Sean of the Dead

I have never in my life observed the speed limits as closely as I have today.

I mean, it was almost dangerous the amount of time I spent staring at my dashboard instead of the road ahead. But today would have been the wrong day to get pulled over. With two weeks to go before kick-off, Jake and I took an early morning jolly into London to pick up some of our more, shall we call them, 'niche' props.

And now, Charmed Central is replete with replica handguns and magnesium rounds. And body parts.

What is it about guns that make them so addictive to hold? Is it just simple ergonomics, refined over hundreds of years of evolutionary improvements? They are, after all, just tools for a very specific job. But that doesn’t quite explain why I’m sat wearing Mac’s Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum in a shoulder holster as I’m typing this. And I know that when Jake gets back to the office he’s going to fight me for a go.

Anyway, before I coax out a commentary from the amateur psychologists out there, let’s quickly move onto the collection of body parts. Oh – so, the amateur psychologists are back.

You can imagine that a post-apocalyptic zombie movie needs a whole load of limbs and viscera, if only as set dressing. Today marked the first consignment of corpse-bits, appropriated from other films that Robbie-the-gore and his pals have worked on over the years. A bucket of innards, a headless torso, hands, arms, and four decapitated heads.

And at the same time we have somehow wound up with a couple of big-name cameos for our film. I should stress that this will be completely without their knowledge or active participation, and don’t think they’re going to get paid either.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the horror enthusiast to figure out who it is, and he'll be joining Ian Dury’s leg. This is the polio-withered appendage used in Sex, Drugs & Roll’n’Roll, before being gored up, welcomed into the horror community and given a chance to stand up and be counted in its own.

It’s a massive thanks again to Robbie-the-gore and to Ads-the-digital-FX (who regaled us with stories of the war-footage from Iraq that he is currently being asked to scan at work, and which were so disturbing that I didn’t get a word out of Jake for the next hour). Anything that we do over the summer isn’t going to come close to matching the horror of breakfast in Coulsdon, and for that we are both enormously grateful. Traumatised.