“Zerospan,” the horror-flavored music video from Richard Christy’s group Charred Walls of the Damned, recently debuted on-line, and Fango was on the set to check out the shoot. Read on for comments by Howard Stern cohort Christy and his team, plus exclusive pics.

Christy explains the inspiration behind the video, which you can watch at the bottom of this page: “I live in New York City, and when you walk around there now, most people aren’t even looking up when they’re on the street. They’re on their cell phones, they’re busy with all this multimedia. And I’m guilty of it as well; I find myself stepping in dog crap cause I’m not paying attention when I’m texting somebody [laughs]. The lyrics are basically about how today, people aren’t really living in reality most of the time. They’re in this kind of on-line world, even when they’re out in society.

“So I wrote the song about a person [played by Bryan Haeffele] who gets so consumed with technology and being on-line all the time that he loses track of the real world and gets sucked into this kind of fantasy realm that starts twisting his mind and making him see really scary things. And for the video, I wanted to do something that was almost like a five-minute horror film.”

To that end, Christy—who also appears in the clip as the bio-mechanoid mutant seen in the top and bottom pics—recruited filmmakers Sean McEwen (pictured above), who had previously cast Christy in his feature ALBINO FARM, and Mike Schiff (pictured below with McEwen and Christy), and special makeup artists Brian Spears and Peter Gerner to bring his vision to life. Schiff and the FX duo previously collaborated with Christy on the latter’s HOLIDAY HORROR FEST for REELZCHANNEL (see story here), and Schiff recalls, “Once Richard put his first album together for Charred Walls, he asked me if I could work on a video for him. We shot that and it turned out great, so that led to this next one. Every experience has been a lot of fun. We’re good friends now, and we really enjoy putting our thoughts together and coming up with cool stuff for these videos.”

“This is a collective effort, where everyone rolls up their sleeves and we all jump in together,” McEwen says. “It’s a no-budget experience, but we’ve got a lot of people who have been kind enough to share their talent and resources to enhance the overall dynamic, and that’s been a wonderful experience. So while we have less to work with, the spirit is amazing. We’re all big fans of Richard’s, and the band and this song in particular, so we just wanted to support that and make something really cool.”

The urban theme of “Zerospan” is a 180-degree turn from the rural shocks of ALBINO FARM (in which Christy played a threatening preacher), and McEwen says that with the video, he wanted “to explore a different kind of subtext. As a filmmaker, I find it quite interesting to create a character out of the environment. One of the things we’re trying to create here is the sense of the city having a real presence; it has definitely affected our protagonist, and defined him and refined him, and put him in this enclosed world. That’s something we definitely wanted to capture.”

The set Fango visits has been set up in the basement of Spears’ home, which has been turned into a bizarre video lair with multiple monitors festooning the walls, where the protagonist undergoes his bizarre transformation. “It’s a little Cronenberg-influenced,” Spears (pictured above making up Haeffele, and below with Christy and Gerner) says of the prosthetics work. “We reference a little VIDEODROME, a little bit of THE FLY. It’s a guy who has been taken over by technology, so we’re trying to suggest an infection from the inside out. By the end of it, he’ll be somewhat—how would you say it? Mechanically infused, like technology has taken over his insides.”

Like Schiff, Spears and Gerner (whose credits include I SELL THE DEAD, STAKE LAND and numerous other East Coast horror films) are enjoying the reunion with Christy. “Richard’s a great guy,” Spears says, “and we have a lot of fun with him. We talk horror, we talk movies, music. We’re fans of his, so it’s pretty cool.”

“The only thing that sucks is we can’t play THE HOWARD STERN SHOW while he’s here,” Gerner adds. “That’s all we listen to, so it sucks we can’t do that while he’s here.”

“Yeah, it kind of breaks that fourth wall,” Spears continues. “It’s a little weird when the guy you’re listening to is in the next room.”

For his part, Christy is excited to be taking part again in a genre he loves. “I’m a massive horror fan, and I’m always reading FANGORIA and checking out the new horror films. I’m psyched to be a small part of the horror world now, and to be here shooting at Brian’s house on a Saturday. This is like playtime for me.”

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