Art director and editor Rocky Calsetta couldn't have known his little idea about a zombie-themed swimsuit calendar would make such waves, not to mention international headlines, but his YEAR OF THE DEAD: SWIMSUIT EDITION has stirred more than just the prurient imaginations of gorehounds the world over. FANGORIA has an exclusive peek at the calender, plus production stills and unpublished bikini zombies for your eyes only!

Shot between March and August of 2011, YEAR OF THE DEAD: SWIMSUIT EDITION was certainly not your average poolside cheesecake photo production. What began for Calsetta as a fleeting idea while driving home from work one day would evolve into near film production magnitude, seeing him enlist an army of ten make-up fx artists, eighteen models, four photographers, five hair stylists, and buckets of practical effects grue, all in effort to create what is billed as, "a 12 month calendar featuring the hottest girls to ever crawl out of the grave and into your daily routine!" 

 

Calendar producer and make-up contributor Josh Esan shares, "We all love horror movies and zombie stuff, and when Rocky started getting people involved, it just grew." The undead effects are almost entirely hand-crafted and done in-camera, an intentional move on the part of those involved, but the realism of the resulting tantalizing flesh eaters managed to arouse something else in the locals around the small town where the calendar was shot.

"We were doing the April shoot," recalls Esan, "with the girl laying on the ground with her spine hanging out. We were in our town, Enfield, Connecticut, in a public street and someone called the police on us. We had a couple people covered in blood, and that girl with her spine hanging out. The police came and didn’t do much because it was a public street, so all they could do was ask us to move, which we did."

 

Of the delay, Esan admits, "At the time we were pretty angry, but in retrospect we realize it really did look like a homicide or something." 

Out of that concerned citizen's call would grow a most welcome and unexpected side benefit. Esan fondly elaborates, "Our local paper picked up on it and wrote this headline saying, 'Enfield Police Called On Bikini Clad Zombies,' or something like that. It was a ridiculous headline, and that week we made international news. We went viral for a couple of weeks. We made the Daily Mirror in the UK, a Russian newspaper, Fox News from Boston came down and interviewed us. We jumped up 300 people on Facebook in the span of two days. The whole time we were at our day jobs trying to answer phone calls from reporters and deal with it."

Riding the wave of world-wide attention, the YEAR OF THE DEAD crew are proud to finally present their controversial, rotting, horribly sexy first offering in THE SWIMSUIT EDITION. So what comes after dressing hungry corpses down to bikinis and thongs? Lingerie, of course! Keep your lazy, twitching eye open in fall of 2012 for their follow-up YEAR OF THE DEAD: LINGERIE EDITION.

Below you'll find FANGORIA EXCLUSIVE production stills and unpublished shots from the calendar shoot. Follow the links at the end of the article to pick up some swimming dead for yourself!

FANGO EXCLUSIVE PRODUCTION STILLS

 

 

FANGO EXCLUSIVE UNPUBLISHED SHOTS

 

 

Stuff grandpa's stocking with grimacing glee or replace the Garfield calendar in your cubicle by heading over to the YEAR OF THE DEAD website to order a copy of THE SWIMSUIT EDITION, or find them on Facebook. 

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