or 'Why I put all my time, money and energy over the last 5 years into a very independant low-budget English comedy horror movie only to have 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead beat me to it.'
It was a cold blustry day about 5 years ago, when I was tottering around my local BLOCKBUSTER Video Store, realising that the all-to-recent horror boom had resurrected slasher horror (the scream trilogy et al.) , ghost horror (What Lies Beneath), Hammer horror (Dracula 2000) and even revelations devil horror (Stygmata and The End of Days - true the only thing horrific about the last one was Arnie's acting but I think you get my point) No one up until then had done my most beloved of the horror sub-genres - Zombie horror. Indeed there was even Ginger Snaps (werewolf horror) and Dog Soliders on the way and yet, at the time, they were leaving the legacy of the living dead well alone. By my humble calculations I could certainly not recall an English Zombie horror since Hammer's masterfull 'Plague of the Zombies' in 1966! (you can't really count 'The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue' brilliant though it is, because it's crew list reads like an Italian Mafia wedding list!) Having thought about this for a bit and being a lover of Zombie movies, in all their glory, and wanting to get started on writing my first feature length script; I decided to merge my love of typically English comedy with my love of horror and taking inspiration from my surroundings (A grotty little one horse heap west of London) I threw a bit of western into the mix too.
The first idea was terrible. To write a sort of unofficial prequel to the Evil Dead franchise, with the character of Ash coming to England to study at university. It lasted 4 pages before I headed in another direction. I changed the character to an Englishman from the country, George, studying for the first time in a town environment and making new friends along the way. All the elements that are now in the story, George, Sam, The field trip, the first Zombie shot and even the ending were in that orginal draft. I changed the Ash character into George's visiting half-brother and wrote a few scenes, like sketches, about possible Army involvement.
A brief word on how I wrote it - I had always found it tricky to start at the beginning and work through but being my first full length screenplay I knew little else and sat down to plough through the exposition and set up, normally the most boring part to write! All the while I knew what lay ahead in the story and had some good ideas and desperately wanted to get my teeth into the funnier more exciting scenes. With a background in writing sketches I decided - what the hell! - and just wrote a bunch of scenes, all the ones I wanted to write, but with my mind clearly focused on the arc of the storyline. I then took those sketches and filled in the bones of the plot and exposition around it. I now write all my stuff this way and I find it a suitable method and probably very common.
I now had a workable first draft. having read it and re-read it, I decided it needed tweaking and finding myself in new surroundings, I began working long hours in a local pub, I began to work that into the story.
