I’ve been making a passable living lately shooting corporate videos, commercials and news footage, all of which require an enormous amount of effort to pull off successfully. I’ve also been moonlighting as a horror director, which takes enormous effort to keep myself from ruining takes with my excessive maniacal giggling.

The skill set required on commercial work seems diametrically opposed to the anarchic attitude essential to horror filmmaking, but the two styles aren’t a million miles removed from each other. Each is dependent on how effectively and quickly a closed-to-interpretation visual illusion can be communicated quickly and directly to the viewer, whether it’s “this is a shot of a typical day at this company,” or “that meathook just went into her back.” Which is why directing a commercial for FANGORIA didn’t seem as incongruous as you might expect. If anything, it felt like I introduced my parents to the crazy girl I love so much and then watched them hit it off like old friends.

The whole production team refers to the commercial as ZOMBIE’S DAY OUT, although the concept is probably closer to “Zombie’s Typical Day.” Shot over a couple half-days across several different locations in downtown Richmond, VA, the ad features the titular walking corpse watering his lawn, slaving at the office and getting stuck in commuter traffic, among other things. The concept came from actor Ben Hill, who plays the eponymous zombie. Ben’s a charming, handsome guy and we probably would have just given him the part since it was his idea and everybody likes him anyway, but in hindsight Ben is why the spot works.

At this point I think every horror fan has a zombie inside them lined up and ready to go when the occasion arises. We’ve all got our own walk, face and mental image that we picture while in character. Ben came in with all of that, but he was able to embellish his prepared zombie with minimal direction, handily shaping his performance to the tone of the commercial. While he was getting made up, I told Ben that I preferred my zombies to be “blank but mournful,” appearing convincingly undead but also pitifully cursed.

My zombie ideal is usually Bub from DAY OF THE DEAD, and Howard Sherman always illustrated for me that while most people can pull off a good zombie, a good actor makes a great zombie. Turns out Ben Hill makes a great zombie; he juts his jaw out, his eyes go dead and he shambles like the Tarman in RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, but somehow he also seems sweet and sad, a trace of Boris Karloff’s Monster somewhere in there. He also exerts the same control over his body language as a silent-film comedian; when the shoot was allowed brief use of the VCU gym, Ben’s improvised business on an increasingly fast treadmill had their entire staff laughing. He can turn the character on and off like a switch, and thanks to Johnny Leftwich’s makeup emphasizing the size and intensity of Ben’s eyes, I can accurately say that in all the footage I have, Ben only blinked once. It was when he got hit in the face with a rolled-up newspaper.

Johnny pulled double duty on the shoot, creating the makeup and co-producing with Fango’s Rebekah McKendry, and together they assembled a crew that could not have been easier or more fun to work with. We all had a lot of laughs on-set, but then if I looked through the viewfinder and started to mention an object I wanted removed from the background, it was gone before I even finished my sentence. When there was a problem or obstacle, a half-dozen minds immediately started working in tandem and solutions came in seconds. When we needed a teenaged actor to play the paperboy, makeup artist Shelley Illmensee had her 15-year-old son here in less than an hour, and in four setups he was a wrap. When we ran out of fake blood for one shot, Johnny grabbed a melted Cherry Slurpee and was able to produce the take we used. When the crew came across a flock of geese in the park, within two minutes we had a shot of Ben chasing them. Thanks to everybody’s enthusiasm and quick thinking, we walked away from those two production days with four times the amount of footage we could ever use.

That’s one of the hardest things about shooting ads—speed. Not necessarily moving fast behind the scenes, although that’s essential on any short shoot, but when your finished runtime is going to be less than a minute every single shot becomes a challenge. You have to make sure the action and objects in every moment are clear, interesting and fast enough that the viewer will get the idea instantly. If you’re shooting multiple setups you tend to overshoot, and when I realized in post that editing together all of our shots would result in a nearly four-minute ad, I had to make some decisions of what to drop. What ended up going were shots of the zombie exercising, sacrificing the shoot at the gym, as well as some alternates we shot as exteriors the next day. That’s the way it goes, but Ben shambling in a tracksuit and headband proved too funny to get shelved. Hence a second commercial spot is already on the way.

A couple of weeks after we wrapped, I caught a Honda TV ad with a similar concept and style to ZOMBIE’S DAY OUT. It was obviously produced on a budget that dwarfed ours, and the zombie makeup in it was just excellent, but that Honda spot still put me off the way many mainstream appropriations of horror do. I didn’t like that outside of some groaning, the zombie was acting like your average entitled yuppie jackass, i.e. the target market for that ad campaign. There was a cute gag with the ghoul losing his arms in a golf swing, but overall the commercial felt like market research choosing what’s trending hot and then applying that to a standard car commercial. If I had to guess, I’d say outside of the makeup department, there wasn’t a single horror fan on their shoot.

While ZOMBIE’S DAY OUT is guilty of the same use of iconic imagery for goofy fun, there’s more dignity to Ben’s workplace zombie (he’s more Peter than Lumbergh if that makes sense), and more importantly the punchline of our ad hopefully drives home a completely different point; as commonplace as some of our favorite horror iconography gets, at heart those images and characters still belong to us, the horror buffs. As the ad hopefully illustrates, hanging on to our imagination for the morbid, dark and twisted is sometimes all that gets us through the daily drudgery. Admittedly that digs pretty deep for what’s ultimately just a little commercial, but it’s always easier to sell a product that you care about passionately.

---

MOVIES/TV - Fearful Features