28 Years Later: The Bone Temple has finally released in cinemas, and the director has revealed the very serious reason the Alpha “hung” zombie, Samson, is covered up.
When 28 Years Later was released last year, audiences came away with loads to talk about, especially the hung zombie. The towering infected Alpha made a strong impression in Danny Boyle’s film, but it wasn’t just his power or presence that sent Twitter into overdrive. One very specific design choice became a viral talking point almost overnight: His giant zombie dong.
Now, with 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta, Samson is back, but not quite the same.
So, why did they cover up the hung zombie in The Bone Temple?
They made him cover it up because of woke https://t.co/iXsAuzlen3 pic.twitter.com/Rbu8gOFfWS
— bailey (@baileylikemovie) September 2, 2025
Although 28 Years Later and The Bone Temple were shot back-to-back, DaCosta was clear from her first conversations with the producers that she wasn’t interested in imitation.
“The first thing I said was, I am not going to make a Danny Boyle movie,” she told Den of Geek. “No one else can. I want to make this movie the way I see it.”
That mindset extended directly to Samson. While Boyle introduced the Alpha, DaCosta needed the character to serve a different purpose in her film. “In terms of designing Samson the character, there were some things I had to change from his movie to my movie,” she explains. “In part because… certain things that worked in Danny’s film would not look right in mine. We’re doing things differently.”
And yes, one of those “things” is the detail of Samson, aka the Alpha zombie’s huge dong. DaCosta is fully aware of the reaction it caused. “P*nises bring people together,” she said.
Basically, in The Bone Temple, Samson is no longer just a moment designed to shock and disappear. He’s a character with real narrative weight, so his design needed to match the tone DaCosta was building.
Samson and Kelson are huge parts of the new film
via Sony Pictures
Unlike the first film, The Bone Temple places Samson in close orbit around Ralph Fiennes’ Dr. Kelson, the isolated figure living among the skulls of the Bone Temple itself. Their relationship is central to the sequel.
“The first movie, maybe, says a lot about his solitude in our film,” DaCosta said about Kelson. “In my film, at the Bone Temple, we get to characterise that as loneliness, and we get to see more of how this man survives on his own, how it feels, and why that might push him to do really risky things like engaging with an Alpha in the way that we see him engage with Samson.”
Because Samson’s story is now so closely tied to Kelson’s, his presence had to shift. He could no longer work purely as an unsettling visual idea. He needed to exist within the emotional logic of the film.
So how did Danny Boyle feel about the changes?
via Sony Pictures
Despite making changes, DaCosta worked closely with Boyle to make sure everything still lined up. “It was really important to me that I inherited a character who had the right starting point,” she said. “[Boyle] really listened when I had thoughts or feelings about how those decisions would impact my movie.”
Boyle, she added, was keen not to undermine the sequel. “Because he also loves the second film and loves what it was doing, he didn’t want to do anything that would hinder that at all.”
The Bone Temple also visually separates its worlds. Kelson’s environment is calm, sunlit, and unsettling in its stillness. That atmosphere carries over into Samson’s presence, too, which needed more restraint, especially where Boyle’s film leaned into provocation. Some design elements simply “would not look right” in DaCosta’s world.
The result is an Alpha who’s still dangerous and unsettling, but whose impact now comes from context rather than pure spectacle alone.
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