Kathleen Kellett

storytelling and scholarship for young adults and children

TRANSCRIPT: “28 Years Later”: Zombies, Childhood, and Cultural Rot

INTRODUCTION

Hello and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and today we are talking about the Rage Virus, in all its metaphorical glory. I wanted to return to some proper horror discussion for October, and the recent 28 Years Later films won a Patreon poll, so I am very excited to discuss fast zombies and traumatic childhoods with you all today. I will be focusing primarily on the film entitled 28 Years Later, no subtitle, which is the one that came out in 2025, though I will be talking a bit about 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which came out this year, and then also the first film in this series, 28 Days Later, which came out in 2002. I won’t be talking about 28 Weeks Later, because I have not seen it. But the other three I watched all in a row the other week (Days I’d seen before, but not since college), so I am fresh on this long-running pseudo-zombie apocalypse in what is now both alternate history and alternate future Britain. I’ll just refer to the movies as Days, Years, and Bone Temple, so we don’t get all muddled in the repeated “28” of it all. These films have always been about militarism, masculinity, insularity, and cultural stagnation – all great themes to explore via monsters – and then, luckily for me, Years put all of these ideas into a coming-of-age story for a 12-year-old protagonist, Spike.

Before we get into all of that, just a reminder that if you want more monster education and community in your life, I have programs open for enrollment! As already mentioned, if you join my Patreon community, you get the opportunity to vote on future video topics, and you also get additional monthly reaction videos. I also have an adult Monster Book Club that meets on the last Wednesday of each month. Our October book is A Cosmology of Monsters. We have a great little group over there, and we would love to welcome more members! Also, if you are or know a teenager who enjoys monster stories, I would love to get the teen version of that club going, as well. You can enroll at themonsterandthechild.com, and while you’re there, you can also check out my Youth Monsterology educational mentorship program, which I am aiming to start in the spring. So you can sign up to be kept in the loop for that program, as well. That link and my Patreon link are down in the description, and I hope to see you in one of these communities!

All right, so back to the Rage Virus. For those who are unfamiliar with this franchise, the “zombies” here aren’t technically zombies, at least not in the way they’ve generally appeared in Western horror since Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead. That is to say, they’re not the living dead. Instead, these monsters are simply “infected” mortal humans. So you don’t need to specifically destroy the brain to kill them – any fatal wound will do, but make sure it really is fatal, because they’re not going to slow down for pain. And the “not slowing down” part is their major strength: these are fast zombies. Since regular humans can run, so can they. Otherwise, though, the infected act pretty much like any other Western movie zombie. They are consumed with a single-minded compulsion to chase and kill, and they multiply with a bite.

The way that all of this got started back in the original film, which was written by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, was via scientific experimentation. The film opens with news footage of unrest and violence around the world, and I was reminded of the beginning of the 1976 film Who Can Kill a Child?, which I discuss in the video in the corner. We then pan out of the screens to see a chimpanzee being forced to watch these horrors in a lab. The chimp is strapped down Jesus-style, because we shan’t be getting any subtlety here, which, as far as I’m concerned, is right and proper. If you want to be subtle, you don’t do zombies. Some animal rights activists break into the lab to bust out the apes confined in the too-small cages. One of the scientists begs them not to, explaining that the animals are highly contagious. When the activists ask with what, the scientist pleads, “To cure, you must first understand,” before admitting that the answer is “rage.” The activists don’t heed his warning – and in their defense, that does sound like nonsense – so they open a cage, and the outbreak begins.

As you can imagine, what rage is – what it means and what it does – is central to everything that follows. But it’s not the whole world that has to reckon with these questions: it is specifically the British Isles. More specifically, it’s the main one – comprised of England, Wales, and Scotland – that falls entirely to the virus, owing in part to the rest of the world’s ability to quarantine it there. So much like how Lord of the Flies is about what would happen if specifically English schoolboys were left to fend for themselves, these films are about what would happen if specifically modern Brits and people living in Britain had to survive the zombie apocalypse. What happens to that already quite fraught historical and national identity when it is isolated and left to rot? And, 28 years later, what would a British childhood look like?

Now, I’m not British, so there are probably nuances in these films that I miss, but like I said, they by and large are not subtle, so I think I can pick up what they’re putting down. So let’s catch up with Spike in our alternate 2030 as he contends with the mythical past and the stagnant future – and the desire for something to change.

SON, FATHER, MOTHER, SKULL: END TIMES BOYHOOD

28 Years Later begins not with Spike, but with another boy, even younger, at the start of the outbreak. A gaggle of blond children tensely face the television while Teletubbies plays incongruently in the background. Every so often, a frantic adult opens the door and dumps another child into the room. When young Jimmy tries to ask what’s going on, his mother instructs him to stay put and stay silent. But closed doors don’t stop the infected, so when they descend upon the house, all hell breaks loose for adults and children alike. Jimmy sees his mother torn away as she screams at him to run. He crosses the yard to the adjacent church, where his father, the vicar, is praying in ecstasy. Vicar dad is pretty pumped about this whole end of the world thing, as he believes that after all the bloodshed – or maybe during the bloodshed? Because of the bloodshed? – the kingdom of God will be at hand. He gives a cross necklace to his son, which is decidedly unhelpful at this juncture, and Jimmy hides beneath the church floor as the infected rush in. Jimmy whispers, “Father, why have you forsaken me?”, which, no matter which way he is directing it, is a fair question.

In her introduction to the collection Generation Z: Zombies, Popular Culture, and Educating Youth, Victoria Carrington explains that the sudden rapid change of any social order will naturally result in a crisis of selfhood. She writes, “The ‘self’ is constructed in relation to the norms and practices of the society around us. When that society crumbles, as it always seems to do when confronted by waves of zombies, the structures that have contributed to the construction and maintenance of ‘self’ dissolve.” This prologue with Jimmy basically shows us a speedrun of that process. Then, as we get our eponymous title card, we are introduced to another childhood that looks kind of all right by comparison. But by structuring this film as a coming-of-age story, Years crashes that narrative of the creation of a self into a setting typically concerned, as Carrington says, with the dissolution of the self. I think this is an extremely cool storytelling choice even if you’re not a childhood studies scholar, and if you are, it’s pure catnip.

Spike’s selfhood is developing within a somewhat rundown but still functional house, where Spike is packing his gear for the day: water bottle, whistle, knife, etc. The rest of his village on Lindisfarne, also pointedly named Holy Island, is waking up, too, visiting the communal storehouse and completing tasks like carving new bows and arrows. The island is connected to the rest of the country by a walkway accessible only at low tide. That is hidden behind a huge gate and guard tower. So, on the surface, seems kind of great, relatively speaking. Certainly not the worst place to spend the past 28 years.

Spike, who is played wonderfully by Alfie Williams, finishes getting ready for the day and hesitates over a Power Rangers figure, which he almost takes with him but then puts back down. I may be a childhood studies scholar, but I’m not immune to the poignancy of that. Yes, it’s unsubtle and borderline emotionally manipulative – see the boy leaving childhood behind, casting off the trappings of carefree play – but then actually, mid-writing this sentence, I decided I don’t need to give a scholarly apology for being moved by this, because we are starting to set up some important themes in this moment, namely that Spike does not have the luxury of play anymore, and that’s not only unhealthy for him but also for the adults in his society, too.

So we introduce that idea with a quick little tug on the old heartstrings, and then Spike joins his dad downstairs for breakfast. They seem to have a close and fairly easy relationship, despite the austerity of their circumstances. Dad Jamie tells Spike to have some bacon because he’s already had some, but Spike knows that Jamie has just gone without. But Spike has also internalized this ethos of self-sacrifice, because he smuggles the bacon up to his parents’ room, where his mother, Isla, is lying confused and unwell in bed. She suffers from, among other things, terrible headaches and serious memory lapses. For example, she has forgotten that Jamie is taking Spike to the mainland for the first time today. She reacts to this news by exploding with anger, cursing out her husband, and screaming, “He’s a fucking baby!” “He’s twelve,” Jamie counters, which does not really help the situation. But soon Isla has worn herself out, and when she’s back in bed and asks where Spike is going, he simply lies, “To school.”

Since Years and The Bone Temple just came out, there is not much in the way of published scholarship about them yet, but I did find some sources that certainly help frame some of what’s going on here. One is a book called Parenting in the Zombie Apocalypse: The Psychology of Raising Children in a Time of Horror by Steven J. Kirsh. I’ll admit up front that this wasn’t my favorite text, because Kirsh and I come to our analyses from very different places. He is a developmental psychologist who tends to take a pretty individualistic, evolutionary psychology kind of approach to zombies, whereas I come at this from a much more sociocultural angle. So when he talks about how zombies represent fears of predation and contagion, my instinct is to be like, sure, and also what societal issue are we using those fears as metaphors for? Also, Kirsh states that developmental stages through childhood and even adolescence are straightforward and universal – he actually uses that word – and that’s going to be a real quick no from me. However, he does acknowledge that social constructions of childhood shape how childhood is experienced throughout the world – though I still think he treats Western as kind of default or “most natural” – and therefore a zombie apocalypse would cause an immense upheaval to these constructions. As Kirsh puts it, “When the dead rise, a social destruction of childhood will take place in developed nations.” Instead of experiencing, for example, “lengthy periods of education and enrichment activities,” children will be expected to participate in survival tasks far earlier than current beliefs in childhood innocence and their attendant social institutions would allow.

The way Years immediately starts playing with that idea is fascinating to me. Because on the one hand, yes, clearly true. Outfitting your twelve-year-old with a bow and arrow and taking him out to kill extremely dangerous predators would be frowned upon in, for example, non-alternate-reality Britain. But also, Spike’s community hasn’t overhauled everything about childhood. Kirsh makes the same assumption that a lot of zombie media does: in the zombie apocalypse, “Governments will collapse; modern conveniences will no longer exist; and lawlessness, violence, and brutality will all increase. It will be survival of the fittest, at its most primal level” (6). But Years doesn’t default to this sort of prehistoric (and ahistorical) assumption that we will revert to some kind of pre-cultural anarchy. There’s nothing that could happen to humans that would make us not human anymore, and that means that specificity of culture will remain as long as we do, in whatever capacity. On Holy Island, school still does exist – it includes archery and combat lessons, but also regular classroom stuff, as well – and, as we saw from the Power Ranger, we haven’t completely dispensed with things like toys. One of the ways this post-apocalyptic society is clinging to a cultural identity is through the institutions, material trappings, and social roles of childhood, at least up to a point. I think that shows how crucial the meanings surrounding childhood are for any given society. A big part of what any collective “we” are is what we do with our kids. But also, a big part of “what we do with our kids” is how we prepare them for the future, and Spike’s future is culturally fragmented. This community has put a lot of effort into keeping the island’s British aesthetics, from its basic material realities like the style of clothes and houses to the more pointed examples like the English flag and the portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth II in the town hall. In a review of the film, Tom Augustine writes, “The hallmarks of Rule Britannia remain.” On that note, it needs to be said that this community is white as hell. I don’t think there were any people of color depicted on the island. So this community wants its future to feel a particular kind of British. It also needs its future to have food and fuel, and that means having a populace that can fight zombies to get them. So Spike is trained for the latter while still cocooned in the aesthetics of the former.

Spike’s dad is definitely focused on the survival aspect of things, even to an extent that surprises the village elders. They ask if he’s sure he wants to take Spike out at such a young age – fourteen or fifteen would be more typical. But Jamie insists that Spike is ready, which prompts the viewer to wonder at Jamie’s motivations here. Because, again, his relationship with his kid seems pretty good. He’s helpful and supportive. He speaks to him kindly and does not berate him for mistakes. The typical bad father-son toxic masculinity traits that one might aren’t immediately apparent. But the film lets us know very clearly that those ideologies are present under the surface, as a montage of war and violence accompanies Spike’s first trip past the guarded gates. The Rudyard Kipling poem “Boots,” as performed by Taylor Holmes, plays over images of Spike and Jamie crossing over to the mainland, as well as old World Wars footage of soldiers battling for king and country, medieval longbowmen conjuring up a mythical, Arthurian past, and, of course, infrared scenes of infected carnage. “Boots” was used in the film’s trailer, too, to incredible effect. It’s beyond unsettling. Kipling wrote the poem about the Second Boer War, an imperialist clash in South Africa where Britain had no business being in the first place, though Kipling himself wasn’t trying to argue that. Remember, he’s the OG “white man’s burden” guy. But he was interested in capturing the psychological horror of the endless march of war – in this case, literally, as soldiers traversed miles and miles per day. And the way Taylor Holmes reads it, in a recording from 1915 – so, the cusp of World War I – is harrowing. He begins monotonously, like those endlessly marching boots, but then his voice gradually rises in pitch and franticness until he is positively howling the final stanza.

One of the things I like about these movies is that they don’t try to not be movies. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for naturalistic sound design and editing; sometimes that is the effect that you’re going for. But sometimes that can also be used as just a default, and so I found it refreshing to watch not only Years but the original Days, as well, and find myself confronted with Boyle’s very deliberate and purposely attention-grabbing music choices, camera angles, and, of course, bits of business like the thematic “Boots” montage. Augustine writes, “The messy, cobbled-together feeling of the edit, which seems to follow the director’s subconscious fancies, generates an uncanny mood.” I completely agree and I love it. It feels like the movie is grabbing you by the shoulders to say, hey, this horror is art, and art’s supposed to make you think. So get thinking.

But thinking critically about their choices is not, however, something that the authority figures in Spike’s village are wont to do. They are too busy trying to maintain the fragile equilibrium that they have. Out on the mainland, we see that the small island community has already stripped a lot of the closest forest bare of resources, so the survivors have had to move further and further inland for things like firewood and pillaged supplies from long-empty houses. That means traversing into a wilderness filled with infected. Over the last 28 years, the infected have evolved into several types. Remember, they’re just sick people, so they’ve had to reproduce and, at the very least, demonstrate some basic survival skills despite the extreme mind-altering effects of the virus. Some of the infected have a strain of the virus that makes them “low and slow”: they spend their time crawling over the ground, eating worms, though they can still be dangerous when roused. Others have adapted in the opposite way, becoming “alphas” that are larger, stronger, and smarter than the average infected. Later in the film, we get the explanation that in some people’s systems, the virus has a steroid-like effect, which is how alphas happen. Though they are just as consumed by their rage, they are able to hunt strategically.

Jamie has brought Spike out today not to add to the village’s resources, but specifically so he can have his first kill. And, like, if you put yourself in the mindset of a community that has had to survive in the absolute wildest of conditions for the past 28 years, you can sort of understand this, jarring though it is to think about. You would need community members to learn how to act quickly and decisively, for their own safety and for the safety of those around them. But we also quickly see that this is not merely a utilitarian mission: it’s a coming-of-age ritual, with all the attendant expectation around assuming a new social identity: here, a strong man of violence. Spike has already internalized this cultural value; when his dad checks in with him at the start of the mission, Spike says, “Can’t go back now, Dad. Everyone will think I’m soft.” Jamie is pleased with that answer, and he is also proud as he coaches Spike through his first kill of one of the low-and-slow infected. Spike successfully shoots his target through the neck, but when the noise rouses several other infected of this type, Jamie takes care of the rest – though he holds off on shooting a final child infected when Spike calls out, “Dad!” Jamie shakes off his own fugue of violence to congratulate his son: “Beautiful kill, Spike!”

The next stop of the mainland tour is an abandoned house, so Jamie can show Spike how to search for valuable resources. Something this close to the village is pretty picked over, but Jamie is excited to find a red Frisbee. Spike has no reaction, because he doesn’t know what that is. Jamie has a brief moment of being a dad who can’t wait to show his son a new way to have fun together – and then they hear something from the other room. What they find surprises even the weathered survivalist Jamie: a man’s body with a bag over his head hanging upside-down from the ceiling with JIMMY carved into his chest. So not a great sign! Obviously, our Teletubbies boy from the prologue has had some twists and turns in life, but he is still an unknown entity to our island villagers, so they don’t know what this is all about. (A brief note on names here: I don’t think it’s an accident that we have Jimmy, Jamie, and that the original protagonist of Days, played by Cillian Murphy, was Jim. Definitely doing a sort of variations on the everyman thing here: so like, what are the options for a boy/man to become in this new society? I think this is a clever way of signaling this theme, and also, as someone whose own family is awash in James-names, it’s also personally jarring.) Spike and Jamie get a scare when the hanging body starts writhing: this man has become infected since hanging here like bait. Jamie, growing stern, instructs Spike to kill him: “The more you kill, the easier it gets.” This point-blank execution is harder for Spike than the low-and-slow in the forest, and Jamie has to insist, “He’s got no mind, he’s got no soul.” Spike does not get the option of not choosing violence. He must be ruthless towards the rage-infested humans who would kill him if he doesn’t kill them first. In order to do that, Jamie needs his son to feel a bit of that rage himself – and possibly even to like it.

But first, he’s gonna feel some fear! Some fast zombies, led by an alpha, get on our guys’ trail. Now, I know I was a bit disparaging of the somewhat obvious statement that zombies represent a fear of predation, but oh my god, these films are really good at that element of it. Both Days and Years excel at creating the absolute nightmare terror of running for your life. Not something I’ve ever experienced personally, but my monkey brain does like to trot that out occasionally in my dreams, sometimes with actual zombies and also sometimes with big cats, as if to remind me, hey, this could still happen, little prey animal, stay sharp out there. These films expertly convey that hot, sick adrenaline where culture is momentarily suspended, and you and the thing chasing you are simply mortal bodies. Spike fires off a few arrows during the chase, but his panic makes it impossible to connect with anything fatal. Jamie fares better, but the two are forced to take refuge in another abandoned house to wait out the night and the tide. Meanwhile, back home, choirs of schoolchildren sing the old hymn “Abide with Me” as adults decorate the community hall for Spike’s homecoming. And throughout, we also see the boys training with bows and arrows, intercut with our medieval archers. It’s this dizzying mix of an exalted cultural self-perception, with its hymns and history, and a stark reality of animal terror. I talk a lot about how social constructions of childhood often don’t match up with actual lived experiences of childhood, and this film is eager to demonstrate that idea through pointed juxtaposition.

Holed up overnight, Spike spots smoke from a fire off in the distance, which his dad very obviously doesn’t want to talk about. Spike may be old enough, in Jamie’s eyes, to kill infected, but he’s still not old enough for honesty and transparency from adults. It unfortunately rings very true to me that, even in a zombie apocalypse, adults would still try to “protect” children by withholding information from them. Spike clocks the stonewalling and files it away for later, but first they have to get back to the village, which they narrowly do, chased over the half-flooded walkway by the alpha under a magnificent night sky. Another thing this film likes to juxtapose with animal terror is the vast and numinous, which is not super material to my childhood studies analysis, but just know that I dig it enormously. Once they are home, Spike has his celebration in the community hall, during which he is plied with alcohol and hailed as a hero by his father, despite his protestations that he was mostly just really scared and only managed to kill one slow infected. But to hear Jamie tell it, Spike was the manliest, most violent twelve-year-old around, and the village is raucously delighted to play along. Spike, overwhelmed by following up several grade-A traumatic events with a giant party, escapes the hall to go puke, and he spies his father sneaking off for a dalliance with another married woman – while the ailing Isla waits at home.

At this point, Spike has had enough and heads home, where the archery teacher has been watching over Isla. Spike gets some information about the fire from him – apparently, it signals the continued existence of a “Dr. Kelson,” which is shocking to Spike, because his father told him there were no more doctors, which is why they have not been able to identify or treat Isla’s illness. When Spike confronts Jamie the next day, Jamie admits that there is a doctor out there, but he’s totally insane: fifteen years ago, a hunting party from the island saw him with dozens upon dozens of corpses all arranged in rows around his fire. They fled from this horrifying scene and never returned. Spike is like, eh, whatever – he’s still a doctor who can help Mum? When Jamie resists that interpretation, Spike, now thoroughly disillusioned, accuses his father of wanting Isla to die so he can get it on with his affair partner – for which Jamie slaps him. Jamie seems immediately shocked by his own action: this is clearly not the father he wants to be. He wants to be Frisbee dad, close-with-son dad. But how could violence not seep into this relationship when “violent” is the main thing that boys and men must be? Spike retreats to his mother and demands that Jamie leave, which he does, but not before punching a hole in the wall, almost casually, which I thought was an excellent touch, as that’s such a recognizable and ubiquitous symptom of toxic male anger. The childhood home thus literally marred, Spike now really faces a turning point in his identity, the day after his purported coming-of-age. What kind of man will he be?

Well, first, like his father, he’ll be a liar. He sets a fire and then he tells the guards at the gate that he’ll take over for them while they help put it out. He then promptly smuggles Isla over the water to the mainland, while the English flag – and it is specifically the English one, not the Union – burns behind him. Subtlety is for chumps! Speaking of which, his mother’s name being Isla – island – is also all very archetypal: the motherland, Mother Earth, but also, with both Holy Island and the larger British landmass, the isolation of mother and child. And then we have the boy Spike: a weapon, a phallus, a whole lot of masculine expectation put onto a child who ultimately does not embody those roles, but rather takes on the identity of a caretaker.

When Isla, in her confused state, realizes that they’re on the mainland, she tries to make Spike go back, but eventually acquiesces to his quest to find the wayward doctor. Along the way, she starts to remember her own father and her early childhood from before the outbreak. She reminisces that her dad was always eager to be silly with her when she was a kid, and she asks if Jamie is ever silly with Spike. He is not. That has been one of those major shifts in social constructions that Kirsh predicted would take place in a zombie apocalypse: the playfulness that is currently associated with childhood in our own world has been replaced in Spike’s with serious utilitarianism. But Isla still manages to keep silliness alive, and she and her son pull faces at each other and giggle as they settle down for the night. I really like the implication that losing “silliness” as a virtue is not just detrimental for childhood, because that could have easily become an essentializing and romanticizing notion of how children are supposed to be carefree and playful, etc. But instead, the film posits that the whole family, the whole community, adults and children alike, suffer when cultural identity is crystallized around usefulness, especially violent usefulness. Despite her deteriorating mental state, Isla makes Spike feel safer and more loved by her continuing ability to joke around with him as a form of familial intimacy. Also, not for nothing, but literally as I was working on this paragraph in the script, my wife came in the room to let me know she was heading out on an errand, and in the course of this communication struck a variety of heroic poses while I applauded. So being silly: necessary for the maintenance of comfort and closeness in human relationships! This is something that I haven’t talked as much about on this channel when breaking down social constructions of childhood, because I often wind up discussing how certain assumptions and stereotypes about the nature of kids can backfire and hurt kids, but also there are certain assumptions about childhood that are actually just aspects of human existence that adult society has relegated only for kids, and that messes up adults, too! Adults dispensing with play and jokes and frivolity and assuming that those are only things that kids can have as luxury items that can be taken away damages all of us.

Plus, silliness does not actually preclude anyone from effective survivalism. During the night, a low-and-slow infected crawls in, at first trying to eat Spike’s shoelace as a worm, which was an upsetting visual. The next morning, the infected is dead, with both Spike and Isla alarmed and confused. A flashback shows us that Isla efficiently and brutally dispatched the infected before he could bite her son. That memory is gone for her the next day, but her instincts are intact. Unfortunately, the rest of her mental state continues to degrade. Before sleep the previous night, when Spike said he’d keep watch, she facetiously – and poignantly – responded, “Okay, Dad.” Now, she starts calling him “Dad” not facetiously: she on-and-off perceives him as her actual father. This is a rather literal example of parentification, which Kirsh notes would likely be rampant in the zombie apocalypse, due to an increase in the conditions in which it occurs in real life – that is to say, situations in which children’s parents or caregivers are physically or mentally incapable of providing care, and instead require care for themselves or for other family members. Parentification can be a form of emotional abuse, but it can also take place, as it does in Spike’s situation, when the family unit lacks the appropriate resources to function.

Spike and Isla are briefly joined on their quest by a shipwrecked Swedish sailor named Erik, who has been given up for dead now that he has made landfall in the quarantine zone. Erik, who is in his twenties, provides a contrast in emotional maturity to Spike, as Erik gripes about having to carry Isla and pokes fun at their parentified dynamic, which, not cool, man. But Erik also recognizes that his own belief in heroic masculinity is what got him here, as he relates a story of him belittling his friend’s seemingly meaningless job as “pissing his life away.” He says, “I joined the Navy to prove a point. Now who’s pissing their life away?” Isla, for her part, calls Erik a dick when she returns to lucidity. Anyway, Erik is not long for this world, as he is not prepared for its realities. But Isla is – perhaps more than any other character we have met.

Isla follows the sound of screams and meets a pregnant infected woman who has taken refuge in a derailed and decaying train car to have her baby. Isla offers her hands for the woman to brace herself, and the woman grabs them, her rage momentarily forgotten as her body is consumed by a different primal struggle. I want to be mindful of the potential for bioessentialism within the exalting of female knowledge as something earthier and more “natural” than male society, because that way lies misogyny in a superficially nicer package. Male culture vs. female nature is never a good binary, even if we’re criticizing the former. But I don’t think that that’s the only way to read this scene, and I do think there is something profound in the meeting of these two sick women. The infected mother is an entirely abject being, cut off from society due to a virus reducing her merely to a dangerous body – but even after 28 years of this, rage is still not the only thing an infected body is capable of. There is still the potential of human life there, but this woman and all the other infected have been abandoned just as much as the non-infected survivors have. The world has given up on them. Society has determined that it’s better off without a solution for what ails her, as long as her ailment doesn’t spread. And Isla is on her way to the same fate. Her militaristic community can’t help her; her husband has already moved on, and she no longer has any input into her son’s upbringing. Everyone except Spike is resigned to just wait for her to die. But both of these women have more to do – more life, literally, to give.

Spike and Erik are both horror-stricken when they join Isla in the train car and see what’s going on, but she does not allow them to interrupt. The infected woman bears her child and passes out, and Isla quickly demands water to clean the baby off – if infected blood gets in the eyes or mouth, it’s all over. They act in time: the baby is not infected, but Erik refuses to believe it. He shoots the infected mother when she comes to, and then brandishes his gun at Isla, holding the baby, and then at Spike, who steps in front of his mother. So focused is he on the specter of the dangerous child – an apocalyptic future – that he ignores the present danger, and he winds up with his head – spine still attached – ripped from his shoulders by another alpha. Spike, Isla, and the baby flee, and the alpha chases them to Dr. Kelson’s territory. Kelson, played to absolute perfection by Ralph Fiennes, incapacitates the alpha, whom he has dubbed Samson, with a sedative blow dart. Put a pin in Samson – no pun intended – until the next section. Kelson, who has covered himself in orange iodine as a viral prophylactic, cheerfully plucks Erick’s head from the alpha’s grasp and leads Spike and Isla to what he has made from all those corpses: a towering ossuary of bones, with a spire of skulls right in the center.

Is this all rather spooky? Undoubtedly! But spooky and sinister aren’t the same. Kelson explains that he built this place as a monument to the dead, to honor them and to serve as his own memento mori: remember you must die. In “Ghosts, Vampires, Zombies, and Us: The Undead as Autoethnographic Bridges,” Andrew F. Herrmann writes, “The undead – those ephemeral beings in their multiple variations – connect the seen an the invisible, the known and the unknown, the understood and the unexplained, the private and the public, mystery and science” (328). Though the infected are not technically undead, Kelson’s ossuary performs this function in his undead world. With his material reality no longer remotely resembling the doctor’s life he used to lead, Kelson has adjusted by showing great reverence to what came before – the dead – while also using their remains to bring meaning and beauty to his new life. Ultimately, this approach is considerably mentally healthier than the queen-and-country clinging to the past in which Spike has been raised. Kelson has accepted that everything changed, but he still carried his compassion as a physician into this new world. He does not deny the death around him, but instead has found a way to still care for the humanity of those who died. He’s not trying to force this new world into an old shape. Because of this, he is the one who is able to guide Isla and Spike through the denial and silence that their village had enveloped them in.

Kelson carefully and respectfully examines Isla, and comes to the conclusion that she has metastatic cancer that is consuming her brain. There is no cure, not in this reality. This is not surprising to Isla. She admits that she had assumed the same, though no one would confirm it to her. She couldn’t bring herself to be the first to say it, especially not to Spike, for which she apologizes: “I needed someone else to tell you, but no one did.” Clearly, withholding this information from Spike did not protect him, but rather actively endangered him, as he traversed a literal zombie wilderness because he still believed his mother’s life could be saved. Even a mother as tuned into her child’s needs as Isla could not resist this most common attempt to shield children from reality – and, though she was wrong, it’s hard to be that mad at her for that, given that said reality was her own impending death, which she didn’t want to be real, either. But the ossuary sets the truth free. Isla holds her son and nods over his shoulder to Kelson, who sedates Spike with his blow gun. And yes, that is a medical decision made by a parent without the child’s consent, and I don’t love that and the film doesn’t interrogate it, but this sequence is still very moving and I don’t think there were any really good decisions to be made here. Sometimes you only have bad choices, and I understand that Isla doesn’t want Spike to have to watch what is going to come next. Isla and Kelson explain to Spike as he drifts off that, though Kelson can’t save her, he can still help her, and she has always loved and will always love her son. Kelson says that memento amoris – remember you must love – is just as important as memento mori. And so Isla walks off between the monuments of bone and meets a peaceful death from Kelson’s dart.

Before dawn, Spike wakes, and Kelson gives him his mother’s clean, boiled skull, with instructions to give her pride of place in the ossuary. Spike climbs to the top of the spire and sets her face towards the sunrise. Symbolically speaking, the child assures the mother that there is still a future, though he now leaves her behind to meet it. Classic hero’s journey, coming-of-age stuff, though effectively executed. And since the hero’s journey is a historically patriarchal form of storytelling, there is something subversive in what Spike does next. He returns to the village gates, but only long enough to leave the baby behind, with a note declaring that her name is Isla. As Herrmann writes, “The undead are simultaneously the people they used to be as well as the apparitions they are now. They connect the past with the present” (328). And as Kirsh writes, “Although children cannot consider a deceased parent a source of physical comfort and protection (as they once did), perceived emotional support is still a possibility.” Spike incorporates his memory of his mother into his personal identity, and he also tries to establish her as part of an improved cultural identity. By naming the baby Isla, the dream of the British Isles, of Holy Island, is born again, and Spike wants it to be his mother’s dream – connection, silliness, mutual care – and not his father’s of violent “heroism.” It is worth pointing out here that this baby, after her birth, remains pristinely clean and shining, and, as my wife dryly noted, the whitest baby in the world. So hold onto that thought for a bit.

Spike is not ready to return to his village, to his father’s anguish. He promises that he will one day, but first he needs to figure some things out for himself. Also classic hero’s journey stuff, but in this particular setting, probably a bad idea. Because Spike inevitably winds up cornered by a group of infected – and that’s only the start of his bad day. He is saved by a group of people all dressed alike. Specifically, all dressed like Jimmy Savile. And that’s where the movie ends.

If you know even the smallest amount about British pop culture and media history, you know that things for Spike have just gone from bad to worse. But before we expand our discussion to talk about why, let’s wrap up the themes of Years, which I thought was a really thought-provoking, well-made, intellectually and emotionally engaging movie. Are there things to critique? For sure, and I’ll talk more about some of them in the next section. But, man, it’s just so nice to watch a monster story that I just really like. The pressures of the institutions of storytelling – movie studios, the publishing industry, etc. – increasingly seem to be flattening and same-ing as much media output as they can for maximum profit, so my soul that yearns for artistry was just drinking up every ostentatiously slanted camera angle, every in-your-face montage, every visual reminder that this is a film made by people who truly and deeply believe that monsters are meaningful.

And since the meaning of these monsters is specifically British, let’s zoom out of Spike’s story to discuss some of the broader social implications of the 28 Length of Times Later franchise. Not all of these films focus as closely on childhood as Years does, which is why that one has been the bulk of this analysis, but it would behoove us to round out our conversation with some of the ways this franchise treats the cultural conditions in which a childhood like Spike’s would take place. And that involves us talking about, among other things, Jimmy Savile.

“THERE’S JUST US”: AN INFECTED SOCIETY

Okay. So, for anyone who doesn’t already know, apologies for ruining your day: Jimmy Savile was an English media personality who was ubiquitous in British pop culture from the 1960s to his death in the early 2010s. Also ubiquitous? His sexual predation. Savile was a radio and television DJ and presenter who worked for the BBC for decades, including on a program called Jim’ll Fix It, in which he granted the wishes of children who wrote into the show. He had a distinctive look, which is replicated in The Bone Temple: weird mullet-y blonde hair, tracksuits, gold jewelry. He was widely regarded as eccentric but beloved; he even had a knighthood. And then, immediately after he died, what had been an open secret among his career circles for decades broke to the rest of the public: he had abused hundreds of people over the course of his life, the majority of whom were children. He gained access to many of his victims through his charitable works with schools and especially hospitals. Plenty of people knew about this during his lifetime, but the powerful ones helped cover it up, and the powerless had to watch this man live out his days in fame and fortune. So if you’re looking for a symbol of the rot at the center of society, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more fitting figure than Jimmy Savile.

However, in the alternate timeline of our Rage Virus Britain, the public never learned any of this. Jimmy Savile was still alive in 2002, with reputation intact. Presumably, that universe’s version of Savile died in the outbreak along with most of the country, and the survivors were unlikely to be too concerned with his legacy in particular, beloved knight or no. At least, most of the survivors. Our Jimmy, from the prologue of Years, was left to fend for himself with only the rage of abandonment and some warped-by-trauma memories of pop culture left to create a new self. So he modeled his identity off of Jimmy Savile and became … a Satanic cult leader.

I will be honest: I didn’t think The Bone Temple, which largely follows Jimmy’s cult, was as successful as Years. There were still things that I liked about it, but it didn’t feel as focused or as incisive to me. Probably the main part of this is the inclusion of Satanism as Jimmy’s belief system. This franchise has so much to say about baked-in cultural ills, so falling back onto Satan as a source of evil just feels unnecessary and kind of undermining of the themes. Now, the film isn’t saying that Jimmy’s belief in Satan is real – he is textually incorrect in his idea that the infected are demons – but even having him genuinely believe in an otherworldly evil that fuels his own acts of violence (of which there are many) felt kind of disappointing to me. I wouldn’t have minded if he’d used Satan as a smokescreen, as a way of seducing and misleading his followers without believing in it himself, but the way it played out with his character seemed mostly to muddy the waters, thematically speaking. I get that we’re doing like a Church of England or at least Christian broadly thing here, where it gets all warped by trauma and by, you know, power, but those systems already treat Satan as like the source of evil, so it feels like we’re just reproducing what’s already there as opposed to critiquing it. I didn’t think that Bone Temple was terrible or anything; I just thought that Days and Years worked better.

But taking all three films together – and, again, yes, I know that there are four, but taking the three largely considered good and also that I’ve seen – there is a whole lot here about how the Rage Virus simply revealed the rot and ruin already at the core of British culture. In the original Days, we see that with the entitled misogyny and abuse of the army. The core group of characters there – Jim, Selena, and father-and-daughter pair Frank and Hannah – road trip from London to Manchester to follow a radio broadcast promising an answer to infection from the military. But the recording was a trap. Holed up in a heavily fortified old manor house, a small military unit, led by a sinisterly posh major played by Christopher Eccleston, have managed to carve out a place of relative safety, but the stranded “boys” have begun to despair with no prospects of a future. So their major put out the message to bring in other survivors to give them. “I promised them women,” is what he tells Jim, who he expects to understand. “Because women mean a future.” When Jim is not, in fact, down with this plan, he is ejected from the male sanctuary.

Male sexual entitlement isn’t the only thing going on here, either. Jim is Irish, and the one dissenting soldier is Scottish, in sharp contrast to the major’s extremely English accent. Meanwhile, Selena is Black, as is an infected soldier that the squad keeps sadistically chained in the yard, coldly waiting for him to starve to death. And one of the white soldiers says of Selena, “I’m gonna have the Black one, and I’m gonna make her squeal.” Hannah is a working-class teenager who is grieving – Frank gets memorably infected with a single drop of Rage Virus blood straight to the eyeball – and she, too, is treated as a gift for the grown men. Selena and Hannah even get gift-wrapped, as the soldiers force them to wear the now dead lady of the manor’s fancy red gowns. So this last enclave of imperial British military might becomes a microcosm of all of the violent oppression of that legacy. Jim has to break back into the facility and set free their chained Black infected man to overcome these oppressors – and he has to be as violent as the infected himself, so much so that Selena briefly mistakes him for one. Again, subtle? No. But that first film establishes that its zombie apocalypse is not the breakdown of British society. Rather, it is the laying bare of what that society has been all along.

Fast forward to our two recent films, and we can see how these themes have been updated. The isolated, insular, stagnant community of Holy Island – where Isla herself is being consumed by unacknowledged cancer – is Brexit-era Britain in miniature. Their touchstones of empire are old; they have young Queen E hanging in the community hall, even though she was already elderly when the Rage Virus broke out. There is something almost too poetically ironic about a national identity trying to “protect” itself by cutting itself off from the rest of the world when that identity also rests on its past aggressive expansionism. And listen: I’m just pointing out the broad historical and cultural trends that the films expose. I’m not trying to stones from over here in my extremely glass America. As evidenced by the English writer, Alex Garland – same guy for all three films that I’m discussing here – not all residents of these nations agree with these trends. Sometimes they’re so mad about them that they write multiple zombie films about it.

I am curious about where the third film of the new trilogy – provided it gets made, fingers crossed – will go with some of the racial commentary that is present but as yet – let’s go with underexamined. Clearly, this was on the creative team’s mind with Days, and Bone Temple did have a Black female director, Nia DaCosta, which isn’t, like, complete inoculation against racist tropes in storytelling, but it does definitely make me willing to see where some of these threads go before I fully pass judgment. I will say, though, that having Samson the alpha with the super-huge penis as the only character of color in Years was unsettling to me – but possibly purposely so. And then in Bone Temple, Samson’s whole arc is being rehabilitated to humanity by white Dr. Kelson, which also: hmm. Samson begins returning to the ossuary for more doses of morphine from Kelson’s blow dart, and while in his sedated state, he loses his rage symptoms, allowing Kelson to bond with him, mostly by also getting high and playing music. When Samson begins to regain the capacity for speech – his first word is “moon,” as he gazes at the heavenly body – Kelson develops a cocktail of psychiatric drugs based on his hypothesis that part of what the virus does is induce a sort of delusion in its victims, causing them to see every non-infected person, no matter how benign, as a threat. As a metaphorical treatment of rage, I dig this: aggression and violence born from the misplaced perception of aggression and violence. But also, Years literally used a Kipling poem, so I don’t know if later showing Kelson’s actual white man’s burden of saving the ethnic Other – whom he has named based on his inhuman strength and unruly hair – is really working how they want it to.

There are seeds, though, of more interesting things there. When the treatment begins to work, Samson remembers a moment from his childhood on the train. He was with his parents, and he was reading a science book about the moon. So his origins were being a little space kid: he was not always the hulking giant menacing the white British countryside. That is what he was made into. If the third film follows that thread, I think there could be some good stuff there – and specifically some good childhood stuff there, since the Rage Virus took Samson when he was just a kid. But it remains to be seen how that will carry through.

There are, in any case, a few more characters of color in The Bone Temple. There’s Jimmy Ink, a.k.a. Kellie, played by Erin Kellyman who I really like, who is a member of the Jimmy cult who is losing her faith in its leader. Despite her devotion to her violent cause – and the Jimmies are extremely violent, committed to carrying out actions like flaying to worship their lord of carnage – she takes pity on Spike, who is forcibly inducted into the Jimmies after winning a fight to the death with one of them. (Spike is not nearly as central in The Bone Temple, but when he is there, he’s having an extremely bad time.) The only clue Kellie gives to her background is that it was worse than being in the Jimmies, which: yikes. I do appreciate, though, that cult leader Jimmy – or Sir Lord Jimmy, as he styles himself – finds his powers of persuasion waning specifically with a woman of color. He can’t keep convincing her of his supremacy.

The other character of color – this one a child – appears at the very end. It’s Sam, Jim and Selena’s daughter! Selena is not in this little coda, and I really want her to still be alive, but I imagine that will depend on whether they get Naomie Harris back. Here, we just see Jim with his daughter, as he teaches her some very pointed World War II era history about repeating the mistakes of the past. Then, they see Spike and Kellie off in the distance running from some infected and they resolve to help them. So not much there with them yet, but I desperately want to know where that goes.

As it stands now, though, I do think race is underdeveloped in the current two films, which is a bit disappointing considering the Brexit analogy of it all. Instead of the sexist, racist military, now we have a gang of Jimmy Saviles serving as the metaphor of cultural rot. Nia DaCosta herself said of the Jimmies that “there’s perversion of dogma and religion, but there’s also the perversion of childhood memories and childhood media.” As you can imagine, I love that, but again, I think it was a little undercut by bringing Satan into it. Even if Sir Lord Jimmy never knew that the man he styled himself after was a predator, we still could have had him more textually use his blueprint for the massive cult of personality that this media titan enjoyed. The viewers, of course, know exactly how dark that cult of personality is. And, like, that all is there with just the costumes, and the actor who plays Jimmy, Jack O’Connell, said that outfitting himself after this figure is “a comment on the ‘unchecked power’ Savile was able to wield in his lifetime.” But why couldn’t it just be that, and not Satan, who isn’t exactly specific to Britain? Like, you don’t need two shorthands for evil. Savile would suffice.

I will say, though, that the Satanism of it all did allow Ralph Fiennes to put on a theatrical metal concert extravaganza in the ossuary to get the Jimmies off his back, and this ruled. Ralph Fiennes in general just absolutely kills it, and every time my wife and I would bring up a problem we had with Bone Temple, we’d keep coming around to, well, would we rather have had less Ralph Fiennes? And the answer is no. And I also don’t even necessarily mind a white guy speaking in an RP accent being a good guy here, despite the excellent use of those demographics for Christopher Eccleston’s bad guy in Days. Because Kelson, as we’ve seen, is the character who models giving all of those old categories and cultural markers up. They’re meaningless in this new world – and should have been meaningless all along. He does not yearn for the privileges he once had, and he clearly recognizes the equality of us all in death. As a role model for Spike, who is also a white, English boy, Kelson provides a way forward that isn’t the macho emotional repression of his father or the nihilistic decadence of Jimmy.

So there’s a lot of there there, and a lot of places for this series to go. But even if the third film never happens, or we have to wait 28 additional lengths of time to see this story continue, these movies are an absolutely fascinating use of monsters as revelatory metaphors. The infection lays bare all the fearsome values and valuable fears of a specific place and time, and, in Years, how those fears and values shape the lives of children within that culture. And that is what The Monster & The Child is all about.

CONCLUSION

Victoria Carrington writes, “The young who grow up in contemporary times will be different. And the world will change. The emergence and resilience of the zombie apocalypse metaphor is evidence that we are experiencing rapid and painful change, individually and as a society.” I could not agree more, but it’s also perhaps important to recognize what has not changed – or at least has not changed for some. Kirsh writes, “when you take the zombies out of the Zombie Apocalypse, you are still left with impoverished conditions, violent surroundings, and parenting under conditions of extreme physical and emotional duress. In today’s world, the reality is that hundreds of millions of parents and children live in adverse, apocalyptic-like environments” (4). I think we should stop short of making a direct one-to-one between real and fantastical landscapes of suffering, since that can run the risk of dehumanizing the real people, but Kirsh’s point is legit. The things that shock Western audiences about kids in zombie movies is seeing childhood without the cultural veneer of protection and comfort that we expect, but that is already the reality of many children – including many children in the imperial core, like the U.S. or UK. The horrible undead specter of Jimmy Savile proves that: under the guise of helping children, he abused and assaulted literal hundreds. Monster stories aren’t just narratives that scare us with what could happen. At their best, they horrify us with what is already happening.

In honor of these films’ commitment to that goal, I have provided a list of resources down in the description to help out in some of the places that those horrors – and especially horrors for children and young people – are ongoing. I know donation isn’t in the cards for everyone, so I’ve linked to places that have options for both monetary and writing/calling/action-based support, for victims of the genocide in Gaza, the invasion of Ukraine, the immigrant concentration camps in the U.S., and then environmental justice in general, because lord knows climate change is creating some adverse childhood conditions around the world. All of those conditions have been created by powerful adults clinging to systems that benefit them by making enemies out of everyone less powerful around them, up to and including children. The only way to fight back is to reject the hierarchies that cast one mortal skull as any different or better than any other, and to excise the rot in our own structures ideally before it crashes down as badly as it did with the Rage Virus. We can’t give children an imagined past golden age, because that never existed in the first place. If we really want to help children survive in the unknown new world, we must let the old idols – the monarchs, the media moguls, the military – finally die.

I think that’s as good a place as any to leave off on my peak of spooky season video essay. I hope that you enjoyed it; I had a really good time with this one. Please let me know your thoughts on this series in the comments, along with any other zombie media that includes childhood. Remember to like and share if you want other people to see this video and spend some time thinking really hard about zombies, too. And don’t forget to subscribe so that you never miss a monstrous conversation! Head on over to themonsterandthechild.com and/or my Patreon if you would like even more of that. I hope you all have an excellent Halloween, and I will see you soon with more monstrous food for thought.

Want more monster education? Check out my programs at https://themonsterandthechild.com/!

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/TheMonsterAndTheChild

Action resources:

Media discussed:

  • 28 Days Later, dir. Danny Boyle (2002)
  • 28 Years Later, dir. Danny Boyle (2025)
  • 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, dir. Nia DaCosta (2026)

References:

  • Augustine, T. (2025, Jun. 23). 28 Years Later (dir. Danny Boyle). View, https://www.viewmag.co.nz/28-years-later-dir-danny-boyle/.
  • Carrington, V. (2015). The ‘Next People’: And the Zombies Shall Inherit the Earth. In V. Carrington, J. Rowsell, E. Priyadharshini, & R. Westrup (Eds.), Generation Z: Zombies, Popular Culture and Educating Youth. Springer, pp. 21-35.
  • Herrmann, A.F. (2014). Ghosts, Vampires, Zombies, and Us: The Undead as Autoethnographic Bridges. International Review of Qualitative Research, 7(3), 327-341.
  • Kirsh, S.J. (2019). Parenting in the Zombie Apocalypse: The Psychology of Raising Children in a Time of Horror. McFarland & Company.
  • Ritman, A. (2026, Jan. 16). The Jimmy Cult, Explained: ‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ Resurfaces One of the U.K.’s Most Shocking Sex Abuse Scandals. Variety, https://variety.com/2026/film/global/28-years-later-the-bone-temple-jimmy-cult-explained-1236633012/.

kathleenmkellett

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