In the second of this week’s two episodes of Generation Z (Sunday and Monday), a teenage girl called Finn wondered why her friend Kelly was so distracted and tearful. As a well-informed type, Finn applied the principle of Occam’s razor and decided that Kelly must be pregnant. In this case, though, the simplest explanation definitely wasn’t the right one. What was ailing Kelly was that her nan had tried to stab her with a large kitchen knife prior to feasting on her flesh – until a male schoolfriend turned up, shot her nan with a crossbow and hid the body in the woods.
Residents of the retirement home are also rampaging through the woods, chomping on cockapoos
In some British towns, all this might have been something of a one-off. But not in the fictional Danbury, where an army lorry had recently shed its load: a gas that causes old people to develop a sudden zomboid taste for blood. Now, 15 residents of the Sunny Rise retirement home are also rampaging through the woods, chomping on cockapoos and their owners alike.
Not only that, but any victims who don’t die are infected with the same dietary requirements. The cockapoo sadly didn’t make it – what with being comprehensively disembowelled – but its middle-aged owner was last seen munching on her mother’s brains.
Generation Z is written and directed by Ben Wheatley, whose CV includes both horror and comedy. According to interviews, his plan here was to combine the two – but so far the comedy isn’t easy to discern, unless we’re meant to regard the whole thing as hilariously daft, which I don’t think is the idea at all.
Indeed, the show seems heavy – and sometimes heavy-handed – with perhaps contradictory metaphor. On the one (heavy) hand, the baby boomers are no longer just symbolically sucking the blood of younger generations. On the other, the murderous rage of the Sunny Rise folk is presented as an understandable, if possibly overdone reaction to society’s neglect of the elderly.
A similar uncertainty of purpose affects the storytelling, which mixes the horror with a more straightforward teen drama featuring unrequited fancying, annoying parents and enthusiastic drug-taking. Meanwhile, a conspiracy thriller is emerging too. Faced with the crisis, the government has snapped into action by initiating a full-scale cover-up about a chemical weapon being driven through rural England.
Unsurprisingly, the overall result is that Generation Z is a bit of a mess, with lots of short scenes shuffled in what often appears to be any order. Granted, the programme has a certain mad energy that keeps things bowling along. There’s also fun to be had watching old troupers like Sue Johnston and Anita Dobson clearly enjoying the chance to screech away through spectacularly blood-stained lips. And although the oldies aren’t terribly good at chasing their victims, the scenes when they do manage to nab one are reliably exciting. Nonetheless, the confusion caused by the throw-everything-at-the-wall approach never goes away for long enough to let the show exert a proper hold.
For more scholarly fans of horror this week, there was Hammer: Heroes, Legends and Monsters. In this feature-length documentary, an impressive array of bona fide buffs – among them Johns Carpenter and Landis – showed up in a fake lab full of bubbling potions to talk us through the history of one of Britain’s most oddly successful film studios.
Of course, being buffs, they were generally fans of Hammer’s early work from the 1950s and early 1960s when, following the rise of television, it carved out a sizeable niche for itself making films that could never be seen there and wearing its X certificates with pride. (Being able to show blood in lurid Technicolor helped too.)
Before long, the studio had assembled a crack team of regular actors and even more regular crew – all of whom were eulogised in Thursday’s programme with due thoroughness. We learned, for example, that for his first few films, Hammer’s in-house composer James Bernard drew heavily on his score for the Third Programme’s 1954 production of The Duchess of Malfi. We then got a fully illustrated guide to how art director Bernard Robinson could dress the same set in wildly different ways.
All of which made the second part of the documentary a rather melancholy watch. One by one, the great figures departed, and the studio gradually lost its confidence in a world of more relaxed censorship about violence, where an X certificate wasn’t so easy to come by. Much to the buffs’ dismay (although not, as I recall, that of schoolboys at the time), Hammer’s response in the
early 1970s was to increase the amount of female nudity.
Even so, by the middle of the decade, the game was pretty much up – especially once The Exorcist had moved horror from Transylvanian castles to everyday domestic settings, where it has largely remained since. Including, as you’ll have noticed, in Generation Z.
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