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Aaron Taylor-Johnson is no stranger to horror movies, having filmed Robert Egger's gothic vampire flick Nosferatu right before he sunk his teeth into Danny Boyle's zombie sequel 28 Years Later. Despite the shared genre, though, the two shoots couldn't have been more different, says the Marvel star.
"That's the joy of what we get to do as actors. We get to work with different directors and that's the excitement, because they vary, you know?" Taylor-Johnson tells GamesRadar+ ahead of the release of 28 Years Later. "We as an audience want to see those different visionary directors, right? Danny is a lot more loose in the way that he works, when you talk about technicality, than Eggers and that was really refreshing on this set. We were shooting with iPhones and they'd created different rigs with 20 iPhones on it. So every day was new. It was experimental and exciting. It was bold filmmaking, and it allowed for this creative space to experiment."
Much more spiritual and dream-like than 2002's 28 Days Later, which charted bicycle courier Jim's (Cillian Murphy) linear journey from London to the Lake District across an apocalyptic UK, 28 Years Later centers on Spike (Alfie Williams). At just 12 years old, Spike was born long after Britain was devastated by the Rage Virus, though he's still managed to have a pretty peaceful upbringing on Holy Island, thanks to it being separated from the Infected-infested mainland by a narrow rocky path. Guards watch and defend it round the clock, and since it's only walkable at certain periods of the day, the locals have managed to keep the dead out for almost three decades.
One day, Spike's father Jamie (Taylor-Johnson) takes him to the mainland to get his "first kill" – a bizarre bonding experience, but a bonding experience nevertheless. But what starts off as an adrenaline-pumping adventure soon turns into a nerve-testing, heart-wrenching mission, when Spike learns some shocking truths about his dad and the world beyond the causeway.
"I think only someone like Danny Boyle can do that and be brave enough to make bold swings like that. And I think it's sort of integral to what '28' is. 28 Days was shot on a camcorder, and over these 20 years, film has advanced so much, and things have happened, so Alex Garland's written a script based on all the things that we've kind of been through in society," notes Taylor-Johnson.
"So there's a lot of metaphors, a lot of parallels you can draw upon in this movie, but yeah, to shoot on the iPhone was kind of taking that concept and allowing for this kind of texture and and the way that they shot it, Anthony Dod Mantle, the cinematographer was able to get up close and very instinctive and follow us in our performances," he adds. "So it created a different energy."
28 Years Later releases on June 19 in the UK, and June 20 in the US. For more, check out our list of the best horror movies of all time, or our guide to some of the other upcoming horror movies heading our way.
