Unleashing the Undead

The Day Of The Undead takes place at Phoenix Arts Centre in Leicester, on October 27. We caught up with Ed Zombie - the man behind the event.

Jennie Kermode: Let's start by asking how you became involved in the whole zombie thing in the first place.

Ed: I'd been along to various murder mystery weekends and things like that and never actually been scared. My friend wanted me to sort out some entertainment on a campsite for a birthday, about five years ago, so I came up with the idea of a really bloody fancy dress zombie thing, which went frighteningly well. I'd always loved the zombie genre and I found myself getting more and more involved. I sorted out a website to promote our zombie activities and then film people started to get in touch to see if we could send information out about their productions to alert zombie fans in the country. It just spiralled from there really.

JK: So how did the idea for Day Of The Undead develop?

Ed: People have been asking for the past year or so whether we could put on the kind of films that fans want to see but that a normal cinema, realistically, wouldn't touch, so we put this together. I think and feel that it's quite a unique event. It's a very specialised genre within horror itself. I think zombies are basically the most relevant form of horror there is.

JK: Why do you think that?

Ed: Because, well, vampires and werewolves are awfully kind of turn of the century, Lon Chaney Jr., Universal Studios... I think that even films like 30 Days Of Night are not going to change the fact that it's a bit fantastic, you know, people wearing too much velvet and drinking blood, whereas I think the zombie genre provides a double whammy as far as horror is concerned. You've got the horror of being eaten by the living dead and the gory, graphic nature of the film, but you've also got its relevance to modern society. Foot and mouth, blue tongue disease, avian flu... Films like Dawn Of The Dead and 28 Days Later go into the whole viral problem and fear of disease. I think that makes it more relevant to modern living than a bunch of werewolves hiding somewhere in the Midlands.

JK: So was that a factor when you were choosing the films for this event? There are so many good zombie films out there, it must have been difficult to make your selection.

Peter Jackson's Braindead offers a blast from the past

Ed: We wanted to show a variety of films and all of them are very significant in their own way. Versus is probably the most significant Asian zombie film that's ever been released and Day Of The Dead I personally feel is the best zombie film Romero did. He was offered a lot more money to make a watered down version, by one of the big studios, and he turned it down in favour of doing something as dark and gory. Braindead by Peter Jackson is, I think, a lost treasure. Now that he's done the Lord Of The Rings films hopefully people will be quite shocked about what he came up with when he was developing. As for The Zombie Diaries and Dead Meat, they're probably the most relevant European films for a while. Dead Meat is an insane film, but the Irish Film Foundation actually turned around and said they didn't want just to keep funding films like Angela's Ashes, which is why it got funding. It was good to hear that even people on the Irish film board accepted the need for change (and for zombies).

JK: What about the short films you're showing along with these. How did you find them and choose which ones to show?

Ed: We showed a few at Zombie Fest, the event we normally do during the summer, and we spent a lot of time trawling the internet getting hold of them and watching them. The first one we're showing at the Day Of The Undead is a Leicester one called Zombie Undead, which is an eight-minute advertiser for a feature film that's being made at the moment. It really is a quality short film - the music, the direction, everything. We're putting it on before Day Of The Dead because it's really dark. The last short, the one before Braindead, is one called Campus Of The Living Dead which was made for no budget whatsoever. It's one of those films that you watch and you know that its heart is in the right place. People who really like zombies decided they were going to make a film and a lack of money or sets or anything was not going to stop them. They've knocked together a five-minute frenetic film which shows you that if you've got some people and a camera you need to actually film things, and the more people who do that, the more likely we are to discover the next Romero or the next Fulci or whoever.

JK: Can you tell me about the small zombie film projects you've been involved in supporting?

Ed: Basically, when we started the Terror4Fun website, one film got in touch with us and asked us if we could inform people that this was going on, and they ended up getting another 10 extras.

There's a Lionsgate film in America - it's all to do with cursed beer, it's called Evil Keg - and the director actually got in touch and thanked us for our make-up tips. So essentially, what we do is short filmmakers get in touch with us when they want to do something zombie-based, and we stick it on the website and in our newsletter and that means that people can get involved. We know quite a few make-up artists and they've helped short films.

Some of the short filmmakers whose work we're showing at the festival are over the moon that their films are being shown on the big screen, but I wanted the film festival to be realistic rather than glamorous, because I think that although the feature films are all good and have had DVD and theatrical releases there's a hell of a lot of people making short films who are putting their heart and soul into it... One of the films we're showing, they apparently completely trashed the parents' garage making it, because there's a butchering scene in it and there's just blood absolutely everywhere, and it's these kinds of people who aren't getting any recognition for spending hours and hours and hours on these projects. I think it's a very specific genre but there are a lot of people who do care about it.

JK: Will there be opportunities at the event for people to find out more about getting involved in film making?

Day Of The Undead attendees will get sneak preview of Zombie Undead

Ed: Yes. There's the Leicester feature film and there's one being made south of Birmingham. They'll be at the event recruiting extras to be zombies, having a chat with people, taking details; and we'll also be encouraging people to join our mailing list. Every couple of months we send out details of films being made. If people just get an extra half a dozen zombies for their big end scene, so they have 12 rather than six, we think of that as a big success.

JK: Do you have any further events planned after this one?

Ed: We've got Zombie Fest 2008, and in February I'm doing a make-up demonstration at a trade fair up near Sheffield which is going back to my roots - it's murder mystery and medieval re-enactment. I'll be spending half an hour on stage encouraging people to get more bloody. If readers are interested in this sort of thing, they should get in touch.

JK: With so much going on, do you manage to fit in a day job?

Ed: I actually work for the NHS, and one day a week I'm a make-up artist for the NHS. I get to use my horror and my gore to train medical students in A&E procedures... With Terror 4Fun, when we support a film and we actually get to see it, watching the end result and hearing people say: "Bloody hell, that was good," gives us a lot of satisfaction. There are a lot of crap zombies out there, and if Terror4Fun's aim is one thing, it's just to raise the standard of zombies across the world.