Attack the Block (2011) Directed by Joe Cornish. Written by Joe Cornish. Starring John Boyega, Jodie Whittaker, Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh, and Leeon Jones.
We are sometimes a bit unfair to the special effects tradition of sticking a man in a gorilla suit.
Sure, there are many other ways to create a movie monster. Artistry and technology evolve, times change, trends roll toward the future. But sometimes a man in a gorilla suit really is the best way to go.
The alien costumes in Attack the Block (2011) are not actual gorilla suits, but they are gorilla-adjacent. Director and screenwriter Joe Cornish first imagined the aliens as black silhouettes without a whole lot of initial detail. The glowing teeth came along in concept art, but they are a practical effect as well; those chompers are realized using a motorized headpiece. The long forelimbs and loping movement of the larger aliens were developed through work with actor Terry Notary, a gymnast-turned-stuntman and the film’s lead creature performer. (Notary is in so many movies, usually hidden behind special effects or motion capture. For example, he’s the chimpanzee Gordy in Jordan Peele’s Nope [2022].)
There’s a fun YouTube video about the creature actors and effects in Attack the Block. I don’t bring it up to go down the road of practical effects evangelism, but rather the opposite, because what makes the effects look so great is a combination of skilled actors, solid cinematography, practical effects, and digital post-production. The aliens were designed, crafted, and filmed with an eye toward preserving and enhancing the physicality of having a real actor in a real suit. There’s plenty of CGI to make the fur extra dark, the limbs extra grabby, the teeth extra numerous, but the leaping, crashing, rolling, and body-slamming is real. It’s a great example of what a modern sci fi movie can be, deep in the digital era, when the green screens and CGI and all of that are used to enhance solid physical filmmaking.
The overall effect is such a delight. The action in Attack the Block is great and the aliens are wonderfully scary, which keeps the film fast and fun without ever being in danger of getting too cheesy. Because, let’s face, it could easily be very cheesy. Horror-comedy always has to sit right on the edge of excessive cheese without going too far.
The idea for the film didn’t start with the aliens, however. It started with the people.
A nerdy bit of film history context: Since the very earliest days of cinema, there has been a loosely-defined type of movie that film scholars call a “social problem film,” referring to movies that are directly about some particular issue in society. This includes exactly the movies that you would expect, such as Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), or Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989)—you get the idea.
While most social problem films do tend to be both serious and realistic, they don’t have to be. Sometimes they are comedies, such as Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), a very funny movie that pissed off a whole lot of politicians when it came out. They can also sit firmly in the realms of horror and sci fi, because both horror and science fiction are fertile ground for social commentary. That includes like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1989) for horror, and in sci fi it includes a number of movies we’ve already watched: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Mysterians (1957), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), They Live (1988), etc.
It’s not terribly common for a social problem film to be horror, sci fi, and comedy, but that’s really just more evidence that genre designations are a bit silly anyway.
When describing where the idea for Attack the Block came from, Joe Cornish talks about specifically wanting to subvert a trend in British cinema: a spate of early 2000s “hoodie horror” films. The term specifically refers to British horror films of the ’00s in which the central conflict is derived from a violent clash between people of different socioeconomic classes. Or, to put it more bluntly: films about angry lower-class young men terrorizing nice middle-class people. This includes films like Eden Lake (2008), in which a couple is threatened by violent teenagers; Harry Brown (2009), in which an elderly pensioner goes on a vigilante killing spree against the gang members in his council estate; and The Disappeared (2008), a ghost story that also utilizes the grim urban setting of a gang-controlled housing project. The genre became popular as the UK was having a collective freak-out about crime rates and the apparent ubiquity of youths with anti-social behavior orders (ASBOs).
Hoodie horror is a particularly British phenomenon, although there have been horror and thriller movies about roving hordes of menacing youths ever since a preachy, moralistic anti-drug film called Tell Your Children was recut into the schlocky exploitation flick Reefer Madness (1936).
As you can imagine, these hoodie horror films share a lot of common features that are (to put it diplomatically) a bit problematic: the deliberate dehumanization of the poor, marginalized, and people of color; the characterization of groups of young people as packs of feral animals; the exploitation of real class conflict for visceral shock; scene-setting which casts struggling and neglected communities as filthy and evil, and so on.
Of course people noticed, and one of the people who noticed was writer and comedian Joe Cornish, who hadn’t made any of his own movies yet but was good pals with people who had (especially Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost). Cornish didn’t like the way hoodie horror films dehumanized kids and teenagers as animalistic antagonists, nor the fact that films set in locations such as urban council estates tend to be “downbeat depressing social realism.”
That’s how he developed the idea for Attack the Block: Take the setting of depressing social realism and use it for action and comedy. Take the stereotyped antagonists the hoodie horror films villainized and turn them into the main characters, with a perspective and a cinematic style inspired by Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979). Add aliens, because why not? Everything is better with aliens.
Cornish spent several months going around London to talk to kids who lived in council estates. He would tell the kids about his film idea and ask them what they would do in that situation—how they would fight off the aliens, what weapons they would use. He also wanted to get that amazing slang right.
There is a difference between humanizing a character type and softening a character type, and Attack the Block is clearly aiming for the former. The film opens with Moses (John Boyega) and his friends mugging Sam (Jodie Whittaker) at knifepoint. It’s not a misunderstanding, it’s not a joke, it’s not a game. The threat is real. Her terror is real. And their lack of remorse is real. The film establishes, from the start, that this is not a story about some hypothetical group of actually-quite-good kids who only look like trouble. They pull a knife on a woman just walking home from work and laugh about her fear. They are genuine little shits.
But they’re still people, and that matters. Where hoodie horror and other types of class or urban exploitation films build fear by emphasizing existing prejudices and stereotypes, Attack the Block does the opposite every chance it gets. They are not a seething mass of ill-defined urban menace. They’re a group of teenage friends. They’re pretty funny. They’re kind of idiots. The kids all have different personalities and different situations; we need only those brief glimpses of their homelives and their interactions with the girls and the younger kids to see that.
(Trivia: The building they live in is Wyndham Tower, named for English sci fi author John Wyndham; other buildings are named for other writers. In December we’ll be watching Village of the Damned [1960], which is based on Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos.)
One of the sharpest moments in the film comes toward the end, when Sam enters Moses’ flat and realizes, for the first time, that he’s a fifteen-year-old kid left to fend for himself due to an absentee guardian. Sam says that he looks older than he is, and Moses takes it as a compliment—but we know that’s not what she means, nor what the film intends to convey. We know that it is in fact a profound, systemic societal failure when Black boys are viewed only in terms of being an adult threat in the adult world. The movie doesn’t dwell on it, but Whittaker’s face does the necessary work as Sam is struck by the fact that these boys are children, even though the world has denied them the grace of being seen that way.
It’s an interesting contrast that the film chooses to go the other way with the aliens themselves. When they’re all hiding in the Weed Room and Brewis (Luke Treadaway) comes up with his pheromone theory about why the aliens are chasing Moses, there’s a moment of adjustment. They had all previously been ascribing the aliens’ actions to motives they understand: anger and a desire for revenge. The adjustment comes when the characters have to realize the aliens are behaving like animals, driven by biological instinct, and not lashing out for vengeance.
It’s not subtle, but it’s a point I appreciate nonetheless. Even when people engage in violent, harmful, anger-driven actions—such as those of drug dealer Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter)—they are still human actions. That is not animalistic violence, no matter what the tough-on-crime politicians and ASBOs and cultural stereotypes want us to see, no matter how many ways people invent to justify treating criminals as less than human. They’re still people. (Anyone who can’t or won’t see the difference maybe needs to find a Weed Room of their own to sit in for a while.)
There’s one final thing I want to mention about this movie. In all films about aliens coming to Earth, there is a component of the story that asks the question: Who do we tell? Who can we call for help? At one extreme are those films like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Mysterians (1957), where the answer comes in the form of a high-level response from experts and governments; more modern films like Independence Day (1996) or The Edge of Tomorrow (2014) show what this looks like outside of the post-World War II era. At the other extreme are films like The Thing (1982) or Grabbers (2012) where isolation makes calling for help impossible.
Attack the Block sits in a curious middle ground. The setting is the opposite of isolated. They’re in London, they have phones, they are surrounded by people. The characters are genre-savvy teenagers; they know they should be able to call for help when aliens invade Earth. But their entire lives have also taught them that authorities won’t help if they make that call. So instead, they call on their friends, they call on the affable drug dealer who lives upstairs (played by Nick Frost), they call on the nurse they just mugged. They call on each other, rely on each other, because that’s what they have.
This is another element of the film’s social consciousness, the way it points out so plainly, without embellishment, that it is indeed a very troubling social problem that children in literal mortal danger can’t call for help because of the color of their skin, or where they live, or how much money they have, or how they talk, or who they know.
I love a lot of things about Attack the Block. It’s funny, it’s fast-paced, the action is fun and bloody, the single-night in a single-building setting is well-utilized, the cast is brilliant, and the aliens are suitably scary. But one of the things I love the most is touched on almost offhand, in jokes or bickering exchanges, and that’s the reminder that we can’t ever grow careless about how we define “us” and “them.” It’s a division that sits at the core of alien invasion movies—and at the core of both media representation and harmful public policy that stigmatizes, marginalizes, and punishes entire communities.
A film doesn’t have to be somber and realistic to focus on those communities and highlight those problems. It can do that just fine with glow-in-the-dark teeth.
What do you think of Attack the Block? The characters, the setting, the effects, the action? How prepared are you to join forces with your neighbors to fight off fluffy aliens with pointy teeth? I asked my sister who used to live in South London if she ever had to fight aliens and she denied it, but I’m not sure I believe her…
Coming up: Next week is Thanksgiving here in the U.S., so there won’t be a column on Wednesday. We’ll be back on December 4 with the creepy children of Village of the Damned, which you can watch on TCM, Apple, Amazon, or Microsoft.
