DIRECTOR ALEX GARLAND’S FILMS ALWAYS UNSETTLE. BUT NOTHING WILL PREPARE YOU FOR MEN. HE AND THE CAST TELL US WHAT FUELLED THEIR GENDER-CENTRIC NIGHTMARE

WORDS DAN JOLIN

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.”