The story so far…
Andy Phelps and Jake Hawkins celebrated getting laid-off from their respective day-jobs as an opportunity to do what they would much rather have been doing all along – making a low-budget horror movie. Zombie Resurrection
was written in 2010, and in January 2011 we started working full time on producing
the movie.
After raising the first slice of funding from two private
investors, the film was shot over 24 days in August 2011, in the South of England.
With a cast of nine principal actors, a crew of 23, and a zombie horde of just
about everybody we’ve ever met (and some we hadn’t).
Zombie Resurrection isn't like other low-budget zombie movies. It has all the gore, screams and jumps you'd expect from a horror movie, but it has so much more besides... it expands the zombie mythos; it has a cast of eccentric characters that you really don't want to see end up getting eaten (with some note-perfect performances from a terrific cast); it's funny as hell in places, deeply scary in others; and it has the social commentary that makes Romero's zombie films so much better than all the rest.
Where do we go from here…
While the initial investment got us through to the end of
the shoot, we now need more money to get the film finished and ready
for distribution. By breaking the funding into two blocks, we could get the film in the can without having to wait until we had raised all the money; having something tangible to show people makes us a much safer horse to back.
Post-production is a busy (and expensive) time. Editing,
sound design, an opening credit sequence, writing music, foley, digital FX,
grading, ADR, mastering, etc. And because these all require specialised skills,
these jobs have to be farmed out to experts. We have an awesome post-production
team ready to roll over the movie; these guys are all pros that work within the industry and are all committed to making Zombie Resurrection the best film that it can be.
The plan is to get the film near complete in time for Cannes
in May 2012, and to secure worldwide distribution from there. We will then hit a bunch of horror film festivals around the world, with the DVD /
Blu-Ray in the shops in time for Christmas 2012.
When you're doing what you love doing, day in and day out, you can get a lot done. In only 18 months we have conceived, written, financed, produced and shot a highly ambitious feature. The footage and the first edit look fabulous, and we just need the final push to get the movie out there. At the moment, the UK is a really unhelpful place to make movies - no studios, no government interest in genre and exploitation cinema, a Film Council that has just been closed down, and all this in the middle of a harsh economic climate. This is why crowd funding is so important in keeping the sparks of independent film making alight.
Independent cinema is the absolute bedrock of a country's film industry, where actors, crew and filmmakers learn their craft. We will be massively grateful for any contributions to getting us across the finish line; proof that passion and tenacity can still triumph even when the system is stacked against you.
Other stuff you can do...
Check out the website... www.charmed-apocalypse.com
Read the project blog... http://shootingthedead.blogspot.com/
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Synopsis
Zombie Resurrection
is a darkly humorous low-budget horror film set 15 months after the zombie
apocalypse.
Since the outbreak, pockets of survivors live in isolated
stockades dotted around the country, and so successful has this separation been
that there have been no new infections for months. The zombies have decayed
away; deteriorating to slow, shambolic, toothless pests.
We join a group of eight survivors in the middle of a
six-day march across the bad-lands, moving from one of the smaller stockades to
the central most-populous hub. A party of people all dealing with the end of
the world in their own way - the weekend soldier; the skittish prisoner; the
unnecessarily violent veteran; the middle-class parent and his bizarrely
well-adjusted daughter; the foul-mouthed chav; the idealistic zombie-rights
campaigner; the pregnant religious zealot.
En route, the party leader has a freakishly unlucky
encounter with a zombie, and loses a leg. With night-time quick approaching and
the nearby horde lured by the smell of blood, the party are forced to seek
refuge inside an abandoned school. There they encounter the first ripe zombie
that they’ve seen in months; less than 24 hours since infection, the zombie is
fast, powerful and absolutely terrifying.
Convinced that there must be other survivors in the
building, a faction splits away from the group to investigate, and discovers a
gathering of zombies involved in a bizarre resurrection ceremony. A mysterious
serene zombie lays his hands upon one of the horde, who violently returns to
life. Petrified, the man struggles to escape but is immediately re-devoured; a
continual recycling of the horde that keeps them fresh and extraordinarily
dangerous.
As the party fight to understand the mysteries of the school,
they are confronted with their first real test of survival since the beginning
of the outbreak. They rescue another survivor, a psychotic denizen whose only
memories are of being brutally devoured a hundred times over, and attempt to
kidnap the mysterious zombie from the midst of his horrifying congregation. Is
he the answer to the zombie plague? How much faith can you have in something
that science can’t explain?
As tensions build among the group the characters wrestle
with issues of belief, guilt and self-interest. With the party fractured, a
deadly balancing act develops between survival and heroism, in an increasingly
splatter-ridden game of cat-and-mouse through to a gore-tastic climax.
