News 2025 Hugo Awards 2025 Hugo Awards Nomination Statistics Reveal Several Close Final Ballot Races Many notable Hugo Award nominees just missed the cut in 2025. By Matthew Byrd | Published on September 3, 2025 Image: Working Title Films Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Working Title Films While the 2025 Hugo Awards winners were revealed a couple of weeks ago, the event’s organizers have since released a series of supplemental statistics that reveal how the winners for each category were determined. Most interestingly, they also recently released a report that shows just how close many of the initial nominees came to making the final ballot. For context, nominations for the Hugo Awards are counted using a system that has been dubbed E Pluribus Hugo (EPH). The nominee breakdown sheet mentioned above explains exactly how that system works, but it’s basically an elimination program that turns nominations into “points” that ultimately help determine which nominees make the final ballot. Such systems are designed to help decide which nominees advance to the final ballot in the likely event that multiple nominees receive the same number of initial votes. They can help make tough determining calls in competitive races, and the 2025 Hugo Awards certainly featured quite a few such races. For instance, Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees also just missed the finalist list for the Best Graphic Story or Comic category by one vote, while the Doctor Who episode “Rogue” was one vote shy of making the finalist list for the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form award. It was also noted that three Doctor Who episodes qualifying for that finalist list would have triggered a provision in the awards rules that would have required one of the three episodes to be excluded from the final vote.  This sheet also helps explain what happened to notable initial candidates in other major categories. Helldivers 2 just missed the Best Game or Interactive Work cut by a single vote, while The Substance narrowly missed the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form cut in the final round of voting. It also shows that nominees that did make the initial final ballot in their respective categories (such as Moonstorm in the Lodestar Award race) later had their nominations withdrawn, while other selections (like Dune the Musical Show) were ultimately deemed ineligible for their respective categories. The full nominee breakdown is very much worth reading for both a better look into the mechanics of the voting process and to see just how competitive many of these categories were. Most importantly, it should help you find a few new names for your reading/watchlist. [end-mark] The post 2025 Hugo Awards Nomination Statistics Reveal Several Close Final Ballot Races appeared first on Reactor.

News magic Sam Raimi and Roy Lee to Remake Ventriloquist Horror Movie, Magic Magic is fun; we’re dead. By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on September 3, 2025 Screenshot: 20th Century Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: 20th Century Studios Have you ever heard of Magic? It’s a 1978 film based on the book by William Goldman that starred Anthony Hopkins as Corky, a magician/ventriloquist whose dummy—a cheeky guy named Fats—starts instigating a mentally unstable Corky to murder people in the Catskills after Corky romantically connects with his high school crush. (Fats, in fact, is a representation of Corky’s id, and not a demonically possessed dummy, if those distinctions are of import to you.) The film is, in a word, bonkers. If you need further proof, the poster for the movie features the top of Fats’ face and the following words: “Abracadabra, I sit on his knee. Presto chango, and now he is me. Hocus pocus, we take her to bed. Magic is fun; we’re dead.” Perhaps surprisingly, the movie has piqued the interest of Evil Dead creator Sam Raimi and Weapons producer Roy Lee. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Lionsgate is moving forward with a remake, with Lee and Raimi on board as producers. Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, whose previous credits include writing Freddy v. Jason and 2009’s Friday the 13th, will pen the script. The project is still in its early days, though apparently Chris Hammond and Tim Sullivan, two additional producers who have been working with Lionsgate, have been trying to collect the rights to the film for a while. According to THR, Sullivan in particular is “a longtime film devotee; he has been with the remake from its inception and worked for years to bring Goldman’s story back to the screen.” We sadly don’t know who will be reprising Hopkins’ role, what Fats will look like, or who will potentially voice him. One can hope, however, that Corky’s haircut survives the remake process and brings the dome cut back in all its horror. [end-mark] The post Sam Raimi and Roy Lee to Remake Ventriloquist Horror Movie, <i>Magic</i> appeared first on Reactor.

News Alien: Earth Here’s How Alien: Earth’s USCCS Maginot Eerily Evokes Alien’s Nostromo It turns out that they were made by the same company. By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on September 3, 2025 Credit: Patrick Brown/FX Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Patrick Brown/FX The latest episode of Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth is a flashback to the fate of the USCCS Maginot, the spaceship whose crew members (with the exception of Babou Ceesay’s Morrow) meet violent ends. If you’re an Alien fan, the Maginot undoubtedly looks familiar, with many elements evoking the look of the Nostromo, the ship at the center of the events in 1979’s Alien. Those similarities, unsurprisingly, were intentional.   “I had a conversation with Noah Hawley about the Maginot and how that interior should be made by the same company as the Nostromo,” production designer Andy Nicholson said in the show’s press materials. “The Maginot is a Weyland-Yutani spaceship. Yutani was a manufacturer of the Nostromo, so we kept the overall design aesthetic that was first seen in Alien. You’ll see the same approach to design throughout the Maginot—there are rooms that are very similar stylisticalwaly and then identical in details to the original Nostromo in terms of the mess hall, the cryochamber. There are differences because of the type of ship the Maginot is, and there are new rooms, but a lot of the details are if they were made by the same manufacturer—much as you’d find when you fly on a different Boeing type of Boeing aircraft.” He added, “I just dove into the same kind of historical research I do for any show if I was replicating a period in time. We looked at the movie, studied all the details and I tried to find as many online photographs as possible.” The Maginot bridge, explained Nicholson, was “recreated entirely from photo reference, studying the movie behind-the-scenes stills and a lot of pouring over details and individual frames—it became a historical reference point for us.” In an interview for Gold Derby, Nicholson also shared that a contact from Disney archives eventually gave him additional details. “They actually had digitized all of the original 1979 drawings, which was marvelous,” he said. “It helped us with a couple of things, like the ceiling height in the bridge, and the mess hall with a couple of cupboards.” Another fun fact we got from Hawley in the Gold Derby piece is that the set initially had to look damaged from the crash for filming, and they then had to fix it up to look like the functional ship it was before the crash. The end result for the cast and crew was mind-blowing. “It’s surreal the first time that you [board the Maginot],” Hawley told Gold Derby. “The only way I can describe it is that it collapses time, and you are fourteen again in that moment. The first time you walk into that comms room with all the lights, or the bridge or the mess hall, which were exact replicas [of the Nostromo], it collapses time. And then you turn around and you watch every single person who steps onto that set have that same moment.” New episodes of Alien: Earth premiere on FX and Hulu on Tuesdays. [end-mark] The post Here’s How <i>Alien: Earth</i>’s USCCS <i>Maginot</i> Eerily Evokes <i>Alien</i>’s <i>Nostromo</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Books new releases All the New Science Fiction Books Arriving in September 2025 An interplanetary courier, a police detective, a poet, and a spy all appear in September’s new SF releases. By Reactor | Published on September 3, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Here’s the full list of science fiction titles heading your way in September! Keep track of all the new SFF releases here. All title summaries are taken and/or summarized from copy provided by the publisher. Release dates are subject to change. September 2 The Nga’phandileh Whisperer (Sauútiverse) — Eugen Bacon (Stars and Sabers)When Chant’L, a young and precocious Guardian in New Inku’lulu—an elite space outpost of planet Zezépfeni—misuses her sound magic, the Guardians punish her by stripping away her magical ability, and exiling her to Savage Mound, a sound island on another planet, Wiimb-ó. The Guardians have a vital role to secure a secret border—the Hogiiri Hile Halah, a proactive invisible wall—protecting the federation of planets from the Nga’phandileh, creatures of unreality. But imprisoned Chant’L discovers that sound magic is inborn-never truly lost or taken. She channels energy from two spirit moons and, in an act of revenge, summons a creature of unreality to wreak havoc on the planets. Only her magic is flawed and she gets more than she bargained for when a trinity of Nga’phandileh slips from unreality, and is more uncontained than anyone could have imagined. Now the Guardians in Sector Z find themselves with a bigger problem they must not only keep secret, but resolve. A glossary of Bantu, Afrocentric and made-up words complements this genre-bending, cross-cultural novella. Tracer — Brendan Deneen (Blackstone)In the near future—after a virus has swept the globe and the oil has run dry—what’s left of humanity has created a new technology, one that turns plastic back into oil. A mad scramble for resources ensues, with new cities being built on the seven largest landfills in the world. Plastic is the new gold. Tracer is the adopted daughter and hired gun for the president of PH City—built outside of what used to be Los Angeles, atop the Puente Hills Landfill. When a distress call comes from the landfill city outside of Las Vegas, the president of PH sends Tracer to answer it. But Trace soon discovers this mission is more than she bargained for, and that a dangerous deal has been struck without her knowledge, sending her further down a complex and violent path… Sympathy Tower Tokyo — Rie Qudan (Summit Books)Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of radical sympathy toward criminals has become normalized. The incarcerated are considered victims influenced by their environments to commit crime and are labeled accordingly as Homo miserabilis. A grand, yet controversial, skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house lawbreakers in compassionate comfort—Sympathy Tower Tokyo. Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city’s new centerpiece but is filled with doubt. Haunted by a terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might inherently disagree with the values of the project, which should be the pinnacle of her career. As Sara grapples with these conflicting emotions, her relationship with her gorgeous—and much younger—boyfriend grows increasingly strained. In search of solace and in need of creative inspiration, Sara turns to the knowing words of an AI chatbot… Livewire (Valiant) — Sarah Raughley (Blackstone)Amanda McKee is a psiot, an evolved subspecies of humanity with mysterious psychic powers. According to billionaire Toyo Harada and his secret research organization, the Harbinger Foundation, she has the ability to talk to machines, control technology, and even see into a secret parallel world that exists inside computers: the Digital World. But Harada wants Amanda to keep that last bit under wraps—along with the fact that she’s his adopted daughter. But when a man from the twenty-seventh century named Matsuoka Sho appears, intent on killing her to save his future, she realizes her days of hiding who she really is are over. Especially after Matsuoka gives her an ominous warning: “One day, you and Toyo will destroy humankind.” At first, Amanda doesn’t want to believe it. But when techno-soldiers from the future kidnap her father and drag him into the Digital World, she has no choice but to follow. Going into the Digital World with her hot, time-traveling frenemy and fighting off mecha soldiers with her psiot powers? That’s one thing. But can she handle learning the truth about who Toyo Harada really is? White Widow: Secret Sisters — Tess Sharpe (Marvel)On a top secret mission, top spy Yelena Belova discovers something very familiar about her next target. Yelena is used to the brutal, cutthroat world of the Red Room—the elite, mysterious spy-training facility that raised her. But when her handlers send her on a top secret mission to the US—what they call “the American Outpost”—she finds barely capable girls who can’t even take a punch. Yelena doesn’t make many friends, but the freedom Americans enjoy gives her a glimpse of what her life could be—if she could ever escape the Red Room. Then her mission goes terribly wrong. Now she’s on the run with an orphaned eight-year-old. It’s a deadly road trip of self-discovery, as Yelena outruns her past and struggles to save a girl who reminds Yelena of her younger self—a girl whose shocking origin ties her fate inextricably to Yelena’s. September 4 What a Fish Looks Like — Syr Hayati Beker (Stelliform Press)What are the stories we need to survive? In ten days, the last spaceship is leaving for a new planet. Some of us will stay on Earth. How do we decide? #TeamEarth. Once upon a time, the oceans were full of fish and the forests dark with brambles. Seb read about it in a book of fairy tales, and memory means hope. #TeamShip. Adaptation means knowing when to walk away. Jay is ready. So their ex, Seb, shows up on the dance floor, T-minus-10. What’s the harm in one last dance? What if the stories themselves are evolving? Told in margin notes, posters, letters scrawled on napkins, and six retellings of classic fairy tales, What A Fish Looks Like gathers the stories of a queer community co-creating one another through the strange landscapes of climate change, wondering who is going to love us when there are not, in fact, plenty of fish in the sea. And now this book belongs to you. September 9 An Unbreakable World — Ren Hutchings (Solaris)That’s the rule that Page Found has always followed. She’s a petty thief with no memory of her past, scrounging to survive on a backwater outpost—until she’s kidnapped by one of her marks. Her kidnappers—the cruel, self-serving Zhak and the tough maverick Maelle—plan to pass Page off as a monk from an ancient, isolated planet to help them capture a treasure-filled ship. If Page is willing to play along, they all stand to become richer than they can imagine. Everyone is keeping secrets, and Maelle finds her loyalties conflicted as she gets closer to their captive. Page can’t remember the last time she counted on anyone. But to navigate this deception, she and Maelle will have to trust each other to survive. Into the Storms (Hell Divers) — Nicholas Sansbury Smith (Blackstone)Two and a half centuries before the Hell Divers, the Machine War erupted—autonomous killer robots turning Korea into a battlefield that threatened to consume civilization. As the dust settles, three men stand at the crossroads of humanity’s fate. CEO Tyron Red, thrust into leadership of the Industrial Tech Corporation after his father’s death, works to reverse the war’s catastrophic effects while battling enemies, both human and machine, lurking in the shadows. Sergeant Santiago Rodriguez returns to his family in San Diego, a soldier without a war, struggling to pay bills until an ITC contract draws him back to Korea—now transformed into a radioactive wasteland harboring dark secrets that could ignite global conflict. Corporal Cecil Pepper battles a different kind of enemy while working surveillance for the Charlotte Crime Task Force. When a raid against city gangs goes tragically wrong, Cecil and his wife flee to the mountains of North Carolina seeking safety—unaware that an enemy once thought defeated is awakening across the globe. As peace crumbles and forgotten machines reactivate, Tyron, Santiago, and Cecil must confront a merciless foe whose only directive is humanity’s extinction. Long before the first Hell Divers leaped from their airships, these heroes stood firmly on the ground to face the storm. Welcome to the end of the world as they knew it. September 16 Sunward — William Alexander (Saga)Captain Tova Lir chose a life as a courier rather than get involved in her family’s illustrious business in politics. Set in humanity’s far future, hiring a planetary courier is essential for delivering private messages across the stars. Encouraged by friends, Tova begins mentoring baby bots, juvenile AI who are developmentally in their teens, and trains them how to interact within society essentially becoming their foster mom. Her latest charge, Agatha Panza von Sparkles, named herself on their first run from Luna to Phoebe station. But on their return, they encounter a derelict spaceship and a lurking assassin, igniting a thrilling chase across the solar system. Tova and Agatha’s daring actions leave Agatha’s mind vulnerable, relying on Tova’s former AI pupils for help. As Tova starts gathering her scattered family around her, she is chased through the solar system by forces who want her captured and her family erased.  Extremity — Nicholas Binge (Tordotcom Publishing)When once-renowned police detective Julia Torgrimsen is brought out of forced retirement to investigate the murder of Bruno Donaldson, a billionaire she worked with whilst undercover, she doesn’t expect to find two bodies. Both are Bruno—identical down to the fingerprints—and both have been shot. As the investigation sucks her back into the macabre world of London’s rich elite, she finds herself on the hunt for a mysterious assassin who has been taking out the wealthy one by one. But when she finally catches up with her quarry, she unveils an entire world of secrets: impossible documents about future stock market crashes, photographs of dead clones, and a clandestine time-travelling conspiracy so insidious it might just mean the extinction of the entire human race. If Julia is to have any chance of preventing this terrible future, she’ll have to revisit her own past, the terrible choices she made undercover, and the brutal act that destroyed her once legendary career. Exiles — Mason Coile (Putnam)The human crew sent to prepare the first colony on Mars arrives to find the new base half-destroyed and the three robots sent to set it up in disarray—the machines have formed alliances, chosen their own names, and picked up some disturbing beliefs. Each must be interrogated. But one of them is missing. In this barren, hostile landscape where even machines have nightmares, the astronauts will need to examine all the stories—especially their own—to get to the truth. Uncertain Sons and Other Stories — Thomas Ha (Undertow)Uncertain Sons is a startling and masterful collection exploring familial love and trauma; societal and technological anxieties; identity and class; and alternate near-future irrealities. Sharp, incisive, imaginative, and visionary, Thomas Ha’s debut heralds the arrival of a vital new voice. The Shattering Peace (Old Man’s War #7) — John Scalzi (Tor Books)For a decade, peace has reigned in interstellar space. A tripartite agreement between the Colonial Union, the Earth, and the alien Conclave has kept the forces of war at bay, even when some would have preferred to return to the fighting and struggle of former times. For now, more sensible heads have prevailed—and have even championed unity. But now, there is a new force that threatens the hard-maintained peace: The Consu, the most advanced intelligent species humans have ever met, are on the cusp of a species-defining civil war. This war is between Consu factions… but nothing the Consu ever do is just about them. The Colonial Union, the Earth and the Conclave have been unwillingly dragged into the conflict, in the most surprising of ways. Gretchen Trujillo is a mid-level diplomat, working in an unimportant part of the Colonial Union bureaucracy. But when she is called to take part in a secret mission involving representatives from every powerful faction in space, what she finds there has the chance to redefine the destinies of humans and aliens alike… or destroy them forever. September 23 This Inevitable Ruin (Dungeon Crawler Carl #7) — Matt Dinniman (Ace)The ninth floor. Faction Wars. Nine armies enter, led by rich and powerful aliens from across the galaxy. The winning team must capture and hold the castle at the very center of the battlefield. Strategy, alliances, pitched battles, betrayal… It all makes for great fun and even greater television. But thanks to Carl, Donut, and Katia, this season is different. For the first time ever, the crawlers have their own army. The NPCs, who are normally used as nothing but cannon fodder, have become fully self-aware and have formed an unprecedented team of their own. And it’s not just the crawlers who are at risk this Faction Wars. Any combatant who dies on the battlefield stays in the ground. For Donut and Katia, the stakes are even higher. No matter who wins the war, only one of them will be allowed to leave this level. If they all want to survive, they’re going to need a little help from a veteran or two. This is it. This is what they’ve been fighting toward. This is war. What We Can Know — Ian McEwan (Knopf)2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, ‘A Corona for Vivien’. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery. 2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian’. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem’s discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well. Terms of Service — Ciel Pierlot (Angry Robot)Luzia N.E. Drainway never really thought too much about the Astrosi. They lurk above and below Bastion City—a giant multileveled megalopolis she calls her home—and they tend to keep to themselves. On the rare occasions they use their magics to meddle with human affairs, most people with an ounce of sense steer clear of whichever unfortunate soul happens to be their victim. Luzia is far too dedicated to repairing and maintaining the frequently-damaged Bastion to pay them much attention, and prefers to ignore the Astrosi just like everyone else. That disregard gets blown out of the water when a rogue Astrosi and nefarious trickster named Carrion kidnaps her nephew and sells him to the Eoi, one of the Astrosi courts. With no other options to save her nephew, Luzia trades her life for his and finds herself in service to the Eoi. Unfortunately for her, Astrosi logic is acrobatic in ways even the most devious human mind can barely comprehend. It’s not until the deal is struck that she realizes she’s trapped in the most abstruse verbal contract imaginable. She is essentially conscripted into their ranks, and her devotion to her city becomes stretched to breaking point by her new masters’ orders. As she struggles under this weight, she begins to uncover the secrets of the Astrosi people—the internal battles for power between the two kingdoms, the never-ending conflict between them, the trickster Carrion who somehow bridges that gap, and the very nature of the Bastion itself. The Emperor’s Twin — Honey Watson (Talos)The central palace of Crysth is overrun; the empire has surrendered to an invading army led by Wilhelmina Ming, a traitor from its own capital city. However, the invaders can no longer control their divine power source—a being they worship as god—and now both invader and the invaded are trapped inside the palace with no way to rein in the eldritch force that has taken over, and no choice but to join together against it. Ming’s last hope is Speaker, the slain emperor’s twin and former imperial steward who is somehow bonded with the deity. A wannabe artist and writer, Speaker has been held hostage by the invaders for months, forced to recount the final days of the empire in the hopes that something in these details might give a clue as to the god’s desires and motives. September 30 The Legend Liminal — Ren Hutchings (Stars and Sabers)Stacey Kells never expected to fall out of reality when she packed her bags, got into a camper van with her two brothers and their best friend, and started travelling west. Sure, they might have said something like that-that’s kind of the point of going off the grid, isn’t it? But no one thought it would happen quite so literally. Then the world got real empty, and it stayed empty. Now it’s just the four of them, and a map that doesn’t make sense, and miles upon miles of desert and sky and endless empty highway. They embarked on this road trip to figure out what to do with their lives-but their lives don’t seem to exist anymore, and there may not be a way back home. Saltcrop — Yume Kitasei (Flatiron)In Earth’s not too distant future, seas consume coastal cities, highways disintegrate underwater, and mutant fish lurk in pirate-controlled depths. Skipper, a skilled sailor and the youngest of three sisters, earns money skimming and reselling plastic from the ocean to care for her ailing grandmother. But then her eldest sister, Nora, goes missing. Nora left home a decade ago in pursuit of a cure for failing crops all over the world. When Skipper and her other sister, Carmen, receive a cryptic plea for help, they must put aside their differences and set out across the sea to find—and save—her. As they voyage through a dying world both beautiful and strange, encountering other travelers along the way, they learn more about their sister’s work and the corporations that want what she discovered. But the farther they go, the more uncertain their mission becomes: What dangerous attention did Nora attract, and how well do they really know their sister—or each other? Thus begins an epic journey spanning oceans and continents and a wistful rumination on sisterhood, friendship, and ecological disaster. The First Thousand Trees — Premee Mohamed (ECW Press)After making a grievous mistake that ended in death, Henryk Mandrusiak feels increasingly ostracized within his own community, and after the passing on of his parents and the departure of his best friend, Reid, there is little left to tie him to the place he calls home. Henryk does something he never expected: he sets out into the harsh wilds alone, in search of far-flung family. He finds his uncle’s village, but making a life for himself in this unfriendly new place—rougher and more impoverished than the campus where he grew up—isn’t easy. Henryk strives to carve out a place of his own but learns that some corners of his broken world are darker than he could have imagined. The Heist of Hollow London — Eddie Robson (Tor Books)Arlo and Drienne are ‘mades’—clones of company executives, deemed important enough to be saved should their health fail. Mades work around the clock to pay off the debt incurred by their creation, though most are Reaped—killed and harvested for organs when their corporate counterparts are in medical need. But when the impossible happens and the too-big-to-fail company that owns them collapses, Arlo and Drienne find themselves purchased by a scientist who has a job for them. The reward: Debt paid off, freedom from servitude, and enough cash to last a lifetime. The job: Infiltrate a highly secure corporate reclamation facility in the heart of dead London and steal a data drive. They’re going to need a team. The post All the New Science Fiction Books Arriving in September 2025 appeared first on Reactor.

News 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Trailer Teases a Different Kind of “Big Part” For the Zombie Samson Who says a zombie and a human can’t become friends? By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on September 3, 2025 Screenshot: Sony Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Sony Pictures In a zombie-esque apocalypse, the real monsters are other people! That theme appears to be central to 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the fourth installment in the movie series, which has a script from 28 Days Later alum Alex Garland and sees Nia DaCosta entering the franchise as the film’s director. The trailer that was released today hints at what we’ll see in the sequel to 28 Years Later, as does the film’s official synopsis: In a continuation of the epic story, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) finds himself in a shocking new relationship—with consequences that could change the world as they know it—and Spike’s (Alfie Williams) encounter with Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) becomes a nightmare he can’t escape. In the world of The Bone Temple, the infected are no longer the greatest threat to survival—the inhumanity of the survivors can be stranger and more terrifying. That “shocking new relationship” is with Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), an Alpha (read: infected) that we saw with Dr. Kelson in 28 Years Later. The trailer gives us their meet-cute in a field, and even sees Kelson reach out to touch the rage virus-infected being. In an interview with Rolling Stone, DaCosta teased that the two characters’ relationship is “a big part of the movie.” “We’ve seen Samson ripping people’s heads off,” she added. “But Kelson’s a kook, and he’s doing what he wants to do.” DaCosta also shared how the movie “gives us the opportunity to really talk about humanity. In particular in this film, [it’s about] the nature of evil and how we contextualize that in a world with a lot of belief systems that have been created in order to handle the meaninglessness of existence. That’s one of my favorite things about this genre of film—it’s the look at humanity and what we do to each other. In the film, we have the infected and we have people who aren’t infected. Who’s really doing worse things?” We can see the horrors of humanity and the burgeoning relationship between Dr. Kelson and Samson when 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple premieres in theaters on January 16, 2026. While we wait, check out the trailer below. [end-mark] The post <i>28 Years Later: The Bone Temple</i> Trailer Teases a Different Kind of “Big Part” For the Zombie Samson appeared first on Reactor.