Teen horror about a pandemic finds its plot isn’t so far fetched after all
School’s Out Forever channels Mad Max in the Home Counties, writes Laura Harding
It was more than 10 years ago that the up-andcoming British filmmaker Oliver Milburn was reading the hit YA book School’s Out Forever.
He never could have imagined that a decade later he would be making it into a film that would be more timely than he might ever have dared to think.
Described by its author Scott K. Andrews as “mixing Lord of the Flies with The Hunger Games”, the instalment of the author’s Afterblight Chronicles puts a new twist on the term “postapocalyptic dystopia”, as it follows a teenage boy who discovers a virus has swept across the globe killing everyone who does not have O-negative blood type, and he must seek refuge in his school.
“I read the book when I was working part time in a library,” says Milburn, who has previously made some horror shorts and one feature called The Harsh Light Of Day.
“I could imagine people feeling the way I felt about this book, seeing it on screen and there was an appeal of doing what our producer described as ‘Mad Max in the Home Counties’.
“The scenario gives you licence to have a kind of wild west but in somewhere like rural England. Very few people, no laws – that’s all fun. And then there was something appealing to me, and touching, about doing an apocalyptic story, of which we’ve seen many, but centred around really quite tender teenage themes.
“What’s really at the core of the film was a boy missing his mum and trying to do the right thing by her.
“Like all good genre stuff, that then is a great metaphor for what you do in life.
“I thought that was a really nice way of exploring a lawless world, what would my mum want me to do?”
The story follows Lee, played by Ladhood actor Oscar Kennedy, a scholarship boy at fancy single-sex school St Mark’s, which is set in the middle of rural England, who gets in big trouble for a prank and expelled from school on the same day the UK government starts talking about closing the border to prevent the spread of a deadly virus.
Starting to sound eerily familiar? Milburn thinks so too.
“When we were developing the film, people didn’t get it, they didn’t get that you could just have a virus.
“People constantly mentioned zombies, that we should have zombies in it, or a bomb, or a something – they didn’t get the idea of an apocalyptic event, caused purely by a pandemic.
“Of course, now everybody gets it. A lot of people will spot the things we didn’t get right, like, ‘Why is no one wearing any masks?’ It just didn’t occur to me at the time.
“We actually photoshopped a mask onto one of the news stories that he reads on his phone because we were like, ‘We’ve got to have a mask in here’. That was quite towards the end of the post-production.
“But I could never have predicted it, especially considering how long it took to get to the screen, such a strange coincidence.”
● School’s Out Forever is available for digital download now and on DVD and Blu-ray from 12 April.