Black Friday: Horror with Maria Lewis

October 20, 2017
The Girl With All The Gifts and Gemma Arterton on the most emotional zombie movie you’ll consume.

Like vampire films before them, zombie movies have become one of the biggest horror movie subgenre staples over the past 60 years. They range from okay to very, very bad. The exception to the rule is that blessed occasion when we get a good one, heck, even a great one. Think Dawn Of The Dead, 28 Days Later, Warm Bodies, Zombieland, Train To Busan, Shaun Of The Dead, Dead Snow and REC as the zombie equivalents of excellent vampire movies like Nosferatu, 30 Days Of Night, Interview With A Vampire, Blade, Blade II, Only Lovers Left Alive, What We Do In The Shadows, Near Dark, Thirst, Let The Right One In, Cronos and The Lost Boys. Gemma Arterton has starred in two exceptions: first the feminist tale Byzantium about the enduring relationship between a mother and daughter vampire. Now, The Girl With All The Gifts: a zombie movie unlike any other zombie movie that has come before it.

“I didn’t know how much of a following he had,” says Arterton, of M.R. Carey. “Like a huge, cultish following!” Carey is the author of the best-selling novel The Girl With All The Gifts upon which the film of the same name is based. He’s a pop culture legend to say the least, with runs on classic comic book titles like Fantastic Four, Hellblazer, Lucifer and X-Men. Yet the 31-year-old star of blockbusters like Quantum Of Solace and Clash Of The Titans admits she was completely unaware of his work before The Girl With All The Gifts script landed in front of her. “Because science-fiction isn’t usually my bag, I’m not in that world,” she says. “But I love the way he writes: he just makes it so real and earthy and grounded and actual and current, unlike some science-fiction which can be so hard to connect with sometimes. He has this real humanity to the way he writes, even if he’s writing about ‘hungries’ or people eating each other. There’s still something actual to what he’s doing, which really sets him apart.” It’s this humanity that first drew her to the project and – thousands of others – to the book. Finding humanity in a zombie tale is a unique thing, especially given the very definition of a zombie movie usually requires viewers to spend a large amount of time with creatures that have lost their humanity.

Arterton plays Miss Justineau, one of three central characters in the story, all of whom are women. With pockets of mankind struggling to survive the zombie apocalypse, she’s the teacher of a very special class of children who are being raised inside a combination army base/research facility. With the end of the world looming – a constant threat in the story – one of the big questions in The Girl With All The Gifts is what will someone do to survive? And should they? These answers are represented in opposing figures, played by newcomer Sennia Nanua as the ‘girl’ from the title and relentless scientist Glenn Close who round out the trio of female roles. “I also think it was the sort of femininity as well,” says Arterton, when discussing another one of the project’s “big draws”. “It’s a very female centric film, with the three main characters being women. There’s a different touch to it compared to the standard dystopian, post-Apocalyptic set stories. There’s lots of guns and war and things like that, but it’s more about this love relationship between this … it’s a complicated relationship, because it’s not mother and daughter.”

Given that audiences are now living with the effects of climate change, The Girl With All The Gifts feels like the genuine start of the cinematic cli-fi (climate fiction) movement. Yes, it has all the usual zombie movie hallmarks: gunfights, gory deaths, people eating each other and bonus lobotomies. Yet it also has a sense of authenticity so rarely found within the subgenre that grounds it. “It’s funny, when we were shooting the film we had been photographed on set by the paparazzi with guns looking really bad-ass and stuff,” laughs Arterton. “And I remember people going ‘oh it’s another kind of shoot ‘em up movie’ and it’s so not. It’s very misleading. It’s way more than that and I think that’s what’s really surprising for people when they read the book and see the film – it gets to you emotionally. It makes you think quite deeply about what we’re doing to the world and what the future could be.”

Directed by Colm McCarthy – who’s best known for his work on Peaky BlindersThe Girl With All The Gifts has finally finished touring the international film festival circuit to land in Aussie cinemas and on-demand. With only a few months left in 2017, it’s already one of the best reviewed horror films of the year with an 84 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes (so far). Given the expectations of the zombie subgenre, The Girl With All The Gifts can be counted as another one of those exceptions to the rule.

Maria Lewis is a journalist and author previously seen on SBS Viceland’s The Feed. She’s the presenter and producer of the Eff Yeah Film & Feminism podcast. Her debut novel Who’s Afraid? was released in 2016 with the sequel – Who’s Afraid Too? – out now. Her new book It Came From The Deep is available Halloween, 2017. You can find her on Twitter @MovieMazz

Share:

Leave a Comment