There’s a Good Reason the Hung Zombie Wears Clothes in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise that 28 Years Later — the long-awaited follow-up to 28 Days Later and (to a lesser extent) 28 Weeks Later — turned out to be a far cry from the kind of franchise sequel or zombie movie we’ve come to expect. Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland seldom take the straightforward route, particularly when it comes to their collaborations. Together, they infused 28 Years Later with resonant themes and a stunning visual language, crafting a film that’s more about processing grief than it is about surviving run-ins with the infected. For many of us, however, all of the movie’s big ideas ended up dwarfed by something even bigger: the distractingly large penis attached to the “alpha” named Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry).

When the trailer for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was released, it was impossible not to notice that Samson was back with a conspicuous new look. Suddenly, the alpha appeared to be covering his most notable feature with a loincloth. Did Samson get tired of having his dangly bits exposed to the elements? Was the clothing a last-minute addition following the frenzied response to the nudity in the first film? (Highly unlikely since the movies were filmed back-to-back.) Had Nia DaCosta, stepping in as director for the second installment of the 28 Years Later trilogy, decided that Samson’s prodigious prosthetic was pulling too much focus? As it turns out, the loincloth isn’t simply there for modesty — the garment serves a real narrative purpose with the alpha’s nudity (or the lack thereof) reflecting his surprisingly moving arc throughout The Bone Temple. Believe it or not, you can track the character’s development by keeping your eye on his crotch.

Genitalia aside, Samson’s role in this sequel is much more prominent than in the first 28 Years Later, in which he pops up occasionally to terrorize Spike (Alfie Williams) and Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) or to pull off his victims’ heads with their spines still attached, a gruesome party trick. In The Bone Temple, Samson develops an unexpected kinship with Kelson, who learns how to drug the alpha into a more docile state. There’s an element of practicality — we saw in the last movie that Kelson uses laced blow darts to keep Samson from attacking. But now, he’s begun to communicate with Samson, doing his best to articulate that he’s not a threat. His goal, he shares out loud, is to get the alpha speaking again. On the one hand, Kelson’s behavior can be explained by his desperate need for a friend. On the other, his experiment with Samson is designed to prove a larger point about the “rage virus” zombies. Kelson wants to find out if the infection is merely clouding Samson’s mind, in which case the alpha’s memories — and, in a larger sense, his humanity — would still lie underneath.

In many ways, the first 28 Years Later is about the loss of civilization. We see the abandoned buildings and the hordes of infected, whose nudity is a reflection of the primitive state they have regressed to. The Bone Temple, meanwhile, explores the idea of bringing civilization back, and on a small scale, that’s exactly what Kelson is attempting to do with Samson. With regular doses of morphine, the doctor quiets the alpha’s aggressive impulses. They sit together. They have (one-sided) conversations. They dance. It’s all very Pygmalion, and in Kelson’s attempts to give Samson the Henry Higgins treatment, the alpha does begin to change. When Kelson realizes he has only two weeks’ worth of morphine left, he decides to give Samson peace by humanely ending his life. But before the doctor can inject a fatal dose, Samson says his first word while looking up at the night sky: moon. When we next see him, he’s wearing the loincloth.

The outfit change is not subtle. Samson begins The Bone Temple in the same state we left him in at the end of 28 Years Later, naked and feral. As his mind awakens and he begins to civilize, he covers up again. You could liken it to Adam and Eve eating the apple and gaining a sudden awareness of their nudity. Even if the apple here is morphine, the effect is the same.

When Kelson realizes he’s facing potential death at the hands of the Satanic-cult leader Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), he expedites his efforts to civilize Samson. Correctly deducing that the rage virus makes the zombies see all uninfected people as violent threats, he reasons that medication could treat Samson’s psychosis, essentially curing him of his drive to kill. Kelson doesn’t see the immediate results of his experiment, but we do. When Samson steps back onto the abandoned train where he decapitated poor Erik (Edvin Ryding) in the last movie, he begins to have flashes of his former life, eventually remembering himself traveling on the train as a boy. As his memories and his current reality merge, Samson sees himself no longer as Samson but as the human man he would be, and for the first time in both 28 Years movies, he’s fully clothed. At least, that’s how he pictures himself. Along with his fresh duds, he’s also speaking clearly again. His transformation is complete, emphasized by the layering of attire — in a very literal sense, the clothes make the man.

Rest assured, we do see Samson’s now-famous appendage again before The Bone Temple is over, but here, his nakedness serves a different symbolic purpose. After he regains his senses on the train, he’s confronted by a group of his infected compatriots, who innately sense Samson’s newfound humanity. (That he speaks to them surely doesn’t help matters.) When they attack, he’s forced to use his brute strength — thankfully a trait that hasn’t been medicated away — to tear his former followers apart. When Samson emerges from the train naked and bloody, his nudity reminds us of a universal human experience: Naked and bloody is how we all enter the world, and through Kelson’s intervention, Samson has been birthed into something entirely different. Whether or not his infection has been cured completely, we’re witnessing the start of a new life.

What’s most surprising about Samson’s role in The Bone Temple is not just that he has an arc but that it’s perhaps the film’s most poignant one. A character who began as a walking dick joke becomes a profound reminder of the capacity to change and recover what was lost. His evolution offers hope for the rest of the infected, yes, but also for Spike, who will have to reclaim his own humanity after falling in with Sir Jimmy’s gang. As for Samson, his final scene has him returning to the Bone Temple, where he thanks the dying Kelson — fatally stabbed by Jimmy — and carries the doctor’s body away, recalling the death of Isla (Jodie Comer) and the creation of her memento mori in 28 Years Later. Whether or not we see Samson again in the as-yet-untitled next film, this feels like a fitting place to leave him. We can imagine a brighter future with the peace that he’s acquired through Kelson’s intervention: a future in which nudity is for bathing and sex and perhaps even one in which he can find — however unlikely — a pair of pants that fit.