Horror author John Skipp is deep into making his feature-filmmaking dream a reality with the offbeat zombie musical ROSE. He sent along a few new, exclusive photos that you can see below, along with the latest trailer.

“The first photo features, from left to right, Andrew Appleton, Sara Kuhns and Adrienne Pearson as Sal, Rose and Danny’s unfortunate friend,” Skipp tells Fango. “The second is of cult director Charles Pinion [RED SPIRIT LAKE, WE AWAIT] playing the Dead Mormon, and the third shows silver-haired director of photographer Barry Wood readying the shot while 1st AD Jay Shanahan claps the marker, I get ready to yell action and [lead actress] Chase McKenna waits to kill someone.”

The crowd-financed ROSE (go here for our last feature story) stars McKenna as Rose, a former mental patient who hosts an on-line/cable-access variety show to entertain the survivors of an undead apocalypse. Prior footage released emphasized the movie’s lighter side, but the trailer seen at the bottom of this page goes in the other direction. “We knew that we hadn’t brought the horror,” Skipp says, “and that people needed to see it to believe it. Thank God for Kickstarter and our supporters, whose contributions allowed us to shoot this new scene, bring the tension and fear that totally balance out the wackiness. We believe this trailer finally shows what ROSE is all about, in one compressed kaleidoscope of high-voltage crazy. It also reveals the range of our phenomenal star, Chase McKenna.”

Skipp is having a busy fall, with three new books out. DEMONS: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE DEVIL AND HIS MINIONS, FALLEN ANGELS, AND THE POSSESSED is the third anthology he has edited for Black Dog and Leventhal (following ZOMBIES: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE HUNGRY DEAD and SHAPESHIFTERS: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE BEAST WITHIN), boasting both classic and original stories by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Neil Gaiman, Kim Harrison and William Peter Blatty. “I feel like I’m building monuments,” he says of this Supernatural series of volumes, “with the best writers in the history of the field handing me the building blocks.”

The author has also launched the Fungasm Press imprint as part of Eraserhead Press’ Bizarro publishing line; the first two titles are HAUNT, Laura Lee Bahr’s debut novel (“a tripping-balls LA noir/bizarro hall of mirrors,” Skipp says) and Violet LeVoit’s short-story collection I AM GENGHIS CUM. “Fungasm books take place where mainstream and genre fiction collide with the totally f**king strange, right here on Earth,” Skipp explains. “And these are two of my favorite new writers, doing work that’s otherwise almost impossible to categorize. That’s exciting. That’s a Fungasm, for me.”

In addition, Skipp and John Spector’s 1987 splatterpunk classic THE CLEANUP has been issued as an e-book by Crossroad Press—the last of the duo’s novels to make the transition to the digital realm. THE LIGHT AT THE END, THE SCREAM, DEAD LINES and ANIMALS are also with Crossroad, while THE BRIDGE is available from Dorchester Press.

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