It’s that time of year again, when the horror fans gleefully attempt to out-gore each other with impunity and all the theme bars stock up on fake cobwebs and witches hats, and homes across the world welcome back the smell of slowly-rotting, slightly scorched ghoulishly carved pumpkins : it’s (nearly) Hallowe’en!
My mate Ryan Haysom (left, painting a severed hand with home-made blood) loves his gore, and last week signed up for a competition to produce a 3 minute zombie film in 48 hours over the weekend. Unfortunately rain stopped play on Saturday so he bumped everything to Sunday. Given that an edited film had to be in by Monday morning it was going to be impossible to shoot and edit and submit in less than 24 hours but hey, when you’ve got over a dozen zombies turning up and a couple of really nice locations already sorted (and ONE MILLION POUNDS in insurance cover arranged at the insistence of one location owner), you don’t just give up, so off I went on Sunday to document a very fast, dirty and fun shoot in Highgate.
The film is currently called Last Days and follows 3 survivors of a zombie outbreak as they struggle to stay alive – Mark Vincent (who was introduced to me as the title role of Ryan’s first short, the disturbing and impressive LV16), Scarlett Marshall and Sean Turner (who also appeared in Ryan’s second and third shorts, Feral and Fragments, both of which I shot stills for). As the film starts they’ve been chased to a tunnel on a footpath through the woods near Highgate station, and are pursued to an abandoned school where the film reaches its conclusion.
By the way, the head that gets so brutally severed from it’s zombified owner probably deserves it’s own IMDB page – it was originally created for Tristan Versluis‘s short Pixel and has featured in several films now as Tris’s mates keep borrowing it from him! I’ve got another shot of it on my photoblog.
While we were shooting the above, all the rest of the zombies turned up and were being made up at the entrance to the woods. It’s a very stylised zombie ‘look’ but one thing there was no shortage of was blood, apparently composed of golden syrup and red food colouring – and it was everywhere. I was wise to wear old jeans!
Also, it being a Sunday, there were a lot of bemused and amused families, couples and cyclists passing by, including one little girl of about five on her bike, just ahead of her parents, who stopped dead in her tracks, mouth agape, eyes wide in wonder as a couple of dozen undead shuffled past on their way to the next location. And yes, that is a Forensic Zombie!
The key location Ryan secured was a disused primary school somewhere between Highgate and Archway. Although we didn’t have access to the inside, it had enough variety to make for some excellent chase scene moments and gave the zombies plenty of space to stretch their legs and mill around in that aimless way zombies tend to while our heroes take refuge and plan their next move.
Finally, it all kicks off much as you might have been hoping, which meant copious amounts of fake blood being painted onto everyone’s faces and poured into mouths ready to be sprayed, dripped and drooled as teeth, claws and even sharpened wooden stakes are bared. As you can see they were shooting on a Panasonic P2 camera. I’m not sure my photos truly capture the sort of frenetic pace Ryan will create from the footage in the edit, but the diminutive camera really allowed for a fast and easy shoot, with no film to worry about and no problem getting right into the thick of the action.
So, that was my Sunday! I can’t think of a better way to spend a Sunday than running around a forest with your mates being chased by a mob of the undead – can you?
Cheers for reading!
