The Australian zombie comedy Little Monsters (read our review) inherited an Oscar-winning makeup FX team. Odd Studio won the Academy Award for Mad Max: Fury Road, and they gave Little Monsters writer/director Abe Forsythe a great deal for his indie movie.
“They did this movie for a lot less than they normally would do a movie of this scale for,” Forsythe told us at Sundance. “That was just because they believed in the project and they always wanted to make a zombie movie. I think the thing that also appealed to them was this feels like a different zombie movie as well.”
There were well-defined rules for how the zombies would look. They come from a military testing facility right next door to a petting zoo. Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong’o) picked the wrong day to take her class on a field trip.
“There’s obviously the freshly infected ones, but then there are the ones that have been experimented on in this U.S. testing facility near the petting zoo,” Forsythe explained.
“For us it was about trying to get as much exposition into their look and the wardrobe rather than verbalizing how it happened or showing it. There were some earlier incarnations of the script where I’d written a little bit more in that world. But then the more we developed and worked on it, you also realized that audiences just have a shorthand for so many things now that you don’t really need to. You just need a couple little nods here and there to make people go oh, it’s that type of zombie. That’s obviously why we have that line of fast or slow zombies as well.”
In essence, just by looking at the costumes of the zombies and observing the level of decay, the audience can infer how infected they are.
“The idea is their suits that they wear are uniforms,” Forsythe said. “We did experiment with more orangey colored ones to reference Guantanamo Bay and everything like that but it seemed a little bit too obvious. So they’re all wearing those uniforms. They’ve got chains so they’ve managed to break free at some point from something. Also the main threat, the ones that have been genetically modified; they’re in the midst of real decay and they’re hungry. They haven’t eaten. So when they break out and start attacking all the other ones, the freshly infected ones are less hungry. They’re more kind of bumbling and at that point where they’re new to this world. The other thing is they’re attracted to music as well too which is something which develops over the course of the movie too. It was a conscious choice to make those ones in the body suits the threat and the other ones more bumbling and affectionate in their own way.”’
Like the classic George Romero zombie movies, Little Monsters’ zombies are a metaphor.
“The zombies can represent so many things but it’s things trying to get to us, things that we fear,” Forsythe said.
“The whole point of this movie is to not give yourself into fear. That’s the lesson that Miss Caroline teaches the kids. You only let fear win if you actually let it get to you.”
And simply by making a zombie comedy, Forsythe knows Little Monsters will be compared to Shaun of the Dead.
“Shaun of the Dead is the high bar,” he said.
“When people say you’re doing a zombie comedy, everyone always talks about Shaun of the Dead. I’m a massive fan of Edgar [Wright]. I’m sure most people are as well too and a great admirer of how he’s used cinematic language to tell comedy too. I think he’s one of the few directors that can actually know how to set up a gag and execute it as opposed to what I see with a lot of comedy which is that riffing kind of thing sometimes at the expense of story. The reason I’m harping on Shaun of the Dead, not just because it’s a zombie horror comedy, but those guys know how to do story. They know how to give it a full propulsion.”
Fans of Shaun of the Dead should be pleased, while getting a very different type of comedy in Little Monsters.
“I also don’t feel like I’m the same sort of filmmaker as Edgar Wright as well,” Forsythe said. “Even though I admire him so much, I felt like with this, the zombies, from the first draft of the script, it was about writing about my son. It was about his first year of kindergarten but also everything that he’d taught me up until that point. So that was kind of the main thrust of the focus and knowing that there needed to be this threat, this escalating threat for the characters when they’re stuck in the souvenir store. An interesting thing happened when I was writing it, certainly when we were shooting it and definitely in the edit too. The zombies at a certain point stop being the threat and then there’s another threat that comes in which is much more dangerous. We’re also finding that people are finding the zombies fun and enjoying them.”
Forsythe clearly knew his zombie movies before embarking on his own.
“The social satire certainly that George Romero did, I saw that movie when I was very young and I didn’t even pick up on the social [commentary],” Forsythe said. “I probably would’ve been nine or ten when I first saw that. It didn’t register me in that satirical way. The more I watched it growing up, you started to notice all those things. I guess there are differences too. Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead was a very seminal movie for me as well. That’s kind of the opposite. It’s like a Monty Python movie with just the most extreme gore. I saw that when I was 12 years old. My dad talked a cinema into letting me see that in Australia and that was still one of the best experiences of my life that I’ve ever had seeing a movie. So I guess there are so many different ways you can approach it.”
Neon and Hulu will release Little Monsters in 2019.
