ALEX GARLAND
WANTS TO SET SOMETHING STRAIGHT.
IT’S ABOUT 28 Days Later, his first screenplay.
“I’m aware for years and years there’s been debates about that,” he says. “Over whether or not it’s a zombie movie.” The rage-infected horde that speedily lurches around its viral apocalypse are, many (including director Danny Boyle) claim, absolutely not zombies. They’re still alive, technically speaking. To the guy that wrote it, however, the film’s genre is obvious. “It’s a zombie movie,” asserts Garland. “Whatever technical discrepancies may or may not exist, they’re pretty much zombies.” Debate over!
Garland’s insistence on this matter is symptomatic of his lifelong affinity for horror. He remembers being a little kid during the ’70s, sneaking downstairs after bedtime to quietly devour Hammer movies on his parents’ black-and-white TV. His hugely successful debut novel The Beach — published when he was 26 — is peppered with horror tropes (Daffy’s ghostly, post-suicide appearances, for example, recall Jack in An American Werewolf In London). He’d even categorise his last film, the cerebral sci-fi Annihilation, as part of the genre. “The sci-fi element of it is quite distant,” he says. “But I can point to moments which really are horror scenes, though not classically. It’s a psychedelic horror movie.”
So when, during a Sunday-morning Zoom call, Empire suggests that Garland’s latest film, Men, must be his first straightup, pure horror, he’s not convinced. “Well, no. Not exactly,” he responds, never one to let a question go unquestioned. He does confirm that, after the likes of Dredd, Ex Machina, Annihilation and the 2020 FX show Devs, there are no science-fiction elements. “Yeah, it’s not sci-fi,” he says. “If we’re gonna get into subgenres, the subgenre here is folk horror.” Garland references Robin Hardy’s 1973 classic The Wicker Man, which he discovered and loved as a teenager, while praising the films of Ben Wheatley. “It’s the horror of rural England. It’s certain kinds of churches, certain kinds of forest — the shadows within dark green. That kind of thing.”
Pressing Alex Garland for details can be a tricky business. To be fair, at the time of interviewing him in mid-march, he’s about to start his next movie Civil War (“a war movie”) in Atlanta, and is only 24 hours out from completing his final day of post-production on
Men. It is the first time he’s ever talked about the film to an outsider; when we speak, all anyone in the world has seen of it is its elliptical first trailer, featuring Jessie Buckley being stalked and terrorised in the English countryside by tellingly masculine spectres. Details, Garland worries, might dilute the movie’s impact. Its horror.
“Men leans hard into something I’ve been doing for years,” he explains. “Which is that the large part of a story has nothing to do with the person telling the story. It’s about the person receiving the story. The way I see it, there are themes which I’m interested in on a personal level, but I’ll put little flags on some of them, and the distance between the flags will be quite large. That way, people can just step into those gaps and fill them out with themselves. It sounds weird, I know…”
He does give us something to chew on, even if he’s reluctant to elaborate. “When people I’ve been working with have asked me about what the film is, I say it’s a horror movie — but a horror movie about the sense of horror. Does that make sense?”