Dawn of the Dread

“I’m not one of these guys who walks up and down the street with a large sign saying ‘The End Is Nigh!’ Honestly!” laughs Irish director Conor Horgan, “but it does seem fairly obvious that if you look at the challenges we’re facing and the level of activity we’re putting in to meet those challenges, there’s a rather large gap. If that gap isn’t closed then things will probably not go well.”

It’s this scary reality that Horgan explores in his feature debut One Hundred Mornings, a slow-burning post-apocalyptic drama that’s sure to get people talking. Starring Ciaran McMenamin and Alex Reid, the film focuses on two young couples living together in a cabin on the outskirts of Dublin following a societal breakdown, the details of which are never divulged. But though his film focuses mainly on the individual’s reactions to a crisis, it’s clear that Horgan has given a lot of thought to the possible – and terrifyingly palpable – causes of such a disaster.
“I was reading a lot about how when a society breaks down,” he says, “and all it really takes is for one of the legs to be kicked away, and things can topple fairly quickly. And of course once that happens, it’s very difficult to get things back up and running again, especially if it’s a wide societal breakdown. We’ve never experienced a global one, obviously, but when it happens in local areas, as it happened in New Orleans after Katrina, everything just stopped working very, very quickly.”
Horgan was also inspired by comments made by author Margaret Atwood when he heard her speak on a book tour. The Booker Prize-winning novelist has written several science-fiction novels, including Oryx and Crake, The Year Of The Flood and The Handmaid’s Tale, which was made into a (quite unfortunate) film starring the late Natasha Richardson.
In other words, Horgan chose his muse well. “She was speaking and she said, incredibly matter-of-factly, ‘Well of course any species that outgrows its resource base doesn’t survive.’ And you could just feel this chill around the room, because it was so simply and elegantly put – inarguably put. She also recommended a book called A Short History Of Progress by Ronald Wright which I read. The message, putting it frankly, was that it’s only a matter of time. Unless we change our behaviour in a very radical way, what has happened locally will happen globally.”
Horgan isn’t the only director fascinated by the dangers facing modern society. In the last decade alone, countless apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films have been made, with films like 2012, Children of Men, The Road and 28 Days Later addressing the threat of ecological disaster, biological infection and of course, that great pressing danger that’s constantly on everyone’s mind: zombie invasion. Horgan, however, disagrees that these themes are new. It’s merely that our understanding of them has changed, he says.
“Many times in the past people have been convinced that this is the end of days, even going to back to the Bible. I think what’s happening now is different. The science is good enough that when you look at the equation – particularly to do with energy consumption – it becomes clear exactly how this previously vague, projected notion of our collapse could actually, and easily, become a reality.”
As the film’s characters go about their quiet routines of cooking, knitting and reading, they could be enjoying a holiday in a countryside idyll. It’s only as other survivors begin to turn on them that the terrifying reality of their situation is revealed, and their individual moral codes struggle against their survival instinct. And as theft, violence, blackmail and sexual bartering become increasingly necessary means of staying alive, Horgan explores the notion that morality is not innate, but created by community. And it seems that without community, we are adulterous little creatures.
“What was interesting to me was the fact that there’s also this conflict between the people in the house. If the bigger picture is that society is breaking down outside, then society is breaking down inside, and you could say that the most basic unit of society is not even the family, but the couple, and that’s under threat here too, as there’s an affair. And it’s basically because the world we live in now – we’re so unbelievably over-stimulated that if you take four people who are online half the day and going out half the night and put them in this kind of situation, they’re going to go into some kind of withdrawal! I think people now just look for excitement, even at the end of the world!”
Ecological disaster, societal breakdown, the dissolution of morality – there’s a lot of themes in One Hundred Mornings that may keep you awake at night. The idea that should an apocalypse come we may spend our last days having Dawson Creek-style dramas and picking the wrong romantic partners? Now that’s depressing.

One Hundred Mornings is released on May 6.