Dakota Fanning stars in Zygote, the latest short film from Neill Blomkamp

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Neill Blomkamp has been putting together an independent production company which aims to gives audiences a variety of experimental short films, and the first offerings from Oats Studios began to trickle out last month. In addition to several smaller shorts, Blomkamp has shown us an alien invasion in RAKKA, an alternate-history Vietnam War with FIREBASE, and now his latest, ZYGOTE, centers around two people trapped in a mining facility somewhere in the Arctic Circle as they flee a terrifying creature made up of body parts from the other members of the station.

Neill Blomkamp told Verge that he's not sure what made him think of it, but that he wrote down "a monster made out of men" while on a flight from Vancouver to Toronto. The ZYGOTE monster then grew from there and Blomkamp began developing the world.

So, I came up with the original concept, and I wrote the film with [The Gone World author] Thomas Sweterlitsch, and Terri Tatchell [Blomkamp’s wife and District 9 co-writer]. Thomas came up with the idea that Earth is inundated with asteroids 20 years from now: massive amounts of asteroids fall all over the planet, and there’s a concentration of them in Northern Canada and Russia. They bring with them some really unique semiconductors and materials that we aren't familiar with on Earth. So these mining corporations become these larger, 21st century versions of Google, where all the venture capital goes into extracting these incredibly precious metals.

In the asteroid, there’s this trap that’s been flying around for who-knows-how-many billions of years. I really liked the idea of a light wave transmitting gigabytes of data into a mind, and that’s what happened in the mining facility: when the miners crack open the rocks, this light bounces into their eyes, it sends them down this spiral. It basically teaches them how to make a biological substrate that it can live in. Essentially, it wants to make them a body. That’s where this monster comes from.

It's a little too early to say where the future of Oats Studios will lead, but it will be up to viewers such as ourselves to help fund their upcoming content, either through their official website or by purchasing DLC content on Steam, which includes many of the assets used to make the shorts. The next major Oats Studios short to be released will be LIMA, which will be a bit more like a current-day thriller. At this point, Neill Blomkamp doesn't know when it will be released.