Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. I saw 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple over the weekend! And then I came home and wrote a thousand words about how much I loved it! Enjoy!

There are several moments in the newest installment of the 28 Days Later series that took my breath away, but only one was related to the soundtrack.

Midway through the movie, the soundtrack melts into a familiar run of keyboard notes that build and collapse, tension and resolution neatly weaving together. Thom Yorke’s reedy voice is next, fuzzed with staticky distortion. As the stars wheel above Dr. Ian Kelson’s ossuary, the lyrics offer a somber kind of reassurance: “Everything in its right place.”

I’ve listened to Radiohead since I was a teenager, spinning CDs in my childhood bedroom and feeling the band’s specific alienation deep in my bones. Hearing the song so loud at the theater—feeling the music ringing in my head—made me wonder if I’d ever heard it live. When I got home, I checked Setlist.fm, and sure enough, it was part of the first encore when I saw Radiohead at Bonnaroo in 2012.

But I discovered that my memory had failed me, too. I thought “Everything In Its Right Place” was a brilliant, inspired, iconic choice—but I was also certain it was anachronistic. Which struck me as odd: 28 Days is typically studious about using music that was contemporary to the rage virus outbreak, which canonically took place in 2002.

But I was wrong. “Everything In Its Right Place” was on Kid A, which came out in 2000. It just sounds so modern, so immediate, so timeless that it is still astonishing almost three decades later.

I could say the same about 28 Days Later, and in my humble fan’s opinion, The Bone Temple is the franchise’s best movie since the original.

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I am typically wary of franchise revivals, so I’m even more surprised by how much I loved The Bone Temple. Its predecessor, 28 Years Later, was enjoyable, but necessarily caught up in world building.

In the previous installment, Alex Garland’s script gradually introduced us to a new iteration of the UK—an odd modernity in which traditional practices, like bow hunting, coexist with traces of the world we knew in 2002. There are suburban-style houses, action figures, caches of expired pharmaceuticals. There are also overgrown train tracks, torch-lit festivities, subsistence farming.

The Bone Temple picks up moments after 28 Years Later’s conclusion, and what follows is 95 minutes of intricately layered storytelling that hit me on a deeper emotional level. If 28 Years Later is essentially a journey narrative, in which characters go on a long walk through a changed world, The Bone Temple is a character study that unmasks what’s driving humanity to persist in the aftermath of the apocalypse.

On one end of the spectrum, The Bone Temple presents Dr. Ian Kelson’s unending curiosity about the world—and on the other, Jimmy Crystal’s trauma-shattered sadism. I don’t want to spoil anything here, but I loved watching these worldviews crash into each other. If you also love character-driven storytelling, this is a movie made for you.

That’s not to say it isn’t also fucking horrific. There was more than one jump scare that got me, a heavy metal hook that made me grimace, blood spurting in heartbeats from a femoral artery, heads ripped from bodies, skin dropping to a barn floor.

There’s social horror, too, particularly in our Jimmy Savile-inspired villain. Jimmy Crystal: leader of the so-called Seven Fingers gang/cult, bard and keeper of the Teletubbies, warped Satanic cult leader. He and his tracksuit-clad followers—which now include our hero, Spike, albeit against his will—roam the ravaged world, imposing on survivors and doling out sinister acts of “charity.”

I also found it quietly disturbing to witness the implications of Jimmy Crystal and his followers growing up almost entirely in the aftermath of the rage virus. While older characters flinch and hide from the infected, Crystal’s gang is unfazed. They can stab an infected and dodge the lethal blood spray as casually as you’d walk down the street.

While Jimmy Crystal’s gang got to drive the movie’s most stomach-churning scenes, my favorite part of the movie was definitely getting to spend more time with gentle Dr. Kelson, played by Ralph Fiennes.

As we know from meeting him in 28 Years Later, Kelson maintains an equilibrium of acceptance that keeps fear at bay. He’s developed his own rituals, discovered his own purpose for existence. We get to see more of his daily life in The Bone Temple, as he tends to the ossuary, listens to Duran Duran records, and paints himself in iodine to guard against the rage virus.

We also get to see more of Samson, the towering Alpha infected we met in the last movie. “This is interesting,” Kelson says a dozen times a day when I scroll past the same trailer on TikTok, his head cocked and dart gun lowered as Samson slowly approaches.

As Jimmy Crystal and his gang wreak a trail of destruction, Samson and Kelson forge a delicate bond. And Kelson, ever the NHS doctor, begins to wonder if Samson’s humanity could be intact beneath the rage virus after all.

What do we do when the world falls apart? Do we begin the painstaking work of rebuilding, or do we take advantage of the chaos and indulge our cruelest impulses? The Bone Temple explores much more than these questions—for more, I highly recommend reading this article by Phantasmag’s Alex Secilmis, on the distinctly British cultural commentary embedded in the movie.

But as Jimmy Crystal and Dr. Kelson’s stories collide, it’s maybe the simplest way to summarize the forces at play. And now that I’m out of the theater, back in the real world and absorbing the gutting news out of Gaza, and Minnesota, and Ukraine, it’s a question that feels more urgent and timely than ever.

When the world falls apart, do we seek each other’s humanity, or do we destroy it? The important thing to remember is: Being human means we get to choose. Nothing and no one—not a murderous, Teletubbies-obsessed villain or an indiscriminate rage virus—can fully strip away our ability to love, if we’re brave enough to choose it.

Over the past year, I’ve quietly compiled a list of the horror moments that have truly, completely turned my stomach. I am generally hard to rattle, so consider this an admittedly odd compliment to the stories that have managed it!

Mostly, I’m curious to see if anyone else finds these moments upsetting, or if you’ll be like, huh? Why that?? I’ve realized that there is definitely a theme that runs through each selection, so maybe it will resonate with someone else. Or at the very least, give you more advanced warning than I had!

After that, we’ll be catching up with horror author Catriona Ward ahead of her latest novel, Nowhere Burning. It’s a riveting multi-timeline crime novel about a pair of children fleeing their abusive home life, the shelter they seek in the Colorado mountains, and the fragile safety we all strive to create for ourselves. Ward’s books are notoriously difficult to discuss without revealing her signature twists and turns, so this interview will be a very fun challenge that will put my skills to the test.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.