Warning: This article contains spoilers for Men.
Men director Alex Garland has explained how the hit anime series Attack on Titan inspired the horrific visuals and the ending of his 2022 folk horror film. Garland's latest film sees Jessie Buckley play a woman named Harlow who is haunted by the men of the small English village she journeyed to, all played by Rory Kinnear. Buckley and Kinnear are also joined by Paapa Essiedu and Gayle Rankin.
In Men, Harper Marlowe takes a holiday to the English village of Cotson following the apparent death by suicide of her abusive husband James (Essiedu). Renting a cottage from local resident Geoffrey (Kinnear), Harper is soon harassed, disturbed, and haunted by various men residing in the village, all bearing a disturbing resemblance to Geoffrey. Praised for its unsettling and gruesome content, Men's climax features a surreal, gruesome sequence where after fending off Kinnear's characters, Buckley witnesses one of Geoffrey's strange doppelgangers give birth, with each of Kinnear's characters giving birth to one another until finally giving birth to James. Following the film's release, Garland has revealed the ending's inspirations.
Speaking to Indiewire, Garland explained that he was inspired by Attack on Titan after watching the anime with his daughter, being struck by how the Titan's designs and movements made the creatures frightening. The director stated that he preferred the Titan's simpler yet upsetting design to the more mutated, inhuman design he had considered. The director also noted that he felt the series' monsters' designs were subversive in a way that made typical arranged forms uncanny and stands out. Check out Garland's full response below.
“I found myself watching an animated TV show with my daughter, ‘Attack on Titan.’ I was really struck by how, how little they did, in a way, how much of what made the Titans frightening was actually kind of pathetic, but also sort of banal. Like, they’d slightly enlarge eyes or they’d give people awkward movements. It felt sort of weirdly subtle, or weirdly nuanced, but incredibly powerful. What I thought is they’ve been much more imaginative and braver than the kinds of thoughts that I’ve been having because I kept trying to layer things on top of each other... I felt like ‘Attack on Titan’ was picking up on the un-self-conscious bits between arranged forms.”
Set to conclude after four seasons in 2023, Attack on Titan is based on Hajime Isayama's hit manga, which initially depicted mankind reduced to an incredibly small population due to a race of carnivorous giants known as the Titans. Mostly appearing as giant naked figures with accentuated features, Isayama was initially inspired to create the Titans due to a bad experience when working at an internet cafe. The author revealed that during his earlier career, a drunk customer suddenly grabbed him by the collar, and the fear of facing a person he couldn't communicate with inspired the creation of the Titans.
Intended to provoke guttural reactions like Garland's previous film Annihilation, Men's gruesome ending is certain to disturb and shock audiences, and it isn't hard to see where Isayama's work inspired Garland. Beyond the disturbing movements and body horror that the ending delivers, Kinnear's casting as the majority of the village's men could unsettle audiences in the same way that the Titans, taking the familiar and making it uncanny, and unexplainable, most notably with the younger characters Kinnear portrays. The result allows Garland to create a disturbing, foreboding atmosphere long before Men's bloody climax.
Source: Indiewire
