Isegoria

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.

George Romero may be the King of Horror, Curzon notes, but one of his actors is the Prince of Ghor:

In today’s completely random note of trivia, it turns out that Scott Reiniger, a minor horror film actor best known for his role as the ill-fated police officer in the 1978 zombie cult film Dawn of the Dead (and who played a minor cameo role in the 2004 remake of the same name) is actually Afghan royalty!

Reiniger’s great, great, great grandfather, Josiah Harlan, was an American assisting several independent rulers of South Asia, and became the first American to set foot in Afghanistan on a punitive expedition against an Uzbek warlord. He set off with a completely modern army, and came into contact with Mohammad Reffee Beg, an ambitious prince of Ghor, located in the western part of today’s Afganistan. He and his retinue feasted for ten days with Harlan’s force, during which time they observed the remarkable discipline and organization of the modern army, while Harlan was amazed by the working feudal system and the gender equality.

At the end of Harlan’s visit, the two agreed that Harlan and his heirs would be the Prince of Ghor in perpetuity, in exchange for raising and training an army with the ultimate goal of solidifying and expanding Ghor’s power. (Harlan ended up leaving Afghanistan, enjoying a brief period of fame in the U.S., but then failed at several unique ventures and ended up working in San Francisco as a doctor, dying a forgotten man.)

Scott Reiniger is the current descendant of Harlan with claim to the title, but has stated that he considers the title a historical anecdote with no real world importance (and it seems unlikely that anyone in Kabul, or Ghor, would be ready to accept him as their sovereign).

Like many people, I’d heard that the children’s song Ring Around the Rosy was about the Plague:

Many have associated the poem with the Great Plague of London in 1665, or with earlier outbreaks of bubonic plague in England. Interpreters of the rhyme before World War II make no mention of this; by 1951, however, it seems to have become well established as an explanation for the form of the rhyme that had become standard in Britain. Peter and Iona Opie remark: ‘The invariable sneezing and falling down in modern English versions have given would-be origin finders the opportunity to say that the rhyme dates back to the Great Plague. A rosy rash, they allege, was a symptom of the plague, posies of herbs were carried as protection, sneezing was a final fatal symptom , and “all fall down” was exactly what happened.’ Another translation:Ring around the Rosie: people with the plague often had a bright rose-colored rash that people would see and make a large ring around them. A pocket full of posies: people without the plague often carried around posies, believing this would purify the air and protect them from getting ill. Ashes, Ashes: When people died, sometimes they would be burnt to ashes. Then those ashes would be put in a jar and buried. In this way, there was enough room in the graveyards for everyone. We all fall down: ‘falling down’ meant dying and many people did die.  Variations of the same theory allow it to be applied to the American version of the rhyme and to medieval plagues. In its various forms, the interpretation has entered into popular culture and has been used elsewhere to make oblique reference to the plague.

But folklore scholars regard the theory as baseless for several reasons:

1. the late appearance of the explanation means that it has no tradition, only the value of its content;
2. the symptoms described do not fit especially well with the Great Plague;
3. the great variety of forms make it unlikely that the modern form is the most ancient one, and the words on which the interpretation are based are not found in many of the earliest records of the rhyme (see above);
4. European and 19th century versions of the rhyme suggest that this ‘fall’ was not a literal falling down, but a curtsy or other form of bending movement that was common in other dramatic singing games.

Maybe our descendants will explain that it was about the Swine Flu of 2009.

I’ve been meaning to read my copy of Taras Bulba for a while; now Nikolai Gogol’s romantic nationalist tale has been made into a big-budget movie that is rekindling a cultural war between Russians and Ukranians:

A lush $20 million film adaptation of the book was rolled out at a jam-packed premiere in Moscow on April 1, complete with rows of faux Cossacks on horseback. Vladimir V. Bortko’s movie, financed in part by the Russian Ministry of Culture, is a work of sword-rattling patriotism that moved some viewers in Moscow to tears.

It is also a salvo in a culture war between Russia and Ukraine’s Western-leaning leadership. The film’s heroes are Ukrainian Cossacks, but they fight an enemy from the West and reserve their dying words for “the Orthodox Russian land.”

Mr. Bortko aimed to show that “there is no separate Ukraine,” as he put it in an interview, and that “the Russian people are one.” Filing out of the premiere, audience members said they hoped it would increase pro-Russian feeling in Ukraine.

The teaser trailer has me impressed. It is odd to see Polish winged hussars as bad guys though, and it’s odd to see so much — ahem — of the love interest: