Entertainment

Watch The 'Girl With All The Gifts' Trailer Reinvent YA Movies, Zombie Horror Films

This trailer does the impossible. It actually sold us on yet another zombie movie.

Warner Bros. has released a UK trailer for its adaptation of zombie novel, The Girl With All The Gifts. While the novel took its time revealing what exactly its female protagonist was, the trailer slices through that artifice when Paddy Constantine tempts a restrained child with his arm. The child hesitates, and then wildly tries to bite into his skin, revealing himself — and The Girl, played by Sennia Nanua — to be a zombie.

Intelligent zombie fans are a dying breed. Though it was once acceptable to analyze Romero films as contemporary horror texts – textured and nuanced and illuminating societal issues like racism and our fear of the differently-abled – the zombie fandom was overrun by those who sought to make the undead into a mindless spectacle.

It’s hard to watch Brad Pitt in World War Z, trying to outrun a thousand-strong horde of fast moving, CGI, faceless ghouls without remembering 28 Days Later, and how inventive that film felt when it premiered. We’ve reached capacity as far as “it’s a zombie movie, but wait, there’s more!” goes. iZombie defies expectations on The CW, but for every fantastic Shaun of The Dead, there’s a Warm Bodies or another season of The Walking Dead, where nothing much happens for an entire season, which ends on a cliff-hanger.

From the looks of it, The Girl With All The Gifts might be another iZombie, interrogating some of the less-often explored parts of zombie fiction. The movie looks like it’s going to ask all the important questions: When do zombies become inhuman? Does the animalistic urge to eat people negate our humanity? Is Glenn Close a sociopath?

Watch the trailer below. We’ve seen all we need to see; Inverse is on board for The Girl.

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