The folks over at Creature Corner scored a nice interview with Jeremy Kasten, director of the upcoming Mexican Zombie movie – ALL SOULS DAY: DIA DE LOS MUERTOS. He talks about some of the film’s concept, which sounds pretty sweet, as well as upcoming projects and such. You can check out the cool cat on your right, and you know I wouldn’t leave you without a Laura Harring pic no matter how big or small her role is.
Here are some nuggets from the interview:
Q: What do the zombies look like in the film? How do you make fresh-looking zombies nowadays?
Kasten: Mark and I were really influenced by the classic dead films, films like I Walked With A Zombie and Isle of the Dead, films where the zombies were cast in shadows, they were mysterious, you couldn’t see them all the time. In keeping with the Mexican mythology, our zombies have different looks. They wear masks, which is something I’ve never seen before in a zombie film, and they’re organically-fused, if that gives you a clue, very realistic-looking. They eat flesh, but they’re mysterious. Then there’s the movements. When you have extras on a zombie movie, and I had forty of them at any given time, they’re very enthusiastic, but they’ve seen zombie movies and they try to move like the zombies they’ve seen in the other films. What I did was hire a pantomime to work with the extras and develop zombie movements that haven’t been seen before.
Q: The basic premise is about a group of strangers who are stranded in a Mexican town, during the Mexican Day of the Dead, and are attacked by the Dead. What else can you say about the plot?
Kasten: They’re not really strangers. The story has flashbacks. It takes place in 1892, 1952 and the Present Day. In the present, a young couple travel to Mexico to meet her parents. They’re the main couple and they’re played by Marisa Ramirez and Travis Wester. They get trapped in this town, with the zombies, and they call a second couple to come and help them. That’s when the action really starts. Laura Harring plays a woman who runs the local hotel, and she’s a good person, and she knows all the secrets about the town, and knows about the zombies and where they came from. You could say she’s the narrator of the film.
You can check out the rest of the interview here. It’s pretty long, but very interesting. Has some minor spoilers about the film though, so consider yourself warned.