If Ben Wheatley fans were worried the director was going to veer away from his signature small-scale horror-inflected style now his blockbuster movie Meg 2: The Trench has raked in a big pile of money, then worry no more. Wheatley is heading to television to revive his Brexit zombie satire.
Generation Z was originally planned in 2019 for Channel 4 in the UK. According to Wheatley, it was to be a ”zombie drama satirizing intergenerational divides in the UK.” The pandemic that followed meant it got shelved (but meant Wheatley was able to make the eerie folk horror In The Earth), but now it’s back on the table.
Wheatley teased Generation Z at Empire magazine’s VIP screening of Meg 2: The Trench, and believes it will be a return to his traditional uncomfortable vibe.
Wheatley Teases Return to Roots With Zombie Series
“What I’m doing next is six hours for Channel 4, [a] TV series, a horror-based thing […] In the same way I did In The Earth after Rebecca, I’ll do something that’s back to [the] Kill List-y, Sightseers-y world.”
The director has always been at his most interesting in indie spaces, and the fact Wheatley is a big fan of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead bodes well for what has been described as a ”boomers vs. zoomers” satirical take on a very British zombie apocalypse.
Wheatley also mentioned he’d like to work on another big-budget monster movie, preferably something more traditionally like a Kaiju movie.
