The marketing power of the incredibly cheap independent film has hardly diminished as Hollywood eyes a $70 zombie movie that’s wowing Cannes:
It was by advertising for volunteer zombies on social networking site Facebook, borrowing make-up from Hollywood blockbusters and teaching himself how to produce special effects that thrifty director Price was able to make the film for less than the price of a zombie DVD box set.“The approach was to say to people, ‘OK guys, we don’t have any money, so bring your own equipment,’” the the 30 year-old director told CNN.
With help from a makeshift band of friends and volunteers, Price shot and edited the feature — which ingeniously spins the zombie genre on it’s head by telling the story entirely from the zombie’s perspective — over a period of 18 months while working nights part-time as a booker for a taxi company.
Online social networking was an invaluable tool in both generating buzz and cheaply sourcing the undead: “We went on Facebook and MySpace and said ‘Who wants to be a zombie?’” Price told CNN. “We managed to get 50 brilliantly made up zombies and stuff them into a living room.”
In keeping with Price’s beg and borrow approach, most of the zombie make-up in the make-up artists’ cases was inherited from other movies. “One of our make-up people came off ‘X-Men 3,’ so we were having the same latex that was put on Wolverine,” he told CNN.
Price says he came up with the idea to make a no-budget film because he realized that he and his friends would never be able to scrape together enough money to make even a low-budget film.
“A couple of friends were round a few years ago watching Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead,’ recalls Price. “And we were lamenting the fact that we could never make a zombie film — we wouldn’t be able to acquire a budget.”
“Then I just woke up before everyone else — I was probably a bit hungover — and I wondered if a zombie movie from a zombie’s perspective had been done before.”
The end result is “Colin,” a zombie film “with a heart,” Price says, shot using production values cribbed from endless re-watching of making-of featurettes and director’s commentaries from his personal DVD collection.