How Does '28 Years Later' End, and Does It Have a Post-Credits Scene?

28 Years Later, Danny Boyle’s sequel-cum-reboot to his genre-redefining 2002 zombie epic 28 Days Later, is finally in theaters after years of secretive development and swirling fan theories. Boyle reteamed with original writer Alex Garland for this starkly violent and forthrightly emotional continuation of the franchise, whose conceptual updates feel both worthy and necessary. One of the most notable aspects of Boyle’s film is the third act, which takes the film in unexpected directions in setting up the forthcoming sequel, The Bone Temple, which is due out in 2026. Below, we break down the ending and post-credits of 28 Years Later. Major spoilers follow.

What is 28 Years Later about?

Nearly three decades (or, 28 years) after the rage virus decimated the U.K., 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) lives with his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and his ailing mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), in a fortress community which has managed to quell the spread of the virus and live in relative isolation from the threat.

After undertaking a dangerous but ultimately successful mission to the mainland with his father, after which the young man hears tell of a mysterious Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) who lives on the mainland and has reportedly turned a bit mad, himself. Seizing an opportunity to provide his mother with a cure for her undetermined illness, Spike spirits Isla away to the mainland in the hopes of connecting her with Kelson.

What happens to Isla in 28 Years Later?

After a series of increasingly grisly travel adventures, Isla and Spike are rescued by soldier Erik (Edvin Ryding) and end up assisting a zombie woman give birth to an uninfected child on an abandoned train. Erik is killed by “alpha” zombie Samson, who arrives on the scene shortly after the birth, and chases Isla and Spike (cradling the newborn along the way) to Dr. Kelson’s self-made fortress.

Just when things seem to be at an end for Isla and Spike, Kelson appears and shoots into Samson’s neck a dart coated with morphine and another tranquilizer, which causes the zombie to go to sleep. (For some reason, and likely to a character’s eternal regret in the forthcoming sequel, Kelson decides not to kill Samson when he has the chance.)

The three make their way into the doctor’s camp, where we discover that Kelson hasn’t gone mad but has instead devoted his time to building a large memento mori of the dead and undead. He takes Erik’s severed head, boils it down to a skull, and places it amongst the thousands of others on the totem. He then runs a series of tests on Isla before gathering her and Spike around the fire, where he informs them that Isla has cancer and will likely soon die of the disease. Kelson explains to Spike that there are “many ways to die, some better than others,” and reminds him of the meaning of memento mori—“remember you must die”—before telling him, “Memento amare—remember to love.”

As Isla holds Spike and says her goodbyes, Kelson blows a tranquilizer dart into the young boy’s back. Isla leaves her son and walks away, her back to Kelson, as he places a dart in her, as well.

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What happens at the end of 28 Years Later?

The next morning, Kelson presents Spike with Isla’s skull and tells him to place it atop the pile of skulls. Shortly thereafter, Samson reappears and pursues Spike, Kelson, and the baby. The three lock themselves in a small underground cage, into which Samson reaches his hand and grabs Kelson. While slamming the doctor against the top of the cage, Spike grabs a tranquilizer dart from Kelson’s holster and stabs Samson, temporarily felling him. “I think it’s time for you and the baby to go now,” Kelson tells Spike, the young man having clearly overstayed his welcome.

But instead of returning to his father on the mainland, Spike sends the baby along with a note explaining that he, essentially, wants to live in the woods for a while and consider the life-altering events that just occurred. Spike’s father takes possession of the newborn, whom Spike has named after his mother.

How does 28 Years Later set up its sequel?

The most unexpected part of Boyle’s sequel is the final scene, which finds Spike now on his own in the wilderness of the mainland at a makeshift campsite on the side of a road. As he prepares himself dinner, a few hungry zombies appear and quickly make their way towards him. Spike is able to shoot two with arrows, but soon is overpowered and makes a run for it.

When it seems that the zombies will actually kill Spike, a mysterious stranger named Jimmy (Sinners’s villainous vampire Jack O’Connell), who is dressed and styled in a manner reminiscent of disgraced British media personality Jimmy Savile, pops up on a cliff ledge alongside a group of warriors who look like anime characters. Jimmy offers Spike a hand, which he gratefully accepts, and Jimmy orders his band of fighters to vanquish the zombies. Which they do—using kung-fu and a blade-centric fighting style that looks more like something from John Wick than the zombie-inflected family drama we’ve been watching.

Following the massacre, Jimmy saunters up to Spike and tells him something to the effect of, “I’ve got a feeling we’re going to be good friends.” And we have a feeling that’s really bad news for Spike.

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Does 28 Years Later have a post-credits scene?

No, there’s no post-credits scene. The movie ends after the kung-fu zombie fight, which in many ways feels like a post-credits scene included in the body of the film.

Is Cillian Murphy in 28 Years Later?

No, Cillian Murphy does not appear in 28 Years Later. He is credited as a producer on the new film, but that's as far as his involvement with this sequel goes.

However, Boyle recently confirmed that the Oppenheimer Oscar-winner will appear in The Bone Temple, Nia DaCosta's follow-up to 28 Years Later which is expected to debut in cinemas next January. With any luck, we'll get to see more of Murphy in the still-unfinanced third installment. “She gets a bit of Cillian at the end,” Boyle told Business Insider of Da Costa. “All I can say is you have to wait for Cillian, but hopefully he will help us get the third film financed.”

Does 28 Years Later continue the narrative of 28 Weeks Later?

Not really, no. The 2007 sequel to Boyle’s original film was directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and scripted by Fresnadillo and three others who were notably not Danny Boyle or Alex Garland. (It shows in the finished product, a strung-together patchwork of different drafts.) 28 Weeks Later ended with the sequel-baiting image of rage-infected zombies storming the Eiffel Tower, but that notion is nowhere to be found in Boyle and Garland’s latest sequel, which begins with a brief scroll explaining that the rage virus was shortly contained after the events of the original in Europe and the U.K.

However, 28 Years stops short of retconning the events of 28 Weeks. That sequel took place during a period after the original, when London, for a time, rid of the infected and quarantined, was on the road to normalcy. Of course, that’s put to an end when the rage virus is accidentally introduced into the safe zone. There are no explicit references to the events of Weeks, but there’s also nothing telling us that those events didn’t happen.

In fairness, there’s also not a great deal of carryover from 28 Days Later, so the different direction 28 Years Later takes from the ending of 28 Weeks Later is probably nothing personal.

28 Years Later is now in cinemas.

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