LATER IN THE DAY, HAYLEY AND I SHOW MY TREATMENT TO FRANKLIN. He’s pretty enthusiastic. We have some preliminary talks, and a plan emerges: to dive into a speeded-up pre-production for Alastair & Abigail while principal photography winds down on No Chance in Hell. That’s the best use of time and resources. So that’s what happens.
Over the next week, Moldavia rises like Lazarus resurrected, all the various studio departments feeding off my vision for this film, which is still forming. I have lots and lots of meetings. I’m the director, so everything has to be approved by me. Hayley, Oren, and Franklin provide guidance, basically taking on the role of the film’s producers.
During this first week, the production team draws up a schedule and a budget, and they immediately start building all the necessary sets. I’m in awe of how the dark wonderland of Moldavia pieces itself together like some mysterious, well-oiled machine.
Oren wanted to be a screenwriter, so I make him one. My dad never wrote scripts for any of his films, but I want to work in a different way.
During the second week of pre-production, Hayley, Oren, and I squeeze in script meetings whenever we can. They also function as writing lessons for Oren. I task him with fleshing out individual scenes, dialogue and all, while I run off to have consultations with the costume department and makeup about how to zombify Hayley and me so it looks like our flesh is rotting.
Oren hands me individual scenes, and the production team begins to storyboard each one, guided by Jip. As the script gets developed, we all notice that grounded within my story, cauliflower-free, Oren’s writing gets better and better. He just needed direction, to rein himself in. I think that whole cauliflower debacle was mostly Oren self-destructing anyway, mourning our dad.
I tell Oren I’m more than happy to share screenwriting credit, since the sequel was originally his idea. Seeing him smile at that, realizing he isn’t purposeless here, is almost worth everything we went through. Almost.
Gavin brings me my meals at night, since I’m too busy to even make it down to the commissary. My bed looks like an overwhelmed aide-de-camp’s tent during a troubled expedition to the Amazon. There are design sketches and script pages, schedules, and articles I printed out (and am consuming as quickly as I can) about filmmaking and the movie business, scattered everywhere. I don’t have time to sleep.
I take a cup of tea off a saucer Gavin hands me and, without even looking at him, officially cast him as Ferdinand, Alastair and Abigail’s son.
“Um.” Gavin is hesitating again.
I explain to him, while studying Jip’s storyboard, that I’ll get the newer guys on other crews to take over his butlery duties while he films his scenes.
“But I’ve never acted before,” he says nervously.
I look up at him. “I hadn’t either when I made Zombie Children. Dude, you’re the only one who can play this role. You’re the right age, and you have the right temperament.” I give him a reassuring smile. “It’ll be okay. I promise.”
He nods quickly, his lips mashed together, and leaves the room.
I don’t tell him I see his continued hopefulness about his mom as kind of tragic, and that he has a naturally crestfallen quality that will be perfect for the role.
The next day, I cast the remaining roles (there aren’t many) with some of the available Spine Tinglers. I cast various other crew members (as my dad used to do) who are the right size and shape for certain roles to fill out the more epic scenes. They always grumble about this, but hey, that’s how the studio works.
Pre-production continues, and before I know it, it’s the third week in June already.
Principal photography officially begins tomorrow—about a month and a half before Cassidy is scheduled to visit the estate.
The night before I direct my first scene ever, I find Hayley in the Shakespeare garden. We both had the same idea—get a little air, look at some flowers. We’ve hardly seen each other lately. We both had makeup tests, and we still have our zombie makeup on. The newly fallen dusk casts everything in a spectral blue that makes the roses look black, and our artificially pallid faces especially ghoulish.
“Nervous?” she asks me.
I nod. “A little. But kind of excited too. This is crazy.” I bet no other incoming college freshman is spending his summer quite like this.
We kiss, but only lightly, because of all the makeup.
“I think it’ll be different this time,” I say, “getting inside Alastair’s head. I feel different.”
“Because you’re the one in charge now,” she says. “And you’re all grown up.”
What she really means is my dad isn’t here anymore, and I’m not a helpless kid.
“How are you?”
“Abigail is a larger role this time,” she says, tapping her teeth with her finger. “So I’m just hoping I nail it. But I think I understand her.” She smiles at me. “She has to take charge; make decisions quick, some really tough ones too. She’s very strong.”
“And good with her teeth,” I say, taking her hand.
It’s hilarious that I’m going back all those years to the end of the first movie . . . giving Alastair and Abigail a future . . . almost like I’m hoping for one for us.
Hayley and I spend the night together, running lines. It’s been a little while since she’s slept beside me. Although I’ve been crazy busy, I was secretly really missing her.
Once we start filming, I’m pretty nervous at first. The first two days are shaky. But I hit my stride quickly. I just need to make fast and firm choices about the story I want to tell. Once I figure that out, it turns out directing movies is a blast.
The first scene is totally badass: Alastair and Abigail, twenty years after the conclusion of Zombie Children, attacking the camera in an extreme close-up (filmed with a 24 mm wide-angle lens) of our rotted tongues and moldy teeth.
So much is implied from that one shot. First, we obviously didn’t kill each other. Second, Alastair turned Abigail into a zombie. Third, we’re really hungry. And last, although twenty years have passed since we last saw these two, we’ve obviously only aged half that amount.
Since this film will be Moldavia’s first-ever sequel and first-ever production not directed by my dad, I know my key to success boils down to two things: taking the studio forward (attracting the new and younger fans) while retaining the soul of Moldavia and checking off the requisite trademarks (appealing to the squeezers). So there has to be this perfect melding of the expected and the unexpected.
I take the whole idea of sentient zombies that my dad came up with for Zombie Children (an original, underrated concept muddled by poor execution) and decide to push it even further. As the camera pulls back (in an awesome tracking shot, our best camera op riding the dolly) we see Alastair and Abigail feasting on the remains of a cow, its gristly rib cage stabbing into the sunset. (Barbara didn’t even need to build a fake cow rib cage; we already had one lying around in storage from Moldavia’s 1981 adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest. Rick Whorley, writing for Evil Robot magazine, said of it: “I am so confused by this film, I no longer even know how to take a piss.”)
If Alastair and Abigail are eating farm animals, does that mean there are no human beings left on the planet? It turns out not. Their farm is soon attacked by a vicious band of bearded woodsmen, hunters dressed in cured zombie pelts, the ashen skins of slain zombies, toothy grins and all, stretched out into dystopian outerware (hints of black humor are a Moldavia trademark).
I have the production team transfer the remains of the farmhouse façade from The Ciller Cauliflowers outside and rebuild what’s left of it (this doesn’t take much time). Knowing the set was already in shambles, I wrote the script with that in mind, so there would be a minimum of rebuilding. This is to be Alastair and Abigail’s dilapidated home. Gradually, as we continue filming, an inverted replica is reconstructed in the Karloff Wing for all the interior shots, which we get later.
The hunters assume Alastair and Abigail are roaming brainlessly through the farm, not that they’re domesticated. Alastair and Abigail aren’t ordinary zombies. They’ve had malevolent visitors before, and their farm is booby-trapped. As the hunters each get caught in bear traps, tumble into covered pits, and get felled by various other nasty snares, Abigail beheads them all with a machete, in an instant and total reversal of what anyone’s come to expect from a typical zombie movie.
Chopping up the bodies, freezing all the human meat in fancy refrigeration units, Alastair and Abigail then return to their meal (after vacuuming the living-room rug, which got bloodstained), munching on opposite ends of a cow intestine while gazing into each other’s eyes, in a zombie homage to Lady and the Tramp.
But the cow carcass has been poisoned. This leads to two full minutes of intense zombie vomiting (over-the-top, gross-out gore, another Moldavia trademark). The foaming greenish-black zombie vomit involves oatmeal, cornflakes, food coloring, Alka-Seltzer tablets, bicycle pumps, and rubber tubing. It’s awesome.
The culprits of the poisoning soon become clear. A group of full-on zombies, their bodies decomposing, emerges from the trees and descends upon them, filled with jealousy and rage. As Alastair and Abigail take each other’s hands before the battle begins, we realize their romantic union has kept them pure. This is a subtle nod, and a neat reversal, to The Lovers of Dust and Shadow. And since Moldavia movies often coyly reference one another, we’ve just checked off another Moldavia trope.
Oren and Franklin keep urging me to just play against logic, since if you overthink any Moldavia movie the magic gets lost. So I just go for it and embrace the absurd while trying to stay faithful to the tone of the original film, winking at some of its more infamous moments. That’s how great horror sequels are made.
While still very much undead, Alastair and Abigail are in love, and it’s the magic of this emotion that has embalmed them in a way and enabled them to age slowly, and not decompose as quickly as the rest of their zombie brethren. Yes, this makes no sense—but only if you overthink it. Zombies make no sense anyway, as I noted in my journal. So Alastair and Abigail have built a sort of stable life together.
Alastair must contend with the betrayed castaways of the zombie army he built in Zombie Children and later abandoned for Abigail (because they were all somehow less human than him). This leads to some whizzing, Vietnam-inspired battle scenes through the trees—using slingshots, broken bottles, and torches. War is hell, man.
Once Alastair and Abigail defeat the zombie army, they don’t slaughter them but build them up again, handing them back their dignity and making them a viable defense force—a zombie fortress, if you will—against more roving bands of zombie hunters. Alastair and Abigail become their leaders.
While the forest burns around them, sending sparks flying into the ink-black night, everyone has a feast of defrosted human meat at a banquet table ringed by garlands of calla lilies (boom!), and that night, feeling victorious and lustful, Alastair and Abigail have crazy zombie sex. They have to be careful to temper their passion, because when things get too heated they tear chunks of flesh from each other with their teeth, leaving slimy, gaping wounds and streaks of blackened blood.
The audience may think this horrifying sex scene is the Curdling, and why does it come so early on?, but I’ve tricked them twice, in fact. This is not the Curdling, but the Curdling comes next, so yes, it does come super-early for a Moldavia film after all!
Nine months later, Abigail is having Alastair’s child, but let’s just say, being undead and all, the state of her reproductive health is somewhat questionable. She’s in agonizing labor for so long, Alastair is forced to tear open her uterus with his teeth and remove the baby—which looks like a gelatinous alien turd—with his bare hands.
The supervising sound editor tells me they’ll be able to record some really gross Foley sound in post—partly by squishing and kneading a hunk of wet, raw meat.
Jasper makes an amazing fake wax stomach, something I can really sink my teeth into, partially decayed intestines and all. They slather it in goo, and a ton of fake zombie blood (all of it edible). I want this to be one of the most disgusting scenes ever filmed—but also extremely moving. Because, surprise! They have a healthy human baby! And Abigail is totally fine. Alastair just sews her stomach back up with some guitar string (torn from an old Gibson that just happened to be lying around their farmhouse).
As the baby grows older, in a series of flash-forwards, not only do Alastair and Abigail realize their baby is totally normal, but their son begins to age at three times the rate they do.
Ten years later, Alastair and Abigail have decayed only slightly (meticulous makeup work from Madge, and great continuity work from our script supervisor) while their little boy has aged into . . . Ferdinand (played by Gavin). Knowing the treacherous world they live in, Alastair and Abigail have to teach their child how to hunt and kill—to protect their family and their farm, but also so he can fend for himself and survive on his own—because that day will come.
This is something Ferdinand rebels against, wanting to keep his childhood innocence and his family intact. But the sad truth is, as they age, Alastair and Abigail are less in control of their primal zombie instincts. In two horrific instances, Alastair and then Abigail momentarily forget themselves and try to attack and eat Ferdinand. Thankfully, each time, the other zombie parent happens to be there to save their son. But as time goes on, it becomes apparent that neither of them can be a true parent to their son—they both pose a threat. They cannot be the parents Ferdinand needs.
They have to cast Ferdinand out—for his own good.
The weeks of filming go by in a blur. I thrive on the clap of the slate. Shouting “Action!” and having everything suddenly come to life. I love the mess of gaffer’s tape, C-stands, booms, electrical cords; the glare of HMI lamps, the burst of walkie-talkies, the cluster of viewing monitors in the video village.
The electrical crew (the “juicers”) adopted Jude before we began production. But he gets promoted to best boy, assisting the key grip—something that happened quickly because we’re stretched tight in terms of crew, with the other production still filming (and now delayed with unforeseen technical hurdles).
When I’m not in front of the camera or actively discussing a scene with the other actors, I’m having pretty technical conversations with Jip, the set decorator, the property master, the costume, makeup, and special effects supervisors, the sound guys—about how to construct each scene.
Thankfully, our production sound mixer has composition skills; he used to assist my dad scoring his movies. He thinks he can write an original score for Alastair & Abigail that has Moldavia’s signature unsettling synth sound, with a twist of his own. Then the music supervisor tells me it won’t be too hard to get the rights to some indie dark metal music I suggested we use for underscoring, to create a foreboding atmosphere in certain scenes, and a more modern-sounding soundtrack.
Late at night, I have a series of conversations with marketing about updating the Moldavia logo and the website, as well as setting up Twitter and Instagram accounts, all featuring mysterious teaser info for the coming sequel. We decide to title the movie Alastair & Abigail: A Zombie Love Story. True Moldavia fans will recognize it as the sequel to Zombie Children and get excited. Non-Moldavia die-hards won’t know it’s the sequel to a pretty shitty movie.
Hayley and I know all our lines by now. But we still spend every night together in my room. Acting with her has been super-fun because we both decide to just let the past go. We propel ourselves through the story and relate to each other through our characters, as we would ourselves. This turns out to be the best decision; we don’t get weighed down by the past or caught up in any residual negative emotions lingering from Zombie Children. We’re making a different movie, after all.
As I expected, there’s no PTSD stuff about playing Alastair again, because I’ve made him, and this project, my own. Hayley and I take loving care of the story, and the characters we’re playing. And like she was as a kid, Hayley is a generous, luminous presence on-screen.
We’ve had to film way out of sequence because of continuing production issues on No Chance in Hell (the last Moldavia movie that will ever be credited to Lucien Heyward), and we keep losing key crew members to the other production for days at a time. And then to make matters worse, Gavin gets a bad cold. In the meantime, I film the scenes with all the other actors playing Ferdinand at different stages in his life. Alastair and Abigail aren’t on-screen again till the very end—I restructure the film like this very much on purpose so I can concentrate on my directing duties. Doing both is hard.
Jude plays Ferdinand at age twenty. A strong and able hunter now, Jude-as-Ferdinand has only one scene in the film, where he scavenges ammo, slays a deer using only a pickaxe (we use the same fake cow rib cage), and then fistfights another ravenous hunter to defend his venison meal. Jude wanted to box on-screen—he practically made it a contractual requirement. We have no stunt coordinator at Moldavia, so Jude carefully choreographs the whole fight with the burly electrician who’s playing the hunter, and it actually turns out great. I guess now we have a stunt coordinator.
After the fight, I want to film Jude-as-Ferdinand walking all bloody through the forest away from the slain hunter as the midday light sifts through the trees. Jude turns back to me as we’re rolling and says: “So this is like some real warrior-contending-with-nature, Terrence Malicky shit you’re doing right here, huh?”
No one can make me laugh like Jude.
In the last scene of the film, Ferdinand, now a sickly old man (played by Lorenzo Mayberry, who doesn’t fall asleep on me!), has spent his remaining years trying to make his way back to the farm where he grew up, so he can see his parents one last time before he dies. Sixty or so years later, Ferdinand has never experienced any kind of love as pure as that of his undead parents, and I guess that’s the tragedy of the story. He’s had a hard life—a loveless life, driven only by survival.
Ferdinand returns to the farm and finds his parents still there, only slightly more decayed, still almost as young as they were when they sent him away more than a half century ago. Recognizing him, even though he’s an old man now, they all embrace. It’s a beautiful reunion. Neither Abigail nor Alastair gets a chance to attack and eat Ferdinand. He dies in their arms a day later.
Alastair and Abigail bury their son in back of the farm, where he used to play as a little kid, and where all of them, at least for a short while, were the happiest, and I guess the most human. That night, Alastair and Abigail cuddle lovingly in bed one last time. Knowing they’ll grieve forever, and that they’ll never really die, they devour each other until there’s nothing left of them but bits of bone and dust.
And that’s how the movie ends. But it’s not the last scene we shoot.
There’s still one scene left, and I swear it’s going to be the goddamn death of me. It’s the scene where Alastair and Abigail banish Ferdinand from the farm so he’ll survive. It’s one of the most powerful moments in the film, and I can’t pretend this scene about having to leave home doesn’t have deep personal meaning for me.
I write five drafts of the scene, but none of them work. I realize it’s not about the dialogue or the way the shots will be composed; it’s about the raw emotion, especially on the part of Ferdinand. And that’s where we run into trouble.
I didn’t know what to expect from Gavin, but his general demeanor—which I can only describe as a sludge of slowly degrading hopefulness—gives a level of truth to Ferdinand I never thought we’d achieve. It’s literally jaw-dropping to behold. It’s luck.
But Gavin freezes during the filming of this one crucial scene. We spend nearly six hours shooting as I try to coax out his performance, pushing him to give me more more more. But it doesn’t come. And that’s the first time I get tense, remembering what it was like for me when I was a kid filming Zombie Children. Standing there for hours in the cold, not knowing what my dad wanted from me, and then him just berating me and hitting me until he finally declared: Yeah, we got it.
I feel the pressure to get this right—the pressure on me, the pressure on Gavin, like we’re bound together during a deep-sea dive, our ears madly popping.
“I need you to be heartbroken, completely despondent,” I tell him, acting totally cavalier, like this is all whatever.
“I am,” says Gavin, not really understanding.
“Right now you’re reading apathetic.” I try to phrase this in a way he’ll connect to. “Think about what’s happening in the scene. Ferdinand is being forced to say good-bye to his parents forever. We need to nail this now.” I point up. “We’re losing the light.”
But he chokes. And then it’s too late, and we have to wrap for the day.
That night, I have a terrible dream.
My bathroom door swings open, and in the watery light I see my father drowning Aida in the bathtub—she’s floating lifelessly, her eyes open. He’s whispering in her ear like he’s spooling the remaining life out of her body with his words. He looks up at me and grins in this sadistic way. “You know what to do.”
“I won’t,” I tell him.
He shrugs and kicks the bathroom door closed.
The next day we start super-early in the morning but run into the same problem again. Gavin is stoic, when I need him to feel betrayed by his zombie parents, who are essentially telling him they can’t love him anymore. But he can’t get himself there. We film for four hours, probably over twenty takes, a few different setups, but then it starts to rain and we have to wrap early.
That’s when I start imagining my dad lurking around the set wearing that same white tuxedo he was buried in, shaking his head at me in disappointment.
And that night I have another awful dream.
This time, my hands are around Gavin’s throat. And I’m screaming at him:
“We all have to give something of ourselves to keep this place afloat! We all have to sacrifice something!” I start throttling him until I see his tears flying into the air. I hear a clicking sound and realize it’s his teeth.
The next day doesn’t go any better. Gavin is actually getting worse as he loses what’s left of his confidence, and starts unconsciously sabotaging himself.
He was always terrified to do this role, and now the cracks are starting to show.
I look over and see my dad sitting in the director’s chair, lit cigar between his fingertips, laughing at me. Franklin catches me punching a wall as we head inside.
That’s when an emergency production meeting is called.