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Danny Boyle’s latest film, ‘28 Years Later’, delivers one of the most intense chase scenes in recent cinema, as Jamie (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his son Spike (Alfie Williams) attempt to escape an evolved variant of the infected known as The Alpha. One Alpha, named Samson, is particularly brutal — known for ripping victims’ heads clean off.
Following a grim encounter with the infected, Jamie and Spike make their way to the mainland. Their only route back to safety is the narrow causeway leading to Holy Island, which is just passable during low tide. But as they begin their return, the Alpha appears, triggering a nerve-wracking pursuit across the waterlogged stretch. Although parts of the film were shot on location in Holy Island, Newcastle and North Yorkshire, replicating the treacherous causeway posed significant challenges.
Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle shared that the production team had scouted various coastal spots around Newcastle. One site showed potential, but concerns quickly arose regarding the safety and controllability of the natural environment. According to him, the water might have been unsafe for actors to run through, and injuries were a real possibility.
Complicating matters further was the fact that Alfie Williams, only 13 at the time, was subject to restricted working hours. This limited the window in which they could film, particularly challenging for a scene so reliant on precise lighting and atmosphere.
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Eventually, the team settled on an unconventional location: a former COVID vaccination centre just outside Newcastle. Dod Mantle explained that it was a massive hall that immediately sparked his imagination. Once he saw it, he said he could picture how the water causeway could come to life. The team built the entire set from scratch, stretching 450 feet and complete with a gate in the middle. The artificial causeway was filled with temperature-controlled water.
To bring the sky to life in the scene, the team used VFX, incorporating plates sourced from an astronomy centre. Dod Mantle noted that while the sky wasn’t technically meant to be the Northern Lights, they wanted to create a luminance that would feel believable in a world 28 years post-collapse — a world free of pollution, cars and industrial interference.
The actual chase sequence required rapid movement through the water, with the Alpha always close behind the protagonists. To achieve this, the team employed cranes and tracks flanking the causeway, as well as two dollies and two technocranes. Dod Mantle described how they mounted a bar cam — an array of iPhones — onto one of the technocranes, allowing it to spin rapidly around the heads of the actors, including Aaron Taylor-Johnson and the Alpha performer. He admitted the setup was quite dangerous, but the end result was worth it.
Filming the sequence took around three to four days. Dod Mantle reflected on the experience as “blissful”, despite its intensity. He described the scene as an unusual mix of sublimity and terror — beautiful, melancholic, yet frightening — and praised its emotional and visual ambiguity.
When it came to staging the zombie kills, Dod Mantle acknowledged his initial hesitation over using bows and arrows, the primary weapon of survival in the film’s world. He was concerned about how effective these weapons would appear onscreen, referencing older Robin Hood-style portrayals. Without the use of guns or bombs, survival in this world depended on more primitive tools.
Ultimately, the filmmakers used bar cameras again to enhance the visual impact. This technique allowed them to extend the visual moment of an arrow piercing a body, wrapping the camera around the scene to provide dynamic movement — a style familiar to fans of other action-heavy films, but still striking.
Dod Mantle circled back to the Alpha chase on the causeway, admitting that the experience unnerved him more than expected. He emphasised how terrifying it was to have the creature pounding the ground behind the camera team, with the combination of lighting, sound and movement heightening the horror.
The film also introduces a new class of threat: the Slow-Lows, or bottom feeders. These creatures consume whatever remains after the infected have ravaged an area. Unlike the swift, frenzied infected, the Slow-Lows are marked by stealth. Dod Mantle said that their menace lay in their subtlety — they moved slowly, fed on worms, and appeared almost benign. But he warned that their quiet presence carried a different kind of fear.
His first glimpse of the Slow-Lows came via a photo sent by Boyle from a prosthetics test in London. The make-up alone took six hours to apply each day, and Dod Mantle said he couldn’t wait to begin filming with them, eager to visually convey their strange, unsettling movement.
Horror Meets Humour in the Church Scene
One particular scene in an abandoned church stood out to him. In it, Jamie and his mother, played by Jodie Comer, have taken refuge. As Jamie plans to seek help for her, a Slow-Low sneaks toward them in the dark. Dod Mantle described the moment as his personal nightmare — the creature silently approaches, blind but guided by smell. In a disturbing twist, it mistakes Jamie’s shoelace for a worm and spits it out. He appreciated the strange mix of horror and comedy in that detail and credited Boyle’s sharp eye for balancing genre tension with unexpected levity.
Ultimately, Dod Mantle felt that scenes like this showcased Boyle’s unique skill in horror storytelling — blending fear, atmosphere, and nuance in ways that linger with the viewer.
