Question about my zombie film

[Roehm]

I didn't know where I should post this but I figured this is as good a place as any. Anyway I am currently working on an amateur zombie film but I have a question regarding it. I was planning on using shadows and stuff like that to leave a little more to the imagination and also to aid my lack of budget. So my question is do you think doing that will lead to a bad Z movie. I am going to fit as much gore as I can with the allowed budget but I was going to try and add some suspense to it. Just want your opinions. Thanks

[MaxVeers]

I'm currently working on one, as well. Here's my humble opinion:

1. Get a decent camera guy. If you're unsure of what to do ARTISTICALLY, get an artist to guide your way. Most college-age artists are quite aware of what is trite and what will come out corny as hell, especially if they're going to school for any form of art (my school is a liberal arts school, half the campus atleast, and I know well that all of my friends complain about how picky the teachers are about reusing overdone ideas and things that are just generally laughable or hokey).

2. Using gore sparingly. Excessive amounts of gore, on any budget, doesn't make a good movie. Watch the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which, despite it's following and overall image, has a suprising lack of blood and guts. Most of it is implied. THEN, watch the remake, or any number of new horror movies with abundant amounts of guts, bursting at the seams with blood and gore... They're just silly, for the most part. It's better to have a few good, MEMORABLE scenes or gore (such as in the original Dawn) than a large quantity of throwaway horror shots.

3. Watch some classic horror films, black and white especially... Not just zombie flicks. I'm not suggesting you rip anyone off or do anything of distasteful practice, at all. I'm just suggesting that you watch older films, some classics, to see how they utilized their low budget and the rating systems of old to their advantage, instead of just copping out because they couldn't show heads exploding and brains splattering the wall.

4. ACTORS. Make sure your actors can act. They don't have to be incredible, but... Especially with girls, it's easy to get a good reaction for a horror film out of them if you make them truely scared. If you're shooting in a creepy location, don't take them there to familiarize them with it at first. Tell them stories and urban legends about it before arriving. A good example of this is the movie Death Tunnel... It's an aweful film, but you can tell the main actresses are truely scared to be there. Why? It's shot on location in the old Louiseville TB hospital, supposedly one of the most haunted places in the US. The camera and sound guys caught enough "ghostly images" and strange, unexplained sounds that they didn't have to make much of it up. The film was a flop, but still... That's a terrifying way to put your actors into character.

[BarnabusBlackoak]

No Shaky Cam !

[detpat]

if part of you movie deals with the military or cops, please get a cnsultant that has some knowledge, or experience of the subject. nothing ruins a film like mil or le characters that obviously don't know what they are doing. just putting guys in camo uniforms or cop suits doesn't get it, and people WILL know the difference.
mpi

[Morbidfilm]

"2. Using gore sparingly. Excessive amounts of gore, on any budget, doesn't make a good movie. Watch the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which, despite it's following and overall image, has a suprising lack of blood and guts. Most of it is implied. THEN, watch the remake, or any number of new horror movies with abundant amounts of guts, bursting at the seams with blood and gore... They're just silly, for the most part. It's better to have a few good, MEMORABLE scenes or gore (such as in the original Dawn) than a large quantity of throwaway horror shots."

From my experience I have to disagree with this statement. Granted you should make sure you have a good story to tell first, but it appears many zombie fans like a lot of gore from their zombies. I have a folder in my inbox full of "Thank you"'s from people thanking us for going all out with the gore in our zombie movie. The response has been amazing.
If you watch the first 15mins of Romero's Dawn of the Dead, there is alot of gore in the apartment building scene. It's non stop gore.
If someone doesn't want to use alot of gore in their movie, thats perfectly fine. They should have their own vision. But MaxVeers...to say extremely gory movies are silly is just your opinion, and in my companies case, your opinion is in the minority.

[MaxVeers]

"2. Using gore sparingly. Excessive amounts of gore, on any budget, doesn't make a good movie. Watch the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which, despite it's following and overall image, has a suprising lack of blood and guts. Most of it is implied. THEN, watch the remake, or any number of new horror movies with abundant amounts of guts, bursting at the seams with blood and gore... They're just silly, for the most part. It's better to have a few good, MEMORABLE scenes or gore (such as in the original Dawn) than a large quantity of throwaway horror shots."

From my experience I have to disagree with this statement. Granted you should make sure you have a good story to tell first, but it appears many zombie fans like a lot of gore from their zombies. I have a folder in my inbox full of "Thank you"'s from people thanking us for going all out with the gore in our zombie movie. The response has been amazing.
If you watch the first 15mins of Romero's Dawn of the Dead, there is alot of gore in the apartment building scene. It's non stop gore.
If someone doesn't want to use alot of gore in their movie, thats perfectly fine. They should have their own vision. But MaxVeers...to say extremely gory movies are silly is just your opinion, and in my companies case, your opinion is in the minority.


"Granted you should make sure you have a good story to tell first, but it appears many zombie fans like a lot of gore from their zombies."

That's my point. Many modern horror films, especially those on a budget, forego storytelling for shock value and effects. Even films outside of the horror genre are especially fond of this method in recent years (for example, compare the original Star Wars trilogy to the new one... Convincing acting and classic storytelling is ignored in exchange for grande special effects and incredible amounts of CGI). While effects will hold a viewer's immediate attention and keep them watching long enough to get them to the next scene, it often doesn't make for much replay value. Horror films are, of course, remembered, atleast as far as individual scenes go, for their scenes or gore and their special effects. It just adds to and increases the terror overall (Bravo's 100 Scariest Moments tells this pretty plainly). But from my perspective, great horror films are remembered for the entire events surrounding the gore and special effects (the tense scene where Peter must kill Roger in Dawn '78, the basement scene in which the restrained ghouls are executed, the death of Captain Rhodes in Day, Karen killing her mother in Night). It's the IDEA of the situation itself, and the thoughts provoked THROUGH the effects, that are scariest of all. Scenes of plain gore with little reasoning or thought-provocation behind them will never compare (the eye scene in Zombi 2, the countless random zombie "splats" in Dawn 04, the flying zombie head in Zombi 3). Again, this is just my opinion, and I know I've been on opposition with a few people here over thoughts like this, because I completely understand that some people don't need mental horror to be satisfied by a horror flick. Horror junkies will always be enthused by blood and guts and exploding heads, it's just plain fun. But I think that subtle violence and gore will always win for me, and many people I know and am working with in our films, because it puts emphasis on the proper moments. To have constant shock and gore will obviously enthuse many a horror fan, but the general public will find it of little interest. This explains why these new movies that attempt to push the boundry on shock, movies like the Saw and Hostel series, are of much more interest to horror fans that your average viewer, and films with a series of climactic scenes and mellowed moments, bringing the viewer on more of a cinematic rollercoaster, will shock the general viewing public more often (my example of this would be Seven, which the afformentioned shock/torture films can't hold a candle to, in my opinion).

Look at real, classic horror films. While I realise rating systems were quite different in those days, and films HAD to be more subtle with their gore, I think the gore of B-horror in today's flicks is incomparible to the blood and guts of old. A perfect example of this is Psycho. Everyone knows the shot, whether they've seen the film in it's entirity or not. Due to ratings systems are regulations, it HAD to be shot in a less gorey way, and the director used the opportunity to IMPLY gore moreso than show it. A girl showering, cut to a knife, cut to her screaming, cut to chocolate syrup in the shower drain, back to the girl, then the knife again... and the result was terrifying. Many of the shots in Night are very similar, such as Karen's murdering of her parents, and the death of Barbara. They COULD have shown her being ripped to shreds... but I like that they didn't. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, well being well-reknown for a bloody, guts-filled flick... really isn't. The blood is minimal, and it's almost... Well, tasteful... atleast as much so as possible for a film about a guy who wears people's skin as a mask. Current horror films just don't seem to utilize this enough. While many here would probably disagree, a recent film that I think used this to proper effect was The Ring (forget the second one... you kinda have to pretend it never happened to hold any respect for the original). Shots were quick and pointed, with effective sound design carrying over INTO the following scenes, even after the gore had ended. That little girl was TERRIFYING... Until the very end. Once you saw her face and there was a consistant, constant shot of her, despite the effects being extremely well-done... It lost some of it's fright factor. I think subtlety is an art that should be well-practiced in independent films.

That said, I don't think ALL gorey films are silly, in the slightest. The Dawn remake was excellent for a current film (despite hardly being a "remake" at all). I'm just not a fan of the direction of many current horror films and remakes of classics. Remakes of The Omen and Texas Chainsaw Massacre just seemed to miss the mark their original forms hit dead-on. Films like the Saw series and Hostel, to me, just feel like non-pointed snuff films. Some sillys that are intentionally silly (Evil Dead 2, Dead Alive) have great, practical special effects, but their outcome is still as such.

My main point is that budget films should be approached with subtlety in mind. It's easy to go into a project expecting to produce grande scenes of relentless violence and gut-wrenching gore... But several factors weigh heavily against the final product. Acting is an important part, no matter how good the special effects are. A perfect example of this, as I mentioned before, is the new Star Wars films (I apologize, I'm a nerd). While they did hire excellent actors, they had nothing to INTERACT with, because everything was CGI. Sitting on a green desk, surrounded by green boards, talking to a green mannequin is not the best enviroment to expect and actor to reproduce the effect of sitting on a space shit, surrounded by electronics and blinding light panels with a vast window opening up to expanses of stars and talking to some strange, alien sentient. Why? Because THEY don't believe it, and in turn, the viewer won't, either. Another factor is budget, and in the case of a new filmmaker, experience. It's great to want to show a man being shot several times in the chest, in the middle of an empty field, and not falling down, but finally being ended by a shot to the head that blows chunks clean out fot he back of him. How do you expect to execute that, though? I'm definitely not saying don't dream. I wouldn't even think of it. If you didn't take the time to dream and imagine, nothing new would ever come of the world. I'm just suggesting, once you've got some great ideas you really believe in, make sure they're possible... And if they aren't, try to figure out how to make them possible! And lastly, is story. Modern horror, and film in general, has a tendancy to believe it can survive by being lax on the character developement, plot line, and believability if the effects are great and eye-catching. This just isn't the truth. Yes, with horror films, there will always be people who will seek out your film to feed their need for blood and guts and, in this case, walking corpses. That doesn't mean, however, that your average viewer will be able to sit through the whole thing (for example, my girlfriend refuses to watch Dead Alive, because she saw it once and thought it was mind-numbing). It all depends on who you want to reach out to, I guess. But even if you're making a horror film, a sci-fi film, a drama film, no matter what, there's always a way to make it loveable for an audience.

[Propaganda13]

I didn't know where I should post this but I figured this is as good a place as any. Anyway I am currently working on an amateur zombie film but I have a question regarding it. I was planning on using shadows and stuff like that to leave a little more to the imagination and also to aid my lack of budget. So my question is do you think doing that will lead to a bad Z movie. I am going to fit as much gore as I can with the allowed budget but I was going to try and add some suspense to it. Just want your opinions. Thanks

Great idea. Seriously. Sometimes movies rely on CGI and FX too much. I felt one of our best shots was a zombie in the shadows. The zombie actually had no makeup on because you could only see their outline. It left a lot more to the imagination that a super lit shot would have.

[Roehm]

I can't believe that my little thread getting some attention. But since i have a very limited budget I will get a few blood or gore shot but there will not be a whole lot. There will be a lot of shadow play and stuff like that. I don't know I hope people will like the story I am trying to make it believable but I just hope its not boring. Not like some horror movies that people do stuff really stupid for no good reason. There are only a few main characters and the movie will only be about 30-60 minutes long so I need to keep a good flow, have some character building and horror but I need to keep the suspense and excitement so it doesn't get slow somewhere in the middle.

Thanks

[Propaganda13]

Ahh, the stupid stuff. While I hate it, it can actually be realistic. People are panicked and in shock. You never really know what people will do in these situations. In real life, a woman shot her husband in the head while he was sleeping. Later, he got up, kissed his wife, and went to work. It wasn't until he went to the emergency room for an extreme headache that they found out he was shot. Put that in a movie and you'd be like what the ???

I read http://www.newsoftheweird.com/ for real life stuff like that. This week was boring so check out the past weeks instead.

[The Phantom]

Basically, Max Veers told you everything...Overuse of gore can ruin the movie..Make it subtle, but scary..

[Roehm]

Yeah Maxveers has been a great help I have been in contact with him for a while now and he has been giving me some pointers. There is one scene in particular that I really want to do right and I hope you guys will enjoy when the movie is done. I will show some gore but I like to leave most of it up to your imagination.

Ohh and on a side note I just finished the outline of my script and it ended up being really really long just because I'm kinda anal about that sort of thing. Also I have my location secured and a few actor commitments although none are for the main characters just zombies and dead peoples :)

I will keep post updates as soon as I get them

[Twistedlink]

Ya i need some help too... I was just making this script and like it takes place on some main roads.. should i like tell the people that live on that road that i am making a movie or should i just let it be ... also i was wondering if i should get people to guard the perimiter like say cars are coming and they would flag them down and tell them that a movie is being made... Btw im on a tight budget (no more then $200) so idk ... Thanks