After delivering one of the most visually stunning TV shows of 2020 with “Devs,” Alex Garland was getting ready to work on a new TV project. Then, 2020 happened and suddenly making a TV show about the need to protest seemed redundant, so Garland changed gears to something more familiar to fans of his directorial work: horror.
“I wrote a low-budget horror movie, set in the UK,” Garland said during a recent interview with Empire magazine. “I don’t know if it’s unrealistic or not. Always at this particular moment, a film always feels unrealistic, but then somehow it works out.” Financing and casting for the project are reportedly underway, and Garland is hoping to shoot the film in the spring or summer of 2021.
The horror film came up after Garland decided to drop the project he was working on, a TV series “tackling the ineffectual and surface-level state of protests in recent years” which was going to star the cast of Garland’s show “Devs,” which aired earlier this spring. “At some point with civil disobedience, you have to start smashing stuff up. So I was writing about the need to smash stuff up,” Garland explained, but the powerful Black Lives Matter protests during the summer showed Garland that there was already palpable anger in the streets, so there was no need to make a series about it. “I thought, ‘So now what I’m writing is pointless.’ In a good way. I almost felt glad, weirdly.”
Now, why would Garland think that this anger and wish to protest wasn’t there before this summer is a bit strange, considering just how many protests we’ve had against police brutality recently. In any case, a new Garland project is always exciting. His directorial debut, “Ex Machina,” and his trippy follow-up, “Annihilation,” were phenomenal films, but seeing Garland return to horror after writing “28 Days Later,” is even more tempting.