The new trailer for the horror sequel 28 Years Later has a hidden message tucked away. Predictably, it isn’t a particularly cheery one…
Update: it turns out that the hidden message is more than a gloomy Easter egg – it’s also a password to a viral website. We’ve updated the post below with more details at the end.
Our original story follows…
If you’ve watched the new trailer for director Danny Boyle’s belated horror sequel 28 Years Later, you may have noticed there are some little symbols scattered through its 130-second duration.
Here’s one we screen-grabbed earlier:
Those symbols might look like something scribbled by the Zodiac killer, but they’re part of a widely-known code called the Pigpen cipher.
If you put all the symbols from the trailer together, they look like this:
Heading over to the eternally useful PlanetCalc, we can convert these symbols into a more familiar alphabet, which yields the following:
MEMENTO MORI
You’ve probably seen this kicking around before: it’s a Latin phrase which means “remember you must die.”
It’s not a terribly cheery message, though it’s fittingly on-brand given the despairing nature of the film itself. 28 Years Later is, of course, the belated second sequel to 28 Days Later (2002) coming almost 20 years after director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later, released in 2007.
Read more: 28 Years Later | Looking ahead to the potential story in Danny Boyle’s sequel
The UK is still crawling with infected hordes, and the remainder of the country’s population live out a quasi-medieval existence in a walled enclave. As the rather revealing new trailer suggests, the stronghold won’t keep the Rage infected out forever.
Something of a revival for a would-be franchise, 28 Years Later arrives this June, and will be followed by 28 Years Later Part II: The Bone Temple, currently being directed by Candyman’s Nia Da Costa.
Is the 28 Years Later ‘memento mori’ message in the just a bit of fun, designed to provoke off-the-cuff internet posts like this one? As it turns out, the words are a password for a viral website which went live a few weeks back.
A user on YouTube, gretxy609 (thanks, ScreenRant), revealed this in a comment under the new trailer – and sure enough, if you head to rageleaks.net, using ‘mementomori’ as a password will grant you access. Inside you’ll find a few grainy images from a ‘report’ from ‘Lindisfarne Commune’. There’s also a message, which reads:
The virus brought us more than the rage.
The sorrow, for our lost home. The guilt, for the ones we left behind. The righteous indignation for the secrets being kept from us.
It’s been almost 28 years since the outbreak. And still, not a single shred of truth about what’s really going on. They say it’s to protect us. It’s for our own good. After all this time, what are they still hiding?
They classify satellite images. They forbid any communication with survivor communities. They suppress rumors and discredit reports that somehow, the infected have adapted.
They don’t want us to see. But we must bear witness. All of us.
All of which hints at a dystopian, post-infection dystopia where, from a society that’s collapsed due to the Rage virus, it’s instead kept contained by some sort of military dictatorship. It also suggests that those infected have also somehow evolved – perhaps into their own primitive society, which is something we’ve theorised about in the past.
There are also some other lines of text on the Wikileaks-type site, which suggest more information will be uploaded over time. We’ll let you know if anything new of interest pops up.
28 Years Later releases in UK cinemas on the 20th June 2025.
