'Innocence, brutal horror and beauty’ - Danny Boyle on 28 Years Later partially filmed in Yorkshire

“Everything flowed from how much time had passed since the notional outbreak in the first movie… I think probably almost every world building element stems from that – whether it’s the communities, or the behaviours of the individuals, or the preoccupations of an individual to memorialise, and also the infected themselves,” explains Garland, 55.

“Because just a simple question arises, which is: ‘If it’s 28 years later, how are (the infected) still alive?’ They’re not supernatural. They’ve got to eat, they’ve got to drink, or how are they eating, and stuff like that.”

It’s a pertinent question. Crucially, those infected with the Rage Virus are not canonically zombies – they are not undead, reanimated corpses, but living people infected with a mind-altering illness transmissible by biting – so how do they endure on an island that has been quarantined for decades, its uninfected residents having either fled or succumbed?

Although, as it turns out, there are still pockets of society remaining across the British Isles – including a village of people living in a heavily-barricaded compound on Holy Island, Lindisfarne, off the northeast coast of England. Accessible only by a causeway at low tide, it seems to be the perfect escape from the horrors of the mainland, but the stagnated society bears unique problems.

“There’s this community who have survived for 28 years, who have kind of gone back on their ideals, really. They’ve sort of regressed, in a way, and found these sort of stereotypical roles, of the men going out and doing the hunting, and the women going back into this housekeeping work, sort of thing,” explains Aaron Taylor-Johnson, 35, who plays Holy Island inhabitant Jamie. “So it’s very strange, right? They’ve sort of put themselves in this bubble.”

The film, which was shot partially in Yorkshire, at locations including Fountains Abbey and a disused Bradford sports centre, follows Jamie and his twelve-year-old son Spike, as the father teaches the son how to fend for himself in a land rife with infected horror. “You see this movie as a coming of age story, really,” says Taylor-Johnson. “You see this through the lens of a 12 year old boy (for whom) this is the world he knows, and he kind of wants to know how to live life.”

Jamie and Spike’s lives are further complicated by the ill-health of Spike’s mother Isla, who is plagued by an undiagnosed illness that leaves her in unbearable pain and suffering bouts of intense confusion. However, as Isla’s actress Jodie Comer explains, her illness is also her blessing.

“In a strange way, Isla is kind of protected by her illness, in a sense of she’s not always aware of the dangers of the outside,” says BAFTA-winning Killing Eve star Comer, 32. “Because she’s so trapped within her own body, or the confines of her own room, and she can kind of escape into her memory. So I’m not sure she’s always aware.”

There are also some people still living on the mainland, side by side with the infected. Ralph Fiennes – decorated actor known for roles in Harry Potter, The Menu and Conclave – plays one such man, the enigmatic lone wolf Dr Kelson. “It’s as if he’s become a kind of priest of the dead, and at the same time, a kind of artist, installation artist,” says Ipswich-born Fiennes, 62, of Kelson’s bizarre bone-filled stronghold on the mainland. “Yeah, curious, an unusual mind. But anyone who’s been alone – how they think, how they react, how they survive – I think they’re going to evolve in a particular way.”

It’s not just humanity that’s evolved in the 28 years since the Rage Virus broke out of a laboratory – as Garland explained, the infected have also adapted to the new landscape. Some are fast, blood-thirsty creatures that hunt in packs; others are slug-like, bloated figures that crawl in the undergrowth hunting for insects. Then there’s the Alpha – a hulking great beast that will stop at nothing to get its kill.

The different varieties of infected lend themselves to uniquely horrifying set pieces, too – an opportunity director Boyle relished in 28 Days Later, which may have breathed new life into the zombie horror genre, with its inexplicably fast infected and instantly catastrophic virus. And 28 Years Later brings a great opportunity to expand on that ingenuity.

“We introduced a way of capturing them which is slightly unreliable… It’s not perfect, and it really suits it,” says Boyle of the approach to filming the infected. “It was domestic video cameras, and on this one it was lightweight cameras, like iPhones, like GoPros, like drone cameras. And they’re not quite perfect… It gives a great way of capturing violent motion… And we could build these special rigs around some of the action to make some of the brutal violence really startling.”

That, he adds, “is a hugely necessary part of the horror experience, that you’re wincing”.

28 Years Later comes to UK cinemas today.