I’ve grown up watching all manner of horror films. I love watching bad horror movies as well as the more critically praised ones. The Italian zombie films from the 70’s such as Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue and Nightmare City are amongst my favourites and have given me huge inspiration for The Zombie Diaries. Horror authors like H.P. Lovecraft and James Herbert have also been a big inspiration on the films I make.
We wanted the zombies in our movie to be as realistic as possible. Because we were filming in an unforgiving documentary style, the zombies had to look good. Our special effects team did a lot of research looking at grisly photos of real corpses and we also looked at lots of other zombie films where the make up really stood out. We also preferred slow moving zombies, like those in George Romero’s movies.
Directing zombies was a lot of fun. We had some sessions with a choreographer, who trained up several of the cast and crew. From there we were able to teach people the basics of how a zombie should move. From our point of view though, it was more about what they ‘shouldn’t’ do. We didn’t want the clichéd arms out in front as that looks silly. But we encouraged people to do their own thing, as long as it didn’t look stupid. There were a few occasions where zombie extras fell over theatrically when they were killed and this had us all in stitches.
I don’t think zombies are that scary to be honest. If you stick a zombie out in the daylight on a bright sunny day, there isn’t a lot to be scared of as they’re pretty slow moving and you’d have to be quite stupid to get caught by one. We made them scary in The Zombie Diaries by showing them mostly at night, or by setting up scenes and having the zombies sneak up on people, or emerging from a dark corner of a room. It’s more about how you show them in the film and by creating tension that makes them scary. The scariest zombies on film in my opinion are the ones in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters. These were really filthy-looking, maggot encrusted zombies that actually looked dead. The fantastic make up work also meant that when they did get hold of you, they were likely to rip your throat out or gouge out your eyeballs!
I think the whole zombie sub-genre of horror came back in from the cold in 2002 with 28 Days Later. But strangely, 28 Days Later isn’t a zombie film in the traditional sense as they are infected humans and not ‘dead’ as such. But the success of that film led on to other movies doing well like the remake of Dawn of the Dead and Britain’s own Shaun of the Dead. We then had George Romero’s Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead as well as 28 Weeks Later and the current wave of zombie films is still strong with the forthcoming adaptation of Max Brooks’s excellent book World War Z by Brad Pitt’s production company.
I don’t think zombie films have ever gone out of fashion, but there’s a cycle to everything. Zombie films were big in the late 70’s and then again in the mid 80’s. It then took around fifteen years for the cycle to start again, but it’s here to stay for a while longer at least. I think film-makers have also tried to be more contemporary by introducing new elements such as the ‘fast’ zombie in the remake of Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later.
Are you doing another one?
Well, The Zombie Diaries has been a big hit across the world and released in dozens of countries including a big release from Dimension Films in the US. We hit number 4 on the Virgin chart here in the UK and on the back of that success we’ve been approached by a big distributor to make two sequels. If all goes to plan, we’ll be shooting them back to back late summer, so there will be lots more flesh eating to come!
In case you missed it first time around, you can pick up The Zombie Diaries at Amazon.co.uk.