Howard J. and Jonathan Ford, two horror fans with plenty of behind-the-camera experience, fulfilled their childhood dream of paying sincere tribute to the zombie movies of yesteryear with THE DEAD. Shot on life-threatening, never-before-filmed locations in Burkina Faso, West Africa and Ghana (including the Sahara Desert) on 35mm film, THE DEAD (opening in theaters this Friday, with a free NYC Fango screening tonight; go here for details) is the first flesheating road movie set against those spectacular vistas, where the Dark Continent becomes a dead zone.

Known in the United Kingdom as the new Ridley and Tony Scott, due to their similar backgrounds directing high-profile commercials, the Fords use the living-dead apocalypse as a social and political allegory for the difficult integration between Africa and the world’s leading economic nations, emphasizing the extreme poverty in many living on that continent. At the same time, it’s a heartfelt homage to the movies of George A. Romero and Lucio Fulci, with ghouls who walk the deserted lands slowly and groggily, according to the old rules.

The story follows American Air Force engineer Lt. Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman), sole survivor of the crash of the last evacuation flight out of wartorn Africa, and Sgt. Daniel Dembele (Prince David Osei), whose village has been torn apart by the reanimated dead and is now desperately searching for his son. The two, coming from very different cultures, have to reluctantly join forces to escape the zombie-infested region alive. The eight-week shoot, employing many actual natives, was plagued by many obstacles of its own, like malaria and the stealing of some cameras, but the filmmakers’ deep genre love shines through. The Fords spoke to Fango during the Sitges film festival.

FANGORIA: How did your love for the horror genre begin?

HOWARD J. FORD: When we were teenagers, we used to watch a lot of horror movies. George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD, Lucio Fulci’s ZOMBIE and Sam Raimi’s THE EVIL DEAD were instant favorites. They had an incredible impact on us; we watched DAWN in a little room above our local fish-and-chips shop, and I remember that unnerving feeling on the way home afterward. Every corner, every back alley, became a possible place where a zombie might loom out and tear at our flesh! Every person on the street was suddenly going to lurch and grab us. Terrifying, yet somehow intensely exciting. We grew up watching every horror film we could lay our hands on.

JONATHAN FORD: We were so hooked on the genre that my brother and I would walk miles almost every day just to stand outside the cinema to look at the poster for ZOMBIE. We were too young to get in to actually see it, so instead we would loiter there for hours, studying that image of the dead rising out of the ground and approaching New York. I became like an encyclopedia of horror movies, even collecting everything on the Video Nasty “banned list” that was causing a moral panic in the UK at the time. But there was something about zombies that got to our very core, and it never left us. It was around this time we started making short films on Super-8, using friends as actors and learning techniques as we went along. It was always our goal to make the ultimate zombie movie.

FANG: How did you get into moviemaking, and shooting THE DEAD?

HOWARD: When I was 12 and Jon was 14, we’d watched so many horror movies, and they’d had incredible impact on us. Even at that age, we were so impressed with their ability to inflict the emotion of fear on us, even though deep down, we know they were only films and couldn’t physically harm us in any way. It was suddenly obvious: We had to make a zombie film. As far as we were concerned, this was the only reason for picking up a camera! When we started out in the industry, that was our first intention, but we never had the opportunity. Over the last 20 years, we’ve made all these short films, two features and loads of commercials, but as successful as we became in the industry—with large corporations like Guinness and Unilever coming to us to make their adverts beautiful—we never got to satisfy our urge to make a horror movie. We never really had the proper resources behind us, and frankly, we didn’t want to add to the stacks of seemingly endless ripoff crap that had been churned out following the George Romero classics. Our movie would have to stand shoulder to shoulder with the classic zombie films we loved.

By now I was running a successful production company, but Jon had never stopped talking about making this zombie film. Then one day it just hit us that what we’d been doing was totally not us, and at that point we were just doing it for the money. We felt we had kind of sold out, which we had said we would never do. Jon then reminded me about the zombie movie we never got round to making, and the rest is history.

JONATHAN: I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, but I can recite the dialogue by heart from several of these zombie movies. I actually started making notes on the script for THE DEAD in 1980, almost as a backlash to watching too many crap zombie films that followed the classics. In a way, THE DEAD became the zombie movie we’d always wanted to see. Howard and I had done commercial after commercial for the past few years, for almost every kind of product you could think of, and finally were making a good living. Could we really risk all of that and go off and make the film we’d fantasized about as teenagers? Absolutely! Life is all about taking risks, even though when we started devising THE DEAD, we had little idea of how truly risky it was going to be.

FANG: Why did you decide to shoot it in Africa?

HOWARD: We had shot a great deal of commercial stuff in West Africa, and in driving between locations we saw these amazing landscapes and just thought, we’ve got to make something here. We wanted THE DEAD to look completely different from other zombie movies, and thus it developed into a road film set in Africa. The story had to be a journey for the audience, and rural West Africa was perfect for that. We wanted to make a beautiful horror movie, despite the horrific situations we place the characters in; there are still stunning vistas and spectacular scenery to be seen there, because the landscape doesn’t change. It seemed like most zombie films were set in Los Angeles, New York, London—very familiar locations you can see every day when you switch on your TV or go to the cinema.

So Africa was the catalyst, the hook—and of course, stories of zombies originated in the West African spiritual belief system of voodoo, which told of people being controlled as laborers by a powerful wizard, before being appropriated by George Romero and then the rest of the movie industry. Not only that, but we decided to take it even further and shoot the movie with a respect the zombie genre hasn’t seen for decades. We would shoot on 35mm film and treat the project with the care and detailing it deserved. Plus, the characters in zombie films were always holed up in some building somewhere, whereas we wanted to give audiences something fresh, and have our story unfold moment by moment in constantly changing locations. We wanted to take our audience on an epic journey across a lush continent very few people have visited or know much about. So, even if you don’t like horror movies, in THE DEAD you will see places never before seen in a film.

JONATHAN: We were looking for a stunning visual canvas in which to set our scenes, a place which could be as dangerous as the zombies themselves. We wanted beauty and horror on screen in the same frame, yin and yang. They’re landscapes like nowhere else in the world, really, so to use them just seemed a natural idea. The usual zombie flicks are often set in urban areas where there are plenty of places to hide, and there’s security behind concrete walls. One of the things that struck us first about these African villages where we were shooting was that security just wasn’t there; they were so open and unprotected, they’re not much more than mud huts, really, and anyone or anything can just walk in. Keeping the movie grounded in the reality of that location the entire time hopefully makes audiences feel like the events depicted could actually happen. If we went to a soundstage, it would have defeated the purpose of setting the story in Africa, and I don’t think we would have made a quality movie.

We also included real people in real villages, showing the suffering, the human consequences of a zombie outbreak, rather than just concentrating on straight action pieces. We wanted to ground the film in the real world as much as possible, so the emotional aspects would have as much power as possible. We wanted world cinema to meet the zombie genre in one innovative close encounter.

TO BE CONTINUED

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