Zombies have feelings too, you know. But who knew? Aussie film-maker Zak Hilditch had an inkling.
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His new movie, We Bury The Dead, gives us a fresh, strangely mournful, strangely moving take on the undead rage monster trope: zombies with unfinished business and grief for what they have lost.
Set in a Tasmania rocked by a secret US military experiment that has wiped out the population of the island, We Bury The Dead has Star Wars: The Force Awakens star Daisy Ridley swapping her lightsaber for an axe as she volunteers for a body retrieval mission in the hopes of finding her husband alive at a remote wilderness resort.
Except, of course, some of the countless dead she's supposed to be hauling into mass graves are inexplicably "coming back online", as the shoot-first-ask-questions-later soldiers leading the clean-up describe it.
If Ridley's Ava finds her husband alive or if he is one of the waking corpses, what is she so dead set on asking or telling him?
Inspired by the emotions he felt as he unpacked his mother's Perth house after her death in 2017, Hilditch's initial script had no zombies, just grief-stricken people on a mission to find loved ones as they grapple with the psychological aftermath of a disaster.
"I never in a million years thought of making a zombie movie," the filmmaker says.
"But it adds a real threat, and also gave me a chance to explore this idea of unfinished business - the reason Ava is there - and harness the theme in a better way. It was a personal story and exploration of grief that I was undertaking. But making things more unexpected and more exciting - that's when people really started taking notice of the script. And then it got a life of its own."
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What made him decide that his undead would be more pitiful than predator?
"If you're going to do something with zombies, you better make sure it is something you haven't seen before.," he explains. "When our zombies first come back, they are quite docile and, as they start to realise that they're not the same and they never will be, they might lash out if they have unfinished business. I hadn't seen that in the rule book. This idea of their unfinished business was a thrilling, thematically interesting overlap with the situation of Ava."
With Brenton Thwaites adding endearing Aussie bloke humour as Ava's fellow volunteer and Mark Coles Smith deepening the derangement as a grieving soldier, We Bury The Dead has one standout zombie encounter that won't be described here to avoid spoiling an unsettling and yet weirdly poignant surprise that digs deep into grief and closure - even for the undead.
"That particular sequence is a lot of people's favourite part of the entire movie," Hilditch says. "It's quite the rug pull. By that point, people feel like they kind of know the rules of the game. But then that happens and it hits them in a way they don't see coming. I like movies that throw the kitchen sink at a genre and then turn it on its head, and that's exactly what we tried to do with this.
"We're trying to make a zombie movie for people that don't necessarily dig zombie movies. But, at the same time, we're hopefully offering hardcore zombie lovers enough to suggest a new kind of zombie movie where we're giving them some of the lore, some of the tropes they've become accustomed to, but we're doing a little bit more than they're expecting. It's been interesting to see the collision of those two audiences."
The challenge has been hooking in horror fans craving grisly scares without frightening off those who don't do zombie movies but might actually appreciate the deeper themes the film is exploring. How did the movie's trailers strike that balance?
"Oh, that is such a good question," Hilditch says. "I'm a writer and director. When it comes to trailers, that is a specific niche job and no wonder. [Me making the trailer] would be like getting a bricklayer to do your welding. My editor and I tried and we gave up because it was just so hard.
"Then Vertical, our US distributor, had an absolute gun deliver an amazing teaser I felt spoke to what the film really was. And when the final trailer came out, it blew people away. I might be too close to the trees, but knowing the film as I do, I can look at that trailer and it does offer exactly the movie I made.
"But it's a catch-22. Some have said they felt robbed of the balls-to-the-wall zombie experience. But I look back at that trailer, and there's a lot of emotion in it. Compressing a movie into a two-minute clip can warp your brain, I guess, and give you certain expectations.
"Some hardcore zombie lovers seem to feel gypped but it's also a movie other zombie lovers have been craving and it's unlocking the genre for new people. I've had people say 'I really didn't want to watch this', but they were dragged along by their husband and they have now come to be really moved, even to tears. That's all you can hope for as a filmmaker."
Asked if he's giving away the secret of the dreadful teeth-grinding sound made by his ungrateful undead, Hilditch laughs.
"Trying to make a big multiplex movie with no money, how are we going to stand out? The zombies have to have something unique going on. I thought about their growing agitation and what it'd sound like: teeth grinding. It worked perfectly in my brain and I peppered it through as much as possible as a motif."
His sound design team relished the creative challenge: "Above any other part of the film, they couldn't believe they were getting a chance to do that sound. They put a lot of work into it - the next closest thing to it on Earth is nails down a chalkboard. And it's been so great seeing people just squirm in their seats when they hear it".
So, the sound effect is staying a secret?
"You know what? I honestly don't even know what they did," he smiles. "They did a bunch of stuff and kept me out of the loop. I was blown away by it. Actually we had to peg it back just a little bit or people's brains might have exploded."
The film, while set in Tasmania, used a convincing body double for its locations: Albany in Western Australia. Principal photography was done there in just 25 days.
"I really wanted to shoot in Tassie but it just wasn't to be," Hilditch says. "I'm born in WA but I've never been to Albany. It was always a bridge too far - five hours south near the bottom of the continent. So, when we went there I couldn't believe what I was seeing ... and I realised we can do Tassie here. We ended up getting three shots in Tasmania, including two from a drone, but everything else was at Albany. It's been awesome showing it to people from Tas who don't know. Once they see the hotel in Devonport they just go 'Oh, yeah, they really must have come here'."
One last question: getting a movie star like Daisy Ridley obviously helps, but what do we need to do to get Aussies back to the cinema watching Australian films?
Hilditch: "Hopefully make more films like Together. Make films like Dangerous Animals, like We Bury The Dead. And that's just the horror genre.
"But genre films are a good start. We will see who turns out to watch We Bury The Dead in cinemas, but hopefully we get some Daisy Ridley fans and some zombie lovers and some people who have heard that this movie is not at all what you think.
"I guess genre films are the way to bring that mix of audiences into cinemas."
James Joyce
James Joyce is executive editor of ACM, the publisher of this masthead. Based in Canberra, he is a former editor of ACM's The Canberra Times and began his journalism career as a cadet reporter for his hometown paper, ACM's Newcastle Herald, where he spent two decades moonlighting as the masthead’s movie and TV critic while working his way up to the position of deputy editor.
