Teenage Kicks Right Through The Nightmare
Will School’s Out Forever be a post-covid viral sensation?
WHEN EFFECTS SUPERVISOR turned director Oliver Milburn first envisioned School’s Out Forever as a film, his ambition was to make “Mad Max in the home counties”: a muscular, action-driven post-apocalyptic tale about a bunch of school kids in a world ravaged by an epidemic. Ten years on, he found himself putting the finishing touches to the movie during the Covid-19 enforced lockdown, while fretting about the irony.
“I hope that it’s not seen as piggy-backing,” he tells Red Alert just before Christmas. The film is due for release in February, when it’s clear that the world will still be deep in the battle against the coronavirus. “And I hope that no one is offended by our use of a virus when people have tragically lost family members. But it is a complete coincidence and I have sort of gone through an almost complete cycle with it. Some days I’m like, ‘Oh, this is such a great coincidence’ and other days I think, ‘God, this is Sod’s Law!’”
In fact, when the first UK lockdown went into force in spring last year, Milburn was “still completing some of the visual effects shots – which included the shots of people lying dead on deserted roads, and mass graves and things – at a time when the news was saying ‘We’re worried about hospitals hitting capacity’. So it was very eerie.”
School’s Out Forever began life in 2007 as the first in a trilogy of books by Scott K Andrews, which themselves were only a part of a larger series of books known as The Afterblight Chronicles, published by Abaddon, an imprint owned by 2000 AD publisher Rebellion. It has now become a production of Rebellion’s new film wing, featuring Samantha Bond (Brosnanera Bond’s Miss Moneypenny), Alex Macqueen (The Inbetweeners) and Buffy’s Anthony Head.
“I first read the book when I was working part-time in a library, just after I had finished uni,” says Milburn, “and even though I wasn’t making films at that time, I thought, ‘This would make a really great film.’ Then I worked on my career, and got myself to the point where some part of Rebellion would just about trust me to deliver it.
“What I loved about the book, that I wanted to retain in the film, was this sense of a kind of a rollercoaster ride. It contained all the things I liked, but were generally speaking quite American in style. Or Mad Max – though that’s not American, thus immediately disproving my own point. But cinema tropes like gangs in a post-apocalyptic, lawless world, all very
American in style. I’d never seen that done in the UK. When we do it, we tend to make it a bit more gritty. And one of my favourite films ever is 28 Days Later, so I’m not complaining, but I wanted that kinda American genre feel. Our producer, Ben, calls it ‘Mad Max in the home counties’ – a mix of a slightly Edgar Wright-ish sense of humour along with a more mainstream American take on the apocalypse.”
Milburn cites John Mctiernan’s Die Hard and Predator as other influences – but there’s ambition, and then there’s budget. “I think, quite often, particularly with the scale of modern Marvel movies and things like that, low-budget movie makers are sometimes tempted to emulate that and start with allguns-blazing action straight away. If I look back at my favourite action films, actually you don’t need the really big stuff until the last 30 minutes. Die Hard and Predator are masterpieces of that building. The first two action sequences in Die Hard aren’t particularly spectacular. They’re tense and they’re very well delivered, but the actual content of what happens in them isn’t too explosive. They save that for later. And that was kind of the logic we followed. The last really big stunt we did was at the limit of what we could possibly do on our budget, and we worked back from there. Plus, we had my experience as an effects supervisor, which really helps when it comes to knowing what you can do cheaply and what you can’t.”
But it’s not all fun and games, and various somebodies lose more than just an eye, thanks to some very full-on violence. “It gets very dark,” Milburn agrees. “I wanted the rollercoaster to gradually go down. But most of the time we wanted it to be enjoyable rather than grim, if that makes sense. In that American tradition, what they tend to basically do is use any form of apocalypse as a substitute for the Wild West. Which is exactly what we did. It’s just set in rural Britain, with school compasses and stuff!” DG
School’s Out Forever is available on VOD from 15 February and Blu-ray/dvd from 12 April.
Most of the time we wanted it to be enjoyable rather than grim