This piece contains indiscriminate spoilers for a range of films released over the last 100 years.

The sun perches over a mossy mass of hills, a thatched cottage sits next to an abandoned barn, a storage space for since-abandoned domestic miscellany, and a group of rag-tag strangers gather over a tense meal. In 20 minutes time, we will watch these strangers skin each other alive. For now, we watch as (even at the end of the world), British manners supersede common-sense, and a band of torturing marauders are offered the measly meal of a family they have come to kill. 

In the 28 Days Later franchise, the British landscape (both physical and mental) is as much a character as New York is in Sex and the City. Jim leaves the hospital, still clothed in his gown, to find an abandoned double-decker. Spike is born and raised on a peninsula that juts out from the Northern coast, and on returning to the mainland is set against the ever-recognisable Angel of the North. Doctor Ian Kelson, the guardian of the dead, cracks wise about the NHS in a world that has since forgotten it. 

It is in part this Britishness, the innately recognisable and at times imperceptible quality, that has made 28 Days Later such an enduring cult classic. It is in part the distinct lack of this, that has made 28 Weeks Later such a widely regarded generational flop. 

It isn’t that the 28 Days Later franchise is unique in this appeal to Anglicism – in fact, it is a return to tradition. British horror is a staple of our cinematic legacy, forking in two distinct directions. While the States geared up steadily towards the final-girl, slasher flick, gut-them-and-gore-them, carnival of grotesquery that prevails in North American horror to this day, classic British horror is oft-remembered in its campy, theatrical, fantastical Hammer Horrors – most notably The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), and The Mummy (1959).* 

Alongside these creature features, under the shadow of the Second World War, fascism, tyranny, rations, and blackouts, came a lesser remembered but in my humble opinion far superior genre of British horror – the psychological horror, the thriller, the mind-melding and the suspicion-instilling. While The Bone Temple is far gorier than the original Days, (despite their respective 15 and 18 ratings) they both share a central tenet which embodies perfectly this staple of British horror: in a zombie apocalypse, at the end of the world, when everything you know is dead and gone, the scariest thing you may encounter is other human beings. Think of The Shining (1980) – a British-American co-production – the perfect balance of American blood and ghouls and British psychological torture. The abusive husband Jack Torrence’s ego and selfishness is manifested in a hotel which tortures his wife and children, but where the greatest danger to his family is still, always, him.

In this second-prong of British horror history there are two central interconnected pillars, like Hermia and Helena, “seeming parted but a union in partition”. Both represent elements of control, dominion and domination innate in the Anglo tradition – the repression and torment of women and womanhood, and Anglo-Christian values of chastity, godliness, and moral punishments. Those who stray from these values are the punished or the punishers, serving as a moral lesson.

Long before the likes of Mary Whitehouse, there was a cinema tradition of expressing the horror of punishing women for their sex and sexuality, and an omnipresent God who was written into the fabric of society.

Consider Black Narcissus (1947), wherein a group of Anglican nuns are tortured by – among other things – unchaste feelings, and the manifestations of a God who is disappointed in them for being swayed by the temptations he lay at their feet. In The Bone Temple, Kelson names the lumbering, notably bestowed, vision of machismo and alpha-masculinity “Samson”, named so for his strength and long hair (a lá Samson and Delilah). He bestows the gift of knowledge on Samson, in the form of a chemical cocktail to clear the caches of the mind, and in the next scene we see Samson clothed in a loincloth eating berries, while Kelson recites Amazing Grace. The atheist Kelson, in a world at best abandoned by God, is drawn innately to the Christian imagery of yore. Does he hope, somewhere inside him, for salvation? Or, more likely, does he simply fall back on the ingrained, the familiar, when left alone with only his own thoughts and the fading memory of life and love?

The ineffable Thorold Dickinson, director and editor to the stars, and the country’s very first Film academic, twice in the 40’s took the last-minute reins of psychological horrors starring imported-icon (and Austrian-Hungarian star of one of the greatest British war films of all time) Anton Walbrook. It is unsurprising, when watching Gaslight (1940) and The Queen of Spades (1949), that Dickinson was the son of an Archdeacon. In Gaslight (originator of the phrase) a young bride is driven to madness by her unfaithful husband, who denies the flickering of the gas-burning lights in an attempt to steal her family wealth. In The Queen of Spades a young ward is a pawn in the dealings of an older man, desperate to connive her out of her countess’ millions – in this, the women fight back. What is horror to the spider is victory to the fly (or whatever Morticia Addams said). In both films, women suffer for men’s greed and their lust, would-be sacrifices to their deadly sins.

In this vein, where religious hegemony and misogyny intersect, children are an extension of both values – in their representation of original sin, as fruit of poisoned wombs, as punishments to their mothers either in their existence or in their lacking, as wards to be taken care of. Take The Innocents (1961) as a perfect example of this intersection, an adaptation of The Turning of the Screw in which a governess is haunted by the children she tends, who exhibit a preternatural evil, discovered later to be possessed by the spirits of two adult lovers. The evil of a child, the spookiness of their lilting singing voices, is all due to adults who are unchaste, and their inherited sin – Eve’s fault canonically for her eating of that apple. 

Alternatively, consider Fear in the Night (1972), a little frustrating in its reliance on feminine hysteria, in which a traumatised woman named Peggy relocates to a boys’ boarding school with her teacher husband, and is tormented by a figure with a prosthetic arm. Disbelieved Peggy is at the whims of her cheating husband, who hoped to drive her mad enough to murder. Surrounded by boys, whose echoing voices at haunt her, she is one of two women in a sea of soon-to-be-men (and isn’t that scary enough). Her husband’s affair partner is killed, by a combination of her husband and her lover, leaving Peggy to be almost hung by her own husband. Once again, women are the victims of the whims of unfaithful men, who punish both the women they want and the ones they don’t. They are seen to deserve their deaths both for their looseness or their chastity. 

Alfred Hitchcock – probably the most acclaimed British director, famed for his genre-spanning and -defying six-decade career – made his first foray in American cinema in 1940 with his adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Long before Norman Bates slashed Jamie Lee Curtis’ mother to death in the shower, Hitchcock was rummaging around in women’s heads. In Rebecca, the never-named female protagonist is the second wife to the wealthy Maxim de Winter, haunted by the memory (and perhaps presence) of his first wife, the titular Rebecca. She unknowingly wears her clothes – in the fashion of zombies or Frankenstein’s creatures, reanimating the dead in a familiar, but fundamentally wrong way – and slowly unravels on the Cornish coast. Rebecca, pregnant with a child that was not her husband’s, was ‘disappeared’ in suspicious circumstances, while the nameless second wife is persuaded almost to suicide by the ultimate Boy Mom, Mrs de Winter.

A particularly fascinating symptom of the 28 Days Later franchise’s director-hopping is how the films oscillate between implicit and explicit anti-natalism – in Weeks, the children are harbingers of the disease to mainland Europe, in The Bone Temple the opening shot is a sign reading “no children past this point” – and bio-essentialist “women’s wombs will save the world” – in Years the fog clears over Jodie Comer as she holds the hands of a pregnant zombie, is calmed by Comer’s feminine presence, and in The Bone Temple a pregnant woman saves her child’s father from torture, but is the ultimate harbinger of death for everyone in the cabin. She flees, unnamed incubator to the future in her belly, like Moses floating in his basket downstream.

The natalism ebbs and flows, whether with the times or the director’s whims is unclear, but the central tenet of women, maligned and mistreated, is central to the 28 trilogy: whether it is Selena and Hannah, tranquilised in ballgowns in Days; Alice, abandoned by her husband to die at the opening of Weeks; or the cancer-riddled and brain-addled Isla whose husband dips his wick all across the island in Years.

In fact, despite its famed resurrection of the zombie-genre, and era-defining creature upgrade – imagine zombies, but fast – 28 Days Later contains far less biting, chasing, or frothing at the mouth than you might imagine from a seminal zombie flick. In Days the women are taken as prisoners by the soldiers they hoped would save them, left at the whim of another man to rescue them, while in The Bone Temple a gang of traumatised adults, with stolen childhoods, roam the countryside dressed as a notorious paedophile, defiling bodies and torturing the living. You would be forgiven if you could forget, for large swathes of the film – as Cook from Skins rocked his peroxide bob – that The Bone Temple takes place post-zombie-apocalypse. It is for these reasons that I will always see British horror as a women’s genre, and the 28 Days Later franchise as the jewel in this tradition’s crown. While not always explicitly feminist, the genre has long portrayed the horrors of being a woman in the world. One of my few criticisms of The Bone Temple is the late-stage, shoe-horned in realisation that the monsters attack the living because, in their disease-addled minds, they see them as monsters themselves. It seems that Garland has forgotten, or has expected us to have forgotten, that the original zombies were infected with rage – a condition recognisable from Euripides’ Medea to Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne.


The 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is available to watch on Thursday the 5th of March at 7:30pm at the Midlands Art Centre.

*A lack of American distribution funding led to the steady death-march of Hammer in the industry domination sense, but they still make films to this day, including the ill-conceived, derivative Let Me In (2010) and the Daniel Radcliffe break-from-form (less disastrous than the Monkees as “The Men Who Gave You Head”) The Woman in Black (2012).