June 30--Ah, summer. Mosquitoes. Tourists. Zombies. Just the way life should be.
Filmmakers across Maine are furiously at work this summer on tales of horror and musical sci-fi, tales of real life and unreal deaths. There's a mad scientist. A hermit. An understandably distraught dad (zombies just ate his family, natch). And a wickedly creepy creature from 2046.
We could not make this stuff up. But some wonderful minds are, including locksmith Matthew Quinlan. Below is a description of his project.
The Undead
Filmmaker: Matthew Quinlan, writer/director
Filming: In July, around Ellsworth
Take-away: Don't trust science -- or zombies.
Matthew Quinlan named his movie "The Undead," but he's focused on the living: Survivors of a worldwide, zombie-inducing pandemic.
The half-hour film starts with a miracle drug gone wrong.
"All of a sudden, it turned on all the hosts and they ended up dying at exactly the same time," said Quinlan, 24, from Ellsworth. "Because of the way the drug worked, it was designed to heal brain cells. After the hosts died, it healed the brain cells, bringing the host's body back to life, reanimating the brain but not reactivating their soul."
The lead is a man who loses his son and wife to the pandemic. Quinlan said he was inspired by shows like "The Walking Dead." He considers "The Undead" a drama/thriller versus horror.
"We wanted to make it -- I don't want to say 'family-friendly' because of the subject matter -- we didn't want to focus on the gore and blood part of it," he said. "We wanted the focus to be the characters."
(Though, spoiler, there will be some blood.)
The movie is set in New England. Quinlan, a locksmith with his father by day and enrolled in an online film school, is planning to shoot nights, days and weekends. He raised $1,529 for the project through Kickstarter last summer.
Quinlan plans to release "The Undead" online, for free, in time for Halloween, then start reaching out to film festivals.
Got that zombie feeling? He's looking for extras: [email protected].
Copyright 2013 - Sun Journal, Lewiston, Maine
