Life amongst the undead

Zombies. Everybody loves zombies.

Don't take my word for it – I've got a horse in this race. Go have a look on Wikipedia. In 2010 there were 68 zombie films that got distributed, including the big-budget Crazies and Resident Evil: Afterlife, Sir George’s Survival Of The Dead, and my personal fave of the year The Dead, the only zombie movie that made it onto the main FrightFest screen last year.

It’s not by accident that the subject matter of the first Phelps / Hawkins foray into feature production was chosen because it’s going to be easy to market, and because the genre has an enormous pre-existing fan-base. I like to think of this less as a deliberately cynical ploy, more a sensible foundation to our risk management.

So why do so many people look down on the undead? Even some horror fans, who really should know better. 

I guess the main problem is that most zombie films are awful. Flat, humour-less, theme-less, and populated with bland characters that you don't empathise with enough to care whether they'll keep hold of their brains or not. Maybe this is what makes it so special when the really good ones come along – stand up Dead Set, Pontypool and [·REC]. But most of the time the genre is like a litter tray, a place for unimaginative low-budget film-makers to come and deposit their cinematic stools.

I’m pretty certain that every one of those films must have started out with good intentions, to make the best movie ever and rock the zombie world to its core. Basically, exactly where Jake and I are now.

Ah. OK.

At the risk of extending the faecal metaphors any further, you can’t polish a turd. The screenplay is everything. Garbage in, garbage out.

When you write a genre film it’s often very difficult to innovate, to find a new and meaningful spin on the subject matter. When other people are making 68 similar movies a year that becomes doubly difficult. And this is where we have an edge. We’ve got something new – something that hasn’t been seen before in a zombie movie. Sure, there are all the genre tropes of infection through biting, death by head-shots and a group of people that are far more dangerous to each other than the horde is. But it all comes with a drizzle of special sauce.

15 months after the zombie apocalypse, a group of survivors are forced to take refuge in an abandoned psychiatric hospital, where they encounter a mysterious zombie with the power to bring the undead back to life.

Oh, and for the record, we’ve got both fast and slow zombies. Righteous.