28 Years Later | 2025
- Locations |
- Northumberland;
- Tyne & Wear;
- North Yorkshire;
- Somerset
- DIRECTOR |
- Danny Boyle
Danny Boyle's long awaited second sequel to his groundbreaking sort-of-zombie movie creates a disturbing post-apocalyptic Britain from a patchwork of locations largely around northeast England. Find out where.
The strictly-quarantined island on which a group of survivors has developed a successful, almost Medieval, culture is Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumberland.
Also known as Holy Island, it was an important centre of Celtic Christianity, home to a monastery founded by Saint Aidan.
Yes, it is joined to the mainland by a causeway which is only traversable during low tide. If you're visiting, the causeway is generally open from about three hours after high tide until two hours before the next high tide. There are warning signs to check tide times and the weather, and to keep to the marked path. For drivers, tide tables are displayed at both ends of the causeway.
Nevertheless, about one vehicle each month gets stranded on the causeway.
The nearest railway station is Berwick-on-Tweed and from there, it's about nine miles south to the tiny village of Beal, from where the island is signposted.
Understandably, there was no filming on the causeway itself, we can assume that drone shots and effects were used for the crossing scenes.
Relegated to the background, we see little of the island's most famous landmark, Lindisfarne Castle, which is what is more usually seen on screen, in two Roman Polanski films, the 1966 dark comedy Cul-de-Sac and his 1971 adaptation of Macbeth.
12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) is deemed old enough by his Dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) for his first trip to the mainland to learn to cope with the infected inhabitants. They're cheered off by locals as walk through the island's only town, along Fenkle Street past the Market Cross and the Manor House Hotel.
Although this is the real Lindisfarne, the interior of the 'Holy Island Mission' with its wooden beams and 'barrel'-style ceiling, where the locals gather is the Jubilee Hall in Newton-on-the-Moor, five miles south of Alnwick in Northumberland.
On the mainland, the lush woodland where, equipped with bow and arrow Spike must experience his first kill, is Kielder Forest. About 30 miles northwest of Hexham in Northumberland, this is the largest man-made plantation in England and within it stands Kielder Water, a large artificial reservoir which we'll be seeing later.
The pair end up stranded and spend the night in an abandoned farmhouse, but the smoke from a distant fire alerts Spike to the fact that there's another uninfected inhabitant of the mainland.
Once safely back on Lindisfarne, Spike learns that this is probably Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), dismissed as a mad hermit. With his mother (Jodie Comer) seriously ill and getting worse, Spike is determined to take her to the mainland for what may be her only hope of cure.
While his Dad and the other islanders are distracted, Spike and his Mum cross the causeway and carefully make their way toward where Dr Kelson seems to live.
The journey rather poignantly takes them through what is known as Sycamore Gap, a hollow alongside Hadrian's Wall, near Crag Lough in Northumberland, in which stood a lone 150-year-old sycamore tree.
Sadly it's no more. This much loved and photographed landmark was illegally chopped down one night in 2023 by a pair of idiotic vandals for no apparent reason.
You might have seen the tree as it used to be in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.
The two pass the night in the ruins of Fountains Abbey, about three miles southwest of Ripon in North Yorkshire. This was a Cistercian monastery, founded in 1132, which fell victim to the Dissolution of the Monasteries by King Henry VIII in 1539. It's now a World Heritage Site, owned by the National Trust.
The ruins were used for the climax of Omen III: The Final Conflict in 1980, as well as being seen in both the 1993 and 2020 screen versions of The Secret Garden and in the 2006 film adaptation of Alan Bennett's The History Boys, with Richard Griffiths. The Abbey had previously been the main setting for Bennett's first TV play, A Grand Day Out, in 1972.
Spike and his Mum also pass the Angel of the North, Antony Gormley's 65-feet-tall steel statue which has stood alongside the A1 just south of Gateshead, Tyne & Wear, since 1998.
A side quest sees a squad of stranded Swedish NATO soldiers falling victim to the infected as they make their way through the spillway of Kielder Water Hydroelectric Facility, the largest hydroelectric plant in England, at the northeast tip of Kielder Water.
The only survivor of the group is Eric (Edvin Ryding) who goes on to save Spike and his Mum when they are trapped by the infected in an old 'Happy Eater' cafe and filling station ('Happy Eater' was a popular chain of cheap'n'cheerful roadside eateries in the 1970s which had been taken over in 1996).
This is a real though disused and dilapidated branch, which was still standing alongside the Knowesgate Hotel on the A696 at Knowesgate, about 22 miles northwest of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. It was redressed for the production, and I love that the 'S' of the Shell serving station has disappeared.
From here the three of them stumble upon an abandoned and overgrown railway train, where one of the infected is giving birth.
This is an old Class 31 Diesel locomotive which was hired for the production and filmed on the Embsay & Bolton Abbey Steam Railway, a stretch of the old Midland Railway running as a heritage railway for four miles from Embsay to Bolton Abbey, east of Skipton in North Yorkshire.
They finally reach Dr Kelson's encampment and its bizarre Memento Mori, the 'Bone Temple' construction of human bones and skulls.
The collection of more than 250,000 artificial bones and 5,500 skulls took the production team more than six months to assemble into those columns, on grassland alongside the River Ure, just south of the village of Redmire, about 4 miles west of Leyburn in Wensleydale in the Yorkshire Dales, North Yorkshire.
Keeping spoilers to the minimum for now, Spike eventually decides it's time to put his survival skills to use and strike out on his own. He has quite a journey, traversing England north to south in the cinematic blink of an eye.
The road twisting between sheer cliffs, is the B3135 winding its way through famous Cheddar Gorge in the Mendip Hills, near the village of Cheddar, about nine miles northwest of Wells in Somerset. And, yes this is where Cheddar Cheese originated.
If you're visiting the area, remember that Wells was the city transformed into 'Sandford' for Edgar Wright's 2007 Hot Fuzz.
Almost outnumbered by the infected, Spike's salvation comes in a form as unexpected as it's been controversial (the last line of my notes scribbled in the cinema on first viewing simply reads "WTF?")
