Welcome back, goblins and ghouls, to the fourth annual installment of SpookyJawn! Each October, our love of horror fully rises from its slumber and takes over the MovieJawn website for all things spooky! This year, we are looking at ghosts, goblins, ghouls, goths, and grotesqueries, week by week they will march over the falling leaves to leave you with chills, frights, and spooky delights! Read all of the articles here!

by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

There are few films I’ve been an evangelist for more than Attack the Block (2011, dir. Joe Cornish). From tagging along with a college buddy for one of those “hey, try this movie out” preview screening in Midtown Manhattan, to a celebratory post-release showing at MoMA, to rewatches whenever it’s come back to American streaming platforms (and, most recently, finding out it was on HBO during a hotel stay), it remains one of those movies that I love that few people know about. 

The aliens who descend upon the titular block undoubtedly qualify as a grotesquerie (and, therefore, for this week of SpookyJawn), but I’ve never been sure where to place them or the film. It’s kind of sci-fi, but the science is minimal (just the possible physics of an alien invasion and the physiology and mating habits of the aliens themselves). It’s gory on a few occasions, though I wouldn’t call it a full-on horror film. And any film with Nick Frost (as weed grower/professional stoner Ron) is comedic, but I don’t think of it as a full-on comedy. Typically, I describe it (only slightly tongue-in-cheek) as a film about race and class tensions in council-house South London…with scary monsters from outer space.

And hoo boy,  are those monsters from space something else. They descend to South London on Guy Fawkes Night as our protagonist teenage gang—Moses (John Boyega, before he was Fin), Pest (Alex Email), Dennis (Franz Drameh), Jerome (Leeon Jones), and Biggz (Simon Howard)—have just mugged Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a nurse-in-training and new resident of the block (it’s fun to remember that Whittaker’s played both a nurse and the Doctor in her filmography.) The alien crash-lands through a car and is found and stabbed by Moses, eventually to its death. Its gray pallor and sharp teeth are off-putting, but its small size doesn’t make it too threatening, causing Biggz to exclaim, “It’s raining Gollums!” when the gang sees more aliens shooting from the sky from the window of Ron’s apartment. 

But the new arrivals are larger and much more fearsome. The blackest of black fur (“blacker than my cousin Femi,” as Dennis puts it). No visible eyes (possibly no eyes at all, as we learn they communicate by smell). Three rows of teeth, glowing blue with every snarl, growl, and chomp. They may be the size of particularly large dogs, but, as Pest says to Sam, “Go out there and try feeding them some Pedigree chum! They're aliens, luv.” Soon the block is terrorized by the aliens, and the gang have to fend off the monsters with some help from Sam, Ron, and Brewis (Luke Treadaway), a kind of stoner gadabout, along with the junior-grade hoodlums Probs (Sammy Williams) and Mayhem (Michael Ajao). 

But, this being a sci-fi, there’s allegory in the background (maybe even the midground). As the aliens climb up the sheer wall of one of the block’s towers in huge packs, Moses fears they are just another of the urban scourges hemming in life in the block—first drugs, then guns, now these monsters. “Monsters,” indeed, is how Sam’s elderly neighbor (Maggie McCarthy) describes them—not the aliens, but Moses and his crew. Their brown skin, Pest excepted, is seen as no less a threat than the aliens’ black fur. And the extraterrestrial element is rivaled as a threat by drug-dealer-in-chief Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter), who represents all three parts of Moses’s fears, selling weed and cocaine, moving guns, and wielding terror as a source of power. Hi-Hatz even forbids, under threat of his gun, the gang from pinning the night’s events, including totaling Hi-Hatz’s car, on the aliens, forcing Pest to call them “big gorilla wolf motherfuckers” just before they attack Hi-Hatz’s lieutenant, Tonks (Selom Awadzi).

And there’s one more element, both native and alien at once: the police state itself. The cops arrest Moses in the film’s second and third acts, as they seal off the block during the invasion. The state created the block, neglected it, and led social cohesion to break down such that neighbors were mugging neighbors. And even when this government power manifests itself as a savior—intimate knowledge of the block’s architecture, and in one of my favorite film shots, the Union Jack in one tenant’s window becoming a lifeline for Moses as he perilously dangles—the threat of retribution remains ever present. 

2026 marks the 15th anniversary of Attack the Block, after helping make Boyega a legit British movie star and Whittaker a groundbreaking actress. The legacy of empire has led to an English men’s national soccer team that’s the most diverse in its history, one that will likely make its first World Cup appearance in the US (after its whiter predecessors couldn't do so in 1994). Yet despite this diversity and multiculturalism in British society, it’s still the same nation that led anti-immigrant pogroms this past summer, the response to a stabbing at a block party. Attack the Block shows that the true grotesquerie is not the invasion of an alien species, but “invasion” as a racist trope, damaging the dreams of community coming together in the block.