When you gather with your loved ones this week, be sure to give extra thanks for that turkey or soy-based equivalent on which you’re about to dine. Times are hard, but for most of us, we’re still able to eat. Nevertheless, we need to prepare for the even tougher times that inevitably lay ahead. As countless movies attest, desperate times call for desperate measures at the dinner table. Like cannibalism.
The circumstances under which “eat or be eaten” becomes the rule vary widely. Plenty of films have taken on this ancient taboo; in fact, a search for the tag “cannibal” on Spout.com yields eleven pages of results. For your holiday viewing pleasure, I’ve narrowed the list down to ten.
Most 12 year old kids are busy updating their MySpace pages or planning on what they’ll wear to school the next day, but not Emily Hagins. She decided to direct her own feature film about zombies entitled Pathogen after watching a screening of Undead, and Zombie Girl: The Movie is documentary that chronicles her effort from concept to the first screening. Emily’s a local gal, so this movie was a shoe-in for this year’s Fantastic Fest.
Filmmakers Aaron Marshall, Eric Mauck and Justin Johnson stumbled across Emily and her movie when they saw a local ad looking for people who wanted to be zombies in a movie, and when they found out how old Emily was, they decided to do a documentary about the film, which turned into 146 hours of footage that had to be broken down into a digestible size.
I don’t get to see a lot of shorts programs at festivals. So, when I went to the Independent Film Festival of Boston, I indulged in their delicious menu of shorts. One of the audience favorites was a surprising little piece from Australia. A zombie flick that–unlike most zombie movies–truly transcended its genre. In honor of our Presidential Zombie Photoshop Contest going on until May 25th, I ask you undead to dim the lights, put on your headphones and place your fingernails between your teeth.
Michelle Morgan and Shawn Roberts star in George Romero’s latest zombie romp, Diary of the Dead. The film follows a group of film students whose efforts to produce a zombie movie are thwarted by an actual undead apocalypse. They quickly turn the cameras on themselves, documenting their struggles to survive, uploading their videos to the internet whenever possible. As with many Romero films, the campy delights of exploding zombie heads are lovingly blended with social commentary, this time about the ineptitude of mainstream media compared to “bloggers and hackers” self-publishing their experiences. In this interview stars Michelle Morgan and Shawn Roberts talk about the mood on set, not knowing if their characters will undergo zombification, and their favorite zombie flicks.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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