Zombie culture has taken over America, from the new wave of films to countless books to undead proms, pub crawls and even marathons. It has also begun a hostile takeover of the Internet, with social media groups and homemade viral videos spreading through YouTube like a ghoulish plague. The latest and probably funniest of these is #ZOMBIES: FOLLOWERS OF THE DEAD, a mockumentary-style short about the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse and how it has affected Twitter.

Unveiled to the world by Pixels Per Second, which also created MARIO BROS. INDIE FILM TRAILER, #ZOMBIES comically relates how Twitter has helped post-zombie-takeover survivors find food and shelter, learn effective ways to fight the flesheaters, meet up with other survivors and even get more Twitter followers. Director Joe Nicolosi started the project with an interest in social media: “I've always been interested in Twitter as a source of news,” he tells Fango. “Whenever some big breaking story is happening, I always go right to Twitter to see what people are saying and reporting about it. On the one hand, Twitter is far faster than any other source; stories get updated every minute and eyewitness accounts are retweeted instantly. The bad side is that the information is oftentimes horribly inaccurate. In the same page of tweets, you’ll have four of five conflicting reports on what’s going on.” 

In particular, he draws attention to Twitter phenomena like hashtags; #zombies will get you more followers whether you are posting reliable information or not. The veracity of blogging and social media has been a popular topic in recent years, but Nicolosi adds a comedic/horrific twist. “I love zombies,” he says. “I really enjoy the world that SHAUN OF THE DEAD left us with when it ended, and I sort of see this taking place in that canon. Zombies were here, we fought them back, now we’re talking about what happened and what went wrong.” 

#ZOMBIES: FOLLOWERS OF THE DEAD is essentially a series of interviews with various survivors who celebrate their Twitter accounts, relate methods they have learned on-line to combat zombies and discuss whether or not an iPhone is a necessary tool to battle the undead. These clips are quick, funny and, according to Nicolosi, mostly improvised. “Early on, I decided to try something I hadn’t done before, which was to not use a script,” he reveals. “I cast some of my favorite local comedy improvisers and basically just interviewed them each for an hour on camera. I had an idea of the subjects I wanted each person to chime in on, but that was about it. 

“I ended up with a ton of footage, like 20 hours or so,” Nicolosi continues. “Whittling it down to a digestible size took a lot of hard work. A lot of really funny stuff got cut, but I didn’t want a 20-minute YouTube video. There was a section about all the non-zombie humans who were killed because they looked like zombies when they were playing with their iPhones that got cut. There was a section about frat boys tweeting that alcohol made them immune to zombie bites that got cut. There was a section about Obama nationalizing Twitter that got cut. Finally it was down to a good length and I went out and shot some B-roll—all the YouTube videos and other exterior shots.”

#ZOMBIES spent a good chunk of time in development/production, and seems like it would be well-suited for a series of episodic shorts given all the extra material Nicolosi accrued. “This has been a project that I’ve been working on-and-off for the last two years, actually,” he says. “I would shoot a few interviews, make a new cut and then get distracted by something else. I would then get back into it, shoot a few more interviews and…repeat. It has definitely been intended as an Internet short all along. I also wanted it to feel like you’re seeing all these perspectives that are spread out throughout the country. We mainly shot in Austin, but two of the interviews I shot in New York City with some improviser friends there.”  

Check out this funny, horror-friendly take on disaster and social media below, and keep an eye out for more shorts from Nicolosi and Pixels Per Second on their YouTube channel. And don’t forget: Being the mayor on Foursquare doesn’t make you in charge of the survival shelter.

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