Myth #3 – You have to make a Zombie movie…
Before we wrap on set we say “Martini time,” so as we wrap our series on Microbudget Myths it’s only appropriate to say “Zombie time…”
Your Movie
Okay, this isn’t meant as a diss to zombies. I like zombies, and I love a good zombie movie. Who doesn’t, right? But why is absolutely everyone jonesing to make a zombie movie? Every time I turn around someone is pitching a concept of the undead to me. It runs the gamut from Emmy winning writers, to students, to my girlfriend’s random friend from college who we run into on the street.
Add this to the nearly 5,000 Zombie movies already in existence, and you have seriously zombie-like swarm of films threatening to munch up our brains.
The popularity and relative ease of producing zombie movies makes them attractive to microbudget filmmakers who are looking to break through to a built-in audience, but if we’re only chasing after ideas we think other people want, we will never take control of the filmmaking process.
In the big budget world, a built-in audience is a prerequisite to make a film – if you want seven to nine figures to make a flick, you best be based on a pre-existing property. As a microbudget filmmaker, it’s not a bad idea to think about projects that might have a pre-existing audience. However, as microbudget filmmakers we are in a better position than our big budget brethren to build our own audience. Without the pressure to turn huge profits on opening weekend or be pulled from the theater, we can experiment with things like local screenings, social networking, and the film festival circuit to find out who our audience is. The hope being that you have an original voice, make a movie only you can make that cuts through, and your audience will build exponentially with each successive film.
As microbudget filmmakers we can offer our audience a real relationship, where the studio only seeks a one night stand.
The point is to let your passion lead you to your film and find your audience. This isn’t to say no one should make zombie movies. After all, something great might happen if you make a zombie movie because you truly love zombies, but nothing is going to happen if you make a zombie movie only because you want to make films.
And as for the genre, I’m more curious to discover what this unprecedented case of filmmaking zeitgeist says about our society. Makes me think we have some kind of collective deep-seeded anxiety that just doesn’t want to die.