Ex Machina director and Devs creator Alex Garland has revealed that he’s making a “low-budget horror film”.

The new film, which is set to be produced next year, was conceived in the wake of this summer’s wave of Black Lives Matter protests across the globe.

• READ MORE: ‘Devs’ review: Alex Garland’s Kubrickian thriller is a mind-boggling look at the dark side of tech

“I wrote a low-budget horror movie, set in the UK,” Garland told Empire in a new interview, revealing that he’s currently casting for the film, and hoping to shoot it in the spring and summer of 2021.

He added: “I don’t know if it’s unrealistic or not. Always at this particular moment, a film always feels unrealistic, but then somehow it works out.”

In the interview, Garland revealed that the idea for the new horror film came about from the ashes of another project, a TV series about the lack of effective social protests in recent times, which he hoped to recruit the cast of his 2020 drama series Devs for.

“At some point with civil disobedience, you have to start smashing stuff up. So I was writing about the need to smash stuff up,” he said of the idea, before revealing that the wave of Black Lives Matter protests, which took place across the planet after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis in May, changed his mind over the subject matter for the original series.

“I thought, ‘So now what I’m writing is pointless’,” he said of the original idea. “In a good way. I almost felt glad, weirdly.”

Reviewing Devs upon its release earlier this year, NME wrote: “Much like Garland’s previous work, Devs will mess with your marbles and maybe even chill you to your bones. Similarly to Kubrick, Garland enjoys ambiguity and making the viewer work things out for themselves. That’s definitely worth remembering as you make your way through his latest tech-fuelled puzzle.”