Attack the Block

Guy Fawkes Night, Brixton. Moses leads a small gang of teenage boys who mug a nurse named Sam on her way home from work. A meteor-like object crashes nearby, and Moses investigates — a pale, snarling creature attacks him. He kills it. The gang hauls the dead thing up to their dealer Ron's flat in the tower block to show it off, already turning it into a story.

More objects fall across South London. What emerges from them is nothing like the first creature: pure black, no visible features at all except rows of glowing blue-white teeth. They move fast. They move in packs. And they are heading directly for the block.

Sam, sheltering with them now out of necessity, is not their ally by choice. But the creatures are killing indiscriminately — gang members, bystanders, anyone in range. The group fights floor by floor through the building they've lived in their whole lives, losing people on the way up.

They work out why the creatures are converging: Moses killed a female, and the males are tracking her scent — which has rubbed off on him. He is the target. The whole block is being torn apart because of where he walked.

Moses wraps himself in the female's carcass and draws every remaining creature into a flat rigged to blow. The explosion kills them. Moses survives, barely — but he's immediately arrested by police arriving on scene, who see a young Black man from the estate and reach their own conclusions.

Sam tells them what happened. The block knows what he did. As he's taken away in a police car, the estate chants his name.