Remaking a local zombie movie

VERA MORET
Posted 8/21/12

PIKE COUNTY, PA — Two years ago, three young men decided they wanted to make a movie using the classic young-adult-stuck-in-remote-cabin kind of thing. The threat in the movie was very quickly …

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Remaking a local zombie movie

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PIKE COUNTY, PA — Two years ago, three young men decided they wanted to make a movie using the classic young-adult-stuck-in-remote-cabin kind of thing. The threat in the movie was very quickly established to be zombies. This movie was called “Dusk of the Dead.” As much as they enjoyed it, the three young men— Fernando Irizarry, Nathanaël King and Elias Johnson—decided that it wasn’t fitting with their original vision.

As they thought over this original work, King decided to remake the film. King said, “Four months ago we were talking about how we felt about ‘Dusk of the Dead.’ The missing pieces, the things we wished we had done better in the editing room, the parts that dragged on. After a year of filming the movie we put it together within weeks. We really didn’t have the time to put a lot of thought into the final cut.

“So, we went ahead and re-edited it. I suggested the project as a way to see how we could re-organize the scenes and take out the ones we didn’t like, but as Fernando and I spent more and more time with it we saw so many opportunities to totally shift the direction of the story and the overall tone of the film. After three months of thinking about the pacing, soundtrack, effects and narrative, we found we had a completely different film on our hands. We’re calling it ‘La Veglia.’”

The title is Italian for “wakefulness” and could either be applied to the zombies, who are, indeed, always awake, or to the constant state of wakefulness the characters must remain in order to survive.

King said, “‘Dusk of the Dead’ kind of went all over the place as far as the narrative goes, so we decided to center the narrative of ‘La Veglia’ around this cabin in the woods. The movie begins with our characters grappling with survival and dealing with both internal and external threats, and as it progresses our hero Bruce finds himself at this cabin where all this demonic stuff went down before the movie begins. He finds a satanic shrine, and not only does he have to deal with the living dead closing in on him but something far more sinister. This is where the opening narrative [which is four pages of exposition] would be linked to the rest of the film, to further illustrate the origins of these forces and how they are the source of the living dead.”

This explanation makes it clear how the pentagram found with a skull in one room was the center of an even more sinister force.

The film (a short at about 45 minutes) really revolves around the doomed love of our hero Bruce and his unnamed girlfriend. The motif of this love is a silver locket containing both their pictures that reflects their ongoing relationship and inevitable ending.

There was a time when some believed that zombies, being the living undead, were, in fact un-killable. But the zombie universe has changed since those days. King said, “Most zombie films show that the one thing that can neutralize a zombie for good is targeting the brain. Throughout our filming of ‘Dusk of the Dead’ we consistently strived to pay homage to the George Romero zombie model (primarily following the precedent set by ‘Dawn of the Dead’)—the zombie being a brain-dead corpse hungry for humans that can indeed be killed, but only with a sharp blow or gunshot to the head. You can see in ‘La Veglia’ that targeting the brain is the only real way to keep the living dead ‘dead’ for good (although this doesn’t stop Bruce from going nuts on them with a chainsaw). I hope that clears up concerns about the internal logic.”

It did, actually. And the film did stay true to its own universe.

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