating in the August heat, enough, pilots said, to be smelt from the air.
Instead Wyndham returned to writing with an odd, mild short story called “Time to Rest”: it follows one of the last humans alive, a middle-aged man called Bert, who lives among the Martians as their resident handyman. Bert’s spare time is mainly spent building a boat, which at the end of the story he takes for a quiet row. Wyndham’s agent quickly returned the submission, saying that to stand a chance in the post-war market, fiction “must be completely filled with action, adjectives, drama, and suspense”.
Other contemporary writers exhibited the same strange response to disaster. Brian Aldiss spent his war in Burma, and responded with giant trees and overgrown spaceships, worlds in which mutated survivors fend off gigantic birds and telepathic rabbits. JG Ballard, was a teenager in the Lunghua Internment Camp near Shanghai, would later articulate a raison d’être creed for the rising genre: “science fiction allowed me to inflict just those corrective dislocations on the suffocating docility of English life and all its gentrified ordinariness.”
Wyndham’s instincts were soon vindicated by the success of his 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids. A man wakes up, alone, in a hospital, surrounded by an eerie silence that can only mean the end of the world. “When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like a Sunday, there is something seriously wrong.” One line reads like a justification of Wyndham’s whole project: the protagonist Bill Masen reflects that “it must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that ‘it can’t happen here’ – that one’s own time and place is beyond cataclysm.”
For the post-war science fiction writers it was logical to become illogical, and turn to the weird. Conventional realism simply couldn’t capture the catastrophes they had known. Only manifest unreality, on a scale that hadn’t until then been imagined, could come close. This became the mission of British post-war scifi: to generate fables potent enough to pass on the otherwise incommunicable lessons of war. That when civilisation is stripped away, the strange and the dangerous are all that is left. As M John Harrison, the closest thing we have to a present-day Wyndham or Ballard, puts it in his memoir Wish I Was Here: “the weird is a way of writing about the real.”
Alex Garland, born in London in 1970, never had a war. For his first screenplay, he borrowed Wyndham’s instead. By then he was already a successful novelist, made famous before 30 by The Beach, later adapted into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. He turned down a multi-book deal in order to write screenplays. The first was 28 Days Later.
Garland once named The Day of the Triffids as the science fiction novel that had influenced him the most. Watching 28 Days Later, now the ur-text of the modern zombie genre, it’s easy to see the inspiration. The film begins in a hospital, alone, surrounded by an eerie silence, and proceeds into the commandeering of a taxi, an adoptive daughter found alive, a dalliance with malevolent ex-military types, the eventual cottage in the middle of nowhere.
For all its horror, 28 Days Later, released in 2002, still breathes a confident certainty about the future. A virulent, zombifying “Rage Virus” is released and an entire island infected – but escape remains possible. In the film’s best scene, Cillian Murphy’s bloodied Jim lies on his back and stares up at the sky to see, in the middle of England’s apocalypse, a commercial airliner flying overhead, ferrying cheery families to their holiday destinations. The world is still out there. A return to the past is still possible. Of the multiple endings Danny Boyle (Garland’s collaborator) and Garland discussed, they landed on perhaps the most optimistic: another plane, this time a low-flying fighter jet, flies overhead looking for survivors, who have laid out a banner – “hello” – in preparation. They turn to each other and smile.
As the 21st century progressed, however, Garland became less certain of happy endings. The turn began with Sunshine (2007), the next Boyle-Garland collaboration after Days: the sun starts to falter, and a team of hyper-rational scientists sent to reignite it are, one by one, driven mad. In Annihilation (2018), Garland’s second directing project, waves of teams are sent into a zone that distorts every aspect of reality. Civil War (2024) follows photojournalists tracking a war of absurdity, in which neon-haired snipers hide behind fake Christmas trees; Warfare (2025) consists entirely of the fragments and misrememberings of combat. No one is smiling at the end of these latter films.
So when Garland and Boyle announced that they were reuniting on a new trilogy of sequels to 28 Days Later, audiences could be forgiven for adopting the same expectations as Wyndham’s agent: of action, adjectives, drama, and suspense. Garland described the change his thought had undergone since 2002. “For a very big chunk of my life, probably up to about 15 years ago,” he said to one interviewer, “very broadly, the world I lived in was a progressive world… that felt like the trend.”
It’s now a common sense of disillusion. As John Bew put it in these pages a few weeks ago: “The world has changed in ways that shake us to our foundations.” Almost daily, settlements we’ve treated with certainty crumble. Commentators return to the language of “’hemispheres” and “spheres of influence”. Some part of the world blows up for a few days, then another. We’re not yet experiencing the same horrors as the catastrophists of the 1950s, but we worry about them. And our art is returning to the strange, looking once again to forge new British fables.
The first drafts of the new 28 Years films were thoroughly international. The heroes would be a team of Chinese special forces (the dialogue in subtitled Mandarin) who break into a quarantined Britain and fight their way to the Cambridge laboratory where the rage virus was made, in an attempt to find a cure. Upon arrival, they meet a group, funded by a shady multinational, who have come to weaponise the virus. It’s a story firmly rooted in the anxieties of the past: international laws surreptitiously, rather than shamelessly, flouted; shady corporations operating beyond government purview, rather than openly championed; and the old certainty, again: that there is a way back. Boyle objected that it was too generic. Garland realised what Wyndham had before him. He needed to “get weirder”.
The resulting two films released so far – 28 Years Later (2025) and The Bone Temple (2026) – are intense, strange works belonging to Britain alone. The story is achingly small, set almost entirely in the northeast of England. It is almost three decades after the first film and the virus has been isolated. Britain is quarantined, policed by boats that patrol the Channel. While the rest of the world lives on, with delivery drivers, iPhones and Instagram, Britain’s “natives” have been shown no such charity. They live, like the Romano-Britons after 410, in the ruins. No one leaves this island alive.
The first film follows a teenager called Spike (Alfie Williams) who lives on a commune on Holy Island. This is a place assembled from half-memories of an imagined past: church halls, Ken Loach films, and the firmly-of-their-time Welsh rugby anthems I used to sing along to in the Millennium Stadium as a child. The second film, directed by Nia DaCosta, a new addition to the franchise’s team, mainly follows its antagonist, the malevolent Sir Jimmy Crystal. We first meet Sir Jimmy aged eight, watching as his sisters are torn apart by the adults of the village whilst the Teletubbies play in the background. Grown up, he remains a child in a man’s body: with the tracksuits and catchphrases of Jimmy Savile; his followers, a band of ersatz Power Rangers; and scraps of Teletubby wisdom proffered to the victims of his unnamable tortures.
Both films dwell on the way our remembered past interferes with our present and obstructs our future. The irony of a world where history ended in 2002 shines through characters like Spike and Jimmy characters: to them, that date is now so distant that its facts (Simon Le Bon, Nurofen, the Angel of the North) have become fable. What remains is violence. The history of the northeast – Viking invasions and Scottish raids, Bubonic plagues and pacer trains – refuses to stay buried. People are flayed alive in barns, consumed in flames, skulls ripped clean from their bodies. The message is plain: to forget the violence that once ravaged these isles is to invite its return. The Bone Temple concludes with an actual history lesson in which the terms of the Treaty of Versailles are compared, unfavourably, with the Marshall Plan. One of the film’s final lines echoes Churchill: “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
Yet the films offer a delivery from the nihilism they might seem to suggest. It is largely driven by Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), an amiable, eccentric former GP. Clad in iodine woad, Kelson devotes himself mainly to two grands projets of the apocalypse. The first is a great temple to the dead, pylon upon pylon of bones, belonging to both human and infected: a lone landmark of the new rising from the landscape of the old. For the second, he plays a cheery Doctor Frankenstein, attempting to take an “alpha” zombie – the six-foot-eight Samson – and make him human once more.
Men of reason are usually brought into science-fiction stories in order to be confronted and driven mad by a reality they cannot explain. (Think of the planetstruck scientists in Solaris, Roy Neary’s numinous scooping of the mashed potato in Close Encounters, or Garland’s own experiment in Sunshine.) Kelson, however, adapts to the chaos. Whenever confronted with a miracle – a zombie mother giving birth on a Northern Rail carriage, or an undead behemoth saying his first words – Kelson’s response is a variation of: “how interesting”. Galvanised rather than broken by the inexplicable, he survives by trading in his rationalism for something more romantic. He combines rigorous scientific methods with plenty of opium and time spent gazing at the moon. He is discomfited just once, when a child of the apocalypse asks what he remembers of life before the fall. Kelson sounds like Garland: “There was a sense of certainty, the world had an order, a way about it… the foundations seemed unshakeable.”
Kelson is, in a sense, a science fiction author flourishing within a science fiction story. Confronted by horrifically unforeseen reality, he survives by creating a redemptive strangeness of his own. The result is a kind of humane horror. A woman’s head is boiled, flesh slaked off, and mounted on the temple: many in the Finchley Road Vue broke into loud sobs. In The Bone Temple, life is defined anew. Can we cheer on a zombie’s attempt to say its first word after having watched him crack open a man’s skull and eat his brains like a soft-boiled egg? You betcha.
The Bone Temple’s story of Kelson and Jimmy ends not with a cure, nor an escape: but a performance to Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast”. Fiennes, made up as Voldemort, dances, surrounded by flames, to his last crowd. Harry Potter and heavy metal: the marriage of two of the English strange’s most successful exports. From this unholy mixture comes our salvation.
Here the filmmakers make their most radical argument: we Brits have always been the children of the damned. After all, our head of state is a real-life Green Man, who has adopted a Transylvanian foster-village and can trace his lineage back to Odin. Our national hero is an licence-to-kill assassin, our national sport so globally dominant that Xi Jinping knows who Adam Wharton is. Our most important national exports include world-ending submarines built in Barrow cathedrals, 18,000 part gas turbine engines named after the rivers of Britain, and the world’s most exquisite vacuum cleaners. Surviving a coming strange new world will be a matter of leaning into our an, deep weirdness of our own.
Something of a trend is emerging in British cinema. The films that 28 Years Later will compete against for Best British Film at the BAFTAs this weekend include an adaptation of a novel about a BDSM biker gang near Box Hill, a thriller about a woman descending into post-natal psychosis, and a witch romance set mostly in the forests of Arden. Weird, all of it.
These films are fables for our moment. When a sense of collapse is everywhere, stories of the strange are bubbling up once again from England’s bog. As Mark Fisher, whose influence is all over British cinema, once put it: “the sense of wrongness associated with the weird, the conviction that this does not belong, is often a sign that we are in the presence of the new.” We need to get weirder.
Watching 28 Years Later for the first time last year, I was struck by how illegible it must be to a US audience. As one American Reddit user put it: “when you make a horror film, you should actually want to make one, not use the genre to tell some political story about England.” Last week, The Bone Temple was pulled early from US cinemas. Sony Pictures have reportedly already greenlit the third film, but the box office numbers may make them rethink.
I hope they do not repeat Wyndham’s agent’s error. The US feels more alien by the day;, what once was a flat, global monoculture is now clearly something identifiably American. This is an opportunity for new works that engage deeply and intensely with Britain. This trend has, for years, been emergent in our fringier films and novels (see, for instance, 2021’s In The Earth, and 2022’s Enys Men). But Boyle, Garland and DaCosta are attempting something of greater conceptual ambition. In truth, they’ve already succeeded. Whether their third film is made or not, others will follow.
In Wish I Was Here, Harrison ends one section with a call: “who is doing for us what Nevil Shute did for the On the Beach generation? What does our disaster – not yet risen to consciousness, but already, surely, fully known – feel like?” In 28 Years Later and The Bone Temple, we see not only our disaster, but perhaps our cure. These lands have always been strange. As Susan Sontag once wrote of the British: “If they did not exist, nobody would ever have invented them.” Why not, as Kelson longs to, invent us again? “Were you lost, and now are found,” he shouts at his alpha zombie pupil, as he disappears back into the forests of England.
Wyndham would approve of these new English fables. He’d like Samson, at least. “Time to Rest” ends with Bert, on a boat he’s built, paddling away from his Martian overlords to pastures new. Two Martians watch him as he leaves, confident that, in time, Bert will return. It’s just who he is. One offers the other a piece of advice. “When he comes, be gentle with him. These earthmen have big bodies, but inside them are lost children.”
[Further reading: The dark side of the Enlightenment]
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Subscribe here to commentThoughtful work, Aled! Really enjoyed reading it, framing these cultural shifts like this really does help put our cultural surroundings into perspective, rather than the somewhat unintelligent attitude of “everything is always getting worse” that seems to utterly dominate the media rounds and our zeitgeist – if you can even call the fragmented media environment that anymore.