In 2010 first time director Gareth Edwards crept up on the world and released the indie spectacular that was Monsters. Having now moved on to direct Godzilla for Warner Brothers, Gareth Edwards has handed the reigns for the sequel over to another first-time feature film  Tom Green of Misfits fame.

Empire magazine recently released an exclusive first look at Monsters: Dark Continent, which Edwards is co-producing. The footage reveals very little in terms of story but does a great job at setting up the tone of the film and certainly creates an atmosphere which is reassuringly close to what Edwards established in Monsters.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

Monsters: Dark Continent expands the world that Edwards created and moves the setting to a different Infected Zone, this time the Middle-East, which the U.S. military have now taken control of. Green is aiming to stick to the theme of intimate, human story telling that Monsters captured by piecing together over 100 hours of footage which he shot on hand held cameras as he travelled across North America with stars Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy.

Green has said, in terms of creating the same mood for the sequel:

[quote]“As soon as I watched Monsters I completely identified with the idea of using real locations as a foundation on which to build a world of limitless scale. From my first visit to the location shown here, in Jordan, it was somewhere I felt was key to making Dark Continent work. The moonscape-like environment was the perfect basis for an ‘alien’ landscape. The quarry trucks you see here became ‘buggies’ to transport the remains of firebombed monster herds to be incinerated, with all the leading characters emerging from the dust to witness the scale of the death toll for the first time — and for one character maybe too many times…”[/quote]

Monsters: Dark Continent stars Joe Dempsie (Game Of Thrones), Sam Keeley (What Richard Did) and  Johnny Harris (Welcome To The Punch) and will be released in 2014.