Army Of Darkness

J.J. Abrams top-secret OverlOrd sees a troop of US soldiers parachute into France and down a rabbit hole of unspeakable genre horrors. TF interrogates producer Abrams, director Julius Avery and the cast to uncover the terrible truth

- Jamie Graham

The first thing you need to know is that Overlord is not a Cloverfield movie. Such were the whispers when motes of information first started to drift around the internet, and the scuttlebutt only intensified when the first trailer dropped in July.

“No, it’s not a Cloverfield movie, and it never started off as a Cloverfield movie,” says Australian director Julius Avery, on the phone from his home in Queensland, where he’s relaxing after a hectic couple of years. “This is something completely outside of that franchise. I can’t speak for what people think, but maybe because it had the Bad Robot logo on it, and the Cloverfield franchise is really super-cool. Why not think everything is a Cloverfield movie?”

Producer J.J. Abrams is even more to the point. Calling from the set of Star Wars: Episode IX, semi-shouting to make himself heard over the yells and clatters of the crew, he states, “It was always an original pitch from Billy Ray called Overlord.”

Their careful phrasing doesn’t altogether quash the possibility that perhaps, not at the start, not at the end, but at some point during Overlord’s long gestation period, it was discussed whether it could be migrated into the Cloverfield universe. But even if that was never the case, it’s not hard to see why the whispers started.