Few films make the audience sit up and pay attention more immediately than 28 Days Later. The opening of the celebrated horror film sees Cillian Murphy’s character, Jim, wake up from a coma to discover that London is a desolate city: he staggers around alone, the only man in existence, finding that the most densely populated parts of the capital are totally empty but for birds. It’s a stark introduction whose mark on world cinema is still felt 20 years on — all the more so because of the eerie parallels that suddenly came to mind when Covid-19 shut down the very same parts of London.

Imagining a world in which a “rage” virus has infected almost everyone on Earth, 28 Days Later has been fully embraced as a crucial fixture of the zombie genre despite not strictly being about zombies at all. The film’s “zombies” aren’t zombies, but “the infected.” They sprint — athletes tended to play them in the film — and they can be killed in the same way as any human being.

“It's not that interesting to just sit within the genre,” director Danny Boyle tells Inverse. “You’ve got to be trying to do something with it that maybe hasn’t been done before.”

Two decades on, Inverse spoke to 11 members of the production, including Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire, Yesterday) and writer Alex Garland (Annihilation, Ex Machina, Men), about the making of the iconic film.

If you’ve seen a major blockbuster in the last decade, there are a few things you’ve almost certainly experienced. A huge beam of light probably came down from the sky, our heroes likely exchanged plenty of quips as they took on their enemies, and there was almost certainly a lot of CGI goop. What you likely didn’t see, however, was anyone getting frisky.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe, perhaps the most dominant franchise in Hollywood history, has had precisely one sex scene. No, not the time Tony Stark seduced a Vanity Fair reporter (that doesn’t count); we’re talking about the extremely uncomfortable moment in Eternals — a movie not lacking in uncomfortable moments.

Meanwhile, Dwayne Johnson, one of the biggest Hollywood stars ever, is a famously sexless lead. Even the Fast & Furious movies seem to have largely abandoned the subject. Almost every major franchise is totally devoid of sex, and all this chastity is boring.

Blockbusters don’t need sex to be great, but sex isn’t all that’s disappeared from the modern movie lexicon. There’s no more subtext, no more crackling chemistry between two leads in an action movie. Major films aren’t just sexless. The very idea of sex is absent.