Attack The Block's Alien Designs Were Inspired By This '80s Arcade Game

There was a time when "hoodie" just referred to a plain old comfy sweatshirt with a built-in hood. But in the UK during the 2000s, the word became a derogatory catch-all term that conjured up images of a young, yobbish, working-class male, often seen hanging around bus shelters and shopping precincts, causing aggro and generally being intimidating. An encounter with a gang of hoodies could be a frightening experience, and people told their tales as if talking about a lucky escape from a pack of hyenas (via Slate).

Once held up by the Conservative Party as an emblem of "Broken Britain," the hoodie caused an awful lot of hand-wringing in the press. As Fiona Bawden of Women in Journalism said (via The Independent):

When a photo of a group of perfectly ordinary lads, just standing around wearing hooded tops, has become visual shorthand for urban menace, or even the breakdown of society, it's clear that teenage boys have a serious image problem.

With hoodies becoming such a fixation in the British public consciousness, they inevitably found their way to screen. The result was a sub-genre of horror that fell somewhere between urban wyrd, folk horror, and kitchen sink social realism in the cinematic landscape. It was "hoodie horror," usually featuring nice middle-class people menaced by gangs of deadly hoodie-wearing thugs. Perhaps the most well-known example, "Eden Lake" with Michael Fassbender and a young Jack O'Connell, even suggested these violent antisocial tendencies were endemic across whole generations of the working class (via Horrified Magazine).

2011 was arguably Peak Hoodie. Stereotypes wearing the offending garment were blamed for much of the violence and destruction during the London riots (via Reuters), and a capital under siege from people in hoodies was one of the most common images in the UK media at the time. Earlier in the year, "Attack the Block" came out, Joe Cornish's cult comedy-horror about a bunch of hoodie-wearing kids defending their inner-city estate from an alien invasion.

Given the negative public perception at the time, it was a quietly radical move from Cornish, going against the grain and casting a street gang as the heroes. That was half the point, to combat the trend of "hoodie horror" (via The List):

"This is certainly a reaction to [those] often brilliantly-made and well-crafted movies that I think take a slightly inhuman approach to an issue that, actually, involves very young kids. I think that's the easy option, to take something in the world that is already demonised and frightens people, and just make it even more scary and horrible."

Cornish spent months on the projects of South London speaking with teens and learning the dialect (via Complex) so he could really nail their slang in the movie. One of the great things about "Attack the Block" is how he pulls it off without coming across as pandering. The kids in the film, played by inexperienced local actors, feel real, and Cornish neither sentimentalizes nor patronizes them.

In the video arcade heyday of the standup cabinet, games like "Joust," "Pacman," and "Donkey Kong," stood side-by-side in dark rooms filled with the overlapping crackle of crude sound effects and 8-bit tunes, funky with the smell of hot carpet, overloaded electric sockets, stale cigarette butts, and well-chewed bubblegum. The artwork on the side of the cabinets ranged from rudimentary to iconic, and one always captured my imagination more than all the others: "Space Invaders."

Set against a dark blue background, it showed the crater-pocked surface of an alien planet, with a menacing humanoid creature stomping its way threateningly towards to viewer, furry shoulders bunched and claws ready to strike. The most remarkable aspect of the image was how little detail it provided. The jagged outline gave the impression of very coarse fur, but aside from its pointed ears and glowing white eyes, it was completely blank, a deep featureless black.

It was this image that provided Cornish with one of several inspirations for the creature design in "Attack the Block" (via Vice):

"The idea for them being ultra-black came from my black cat. They look really beautiful when they're backlit, just like silhouettes. So we had people in suits and rubbed out all the reflections, so it was just a black shadow. In the '80s, the old Space Invaders video game in arcades had an illustration of the aliens and even though they're standing on two legs they're just silhouettes. So yeah, it was just sort of keeping my eyes and ears open and gathering influences and that sort of idea forming."

He explained further in Complex:

"We tried to make something that purposely lacked detail. Lots of CGI monsters are obsessed with surface detail, and making everything super realistic, which is weird to me when aliens aren't necessarily real... So we kind of tried to take away detail, and make them interesting because there wasn't that much to look at. Your brain has to fill in the blanks with my creatures. All you can see is this fur-line, and you can feel this alarming, rapid-moving, deep, deep blackness."