At last, a new zombie movie that looks original and compelling

Check out the first trailer for The Girl with All the Gifts, based on an incredible sci-fi novel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjGkB_oWTe0

One of the most fascinating sci-fi horror novels of 2014 was The Girl with All the Gifts, M.R. Carey's tale of a girl who goes to a very special school where every student gets a classical education by day—and is locked into a cage like a wild animal at night. This fall, the movie version comes out in the UK, and it promises to be just as original and compelling as the novel.
It seems pretty much impossible to reinvent the zombie genre, but then a story like this comes along. In Girl with All the Gifts, we've got a scenario vaguely reminiscent of The Last of Us. A mind-altering fungus is infecting people and turning them into violent "hungries" without higher reason. Our young hero Melanie is part of a second generation of hungries, who carry the fungal invaders but are otherwise completely normal humans. Well, except for the part where they have the urge to eat human flesh. In a remote part of the British countryside, the military has gathered several of these second generation children together for study. While the creepy Dr. Caldwell does terrifying experiments on the kids, their kindly teacher Miss Justineau tries to rear them to be ordinary children. Out of the entire class, Melanie is the only one who is completely in control of her violent urges. She won't munch on humans except in self-defense.

As you can see in this trailer, the school doesn't last long. It's attacked by zombies, and Melanie is forced to flee with Caldwell and Justineau. In the book, this leads to a seriously gripping tale that involves evolutionary theory as well as philosophical questions about what it means to be human in the first place. While it's not entirely clear where the movie is taking this scenario, it's obviously exploring the infected as a scientific phenomenon, and Melanie is at the heart of it. Unlike many zombie stories, The Girl with All the Gifts doesn't offer us a post-apocalyptic world of humans vs. zombies. Things are much more complicated than that, and the fate of the zombies seems inextricably tied to humanity's future. Possibly the best comparison might be with In the Flesh, a British TV series about zombies whose violent urges can be controlled with drugs, and who are now struggling to rejoin the communities where they once rampaged.

Pop culture may be reaching peak zombie, but stories like The Girl with All the Gifts prove that even the most tired tropes can feel vital again if they're done right. It hits theaters in the UK on September 23.

Listing image by Warner Bros.