Doomsday Blog and Journals

It's always refreshing to read about a director being genuinely excited for their project and that's just what Neil Marshall (The Descent) has been doing. His next film, Doomsday, will follow people looking for a cure to a virus that lethally destroys all that are infected with it. According to him, it's not like any of the current "disaster" or "zombie" flicks we've seen.

I never saw The Descent, but I do know it was recommended to me by a few friends who are fans of the horror genre. So I can't really say much about Neil Marshall as a director.

What I can say is that I'm kind of stoked at how excited Marshall is about his film. First, a plot summary:

• In Doomsday, a lethal virus spreads throughout a major country and kills hundreds of thousands. To contain the newly identified Reaper, the authorities brutally quarantine the country as it succumbs to fear and chaos. The literal walling-off works for three decades - until Reaper violently resurfaces in a major city. An elite group of specialists, including Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), is urgently dispatched into the still-quarantined country to retrieve a cure by any means necessary. Shut off from the rest of the world, the unit must battle through a landscape that has become a waking nightmare.

Eh. My initial thoughts are that this movie has to bring something different to the table for me to be interested in it. Much like I Am Legend did for me during it's first half, I'd want a movie like this to surprise me with human interaction (or the lack thereof) and, for once, take a more intelligent route.

• "Well, just to clarify, Doomsday is NOT a horror film. Yes, it's dark. Yes, it's brutal and violent. And yes, it 's even a little scary at times. But a horror film it is not. The mistake, and this seems to be based on contemporary cinema lore, which states that virus = zombies. With the likes of everything from 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead, Resident Evil, and most recently in I Am Legend, it seems that any film dealing with a virus automatically has to have some variation of the living dead running around devouring people. Well, our virus is back to basics. The real deal. It kills people. Pure and simple. As lethal and effective as a virus really is. Okay, so it rots you from the outside in, covering the victim with weeping soars and dripping pustules and liquefies the internal organs, but the end result is…you die. And you don't come back. That said, Doomsday is not primarily a virus movie either. The 'Reaper' virus acts as a catalyst for the action, it's responsible for creating the world of the story, but doesn't drive the narrative."

Ok, I'm impressed already, as we certainly don't need another zombie flick for another 20 years.

• "One of the things I was adamant about doing with Doomsday was going back to a kind of gritty stunt/action movie that doesn't get made anymore. Real people, in a real world, doing really REALLY dangerous stuff! No green screen, no wires, just crazy stunties standing on, jumping into, and hanging out of cars travelling at 80mph and smashing into each other! When I wanted to crash and roll a 10 ton armoured transport (one of two we designed and built especially for the movie), they hadn't done anything like that before, but were perfectly happy to give it a try, and it worked spectacularly!"

  "We exploded countless pyro's in the centre of Cape Town, in the middle of the night. We closed down the city centre (to stage a frantic foot/bus/motorbike chase) on a Saturday afternoon! We took over a major theme park, dressed it as the villains lair (playing host to a twisted Moulin Rouge-style stage show and a spot of brutal human sacrifice!) and filled it with a thousand screaming extras, waving baseball bats, hanging from the rafters and generally baying for blood. They had a lot of fun that night, and so did we."

Whoa. Ok. Intersting.

• "We commandeered a Russian freighter in dry dock to film the opening shoot-out, a steam train for an escape sequence, and a derelict slaughterhouse to stage an elaborate 10 min action sequence that'll leave you breathless and shell shocked, and we did it all for real."

Damn. Ok. This had better be good.

You can read Neil Marshall's full blog over at MySpace. Doomsday comes out on March 14th, 2008.