Two Zombie Short Films For Your Post-Halloween Hangover
This article is more than 2 years old
Zombie fans, is The Walking Dead TV show, comic, and video game not giving you enough zombies? Libraries of undead novels and anthologies not plentiful enough? What about the hundreds of zombie films out on DVD or playing on every other cable station? Well, here are two independently-produced short films to give your brains something to do besides look appetizing. I hate Mondays!
First up is a fast-paced mall massacre that’s short on time and long on violence. Filmmaker Devin Graham, in cooperation with WISH, created this homage to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, presenting it in one single take, as the camera creeps around our central humans as they walk through a mall, blasting holes in all the rotting flesh they pass. It looks like a serious video game adaptation of the film, whereas Dead Rising had too much dark humor going on. Watch it below.
The second film, 2 Hours, is quite longer and is much more involved with telling a story. Filmed by a skeleton crew of three multitasking members: Michael Ballif, director; Josh Merrill, actor/writer, and Allen Bradford, production design. The 26-minute short tells the meandering tale of a survivor of a zombie apocalypse. It almost reads as a love story going on inside a lunatic’s brain, combined with som gore-tastic zombie kills. Check it out.
There are good examples of differing aesthetics of telling a zombie-killing story. The first uses darkness and smoke for atmosphere, and the second uses frenetic camerawork and lens filters to achieve its gritty look. As far as content, the dialogue-free one is nearly as poignant as the second, where awkwardly-read narration shoehorns hokey and predictable exposition to cover the scenes between the kill shots. The sound design was solid, so I wish they’d have just let the quiet seclusion do all the talking. Other than that, 2 Hours definitely deserves applause for what the small crew accomplished. Check out their IndieGoGo site here.
