The zombies that made the Beast crave Flesh...

I don't know what it is about zombie films, but when I was young they were always my favourite. And always the talk of the playground after someone had seen the latest 'Zombie FleshEaters' or 'Zombies: Dawn of the Dead'.

"Did you see that bit when the wood went in her eye?" or "that bit when he bit a chunk out of her arm was ace" was always the buzz before the dinner bell.

The titles are just so fantastic...devised to grab your immediate attention no matter what. Good taste never came into it.

I wasn't interested in vampires or werewolves...it was zombies, zombies and zombies.

Why?

I'm really not sure. There's something just so great about zombie films. Even the crap ones interest me. No other horror genre has captured the dispair and hopelessness of the apocalypse, especially Romero's Dead Trilogy (I know there are technically five now, but I choose to ignore the last two entries).

Day of the Dead is my favourite. It's one of the finest horror films ever made, taking a boyhood fantasy "what if you had you had the world to yourself with no rules" and shredding it with an unrelenting grimness unsurpassed since (many have tried, but none have so effortlessly depicted the end of the world as a real bummer).

The Mist is the only recent horror film to come close to apeing the gut-wrenching Nihilism. I applaud Frank Darabount for echewing current trends (i.e. omitting OC/One Tree Hill actors in favour of 'real' adults) and creating a finale so mindblowing that I still have trouble watching now.

And the Dawn of the Dead remake kicked zombie ass! Yeap, it didn't capture what made the original so special, but (inspite of the whingings of Simon Pegg et all) it brought the genre bang up to date. Running zombies are the future.

I love horror films of the 70s. They contain an undiluted intensity and, unlike modern horror, didn't aim for any demographic other than those who wanted to be scared shitless. The focus was always on scares and gore, never cash registers. If the film made money as a bi-product then great...but the primary aim was to make something good.

Unfortunately, the genre has now become a studio whore, and creativity has been quashed by teenage audiences craving bland remake after bland Japanese ghost story remake.

Horror can be subtle..but Zombie films cannot. Which is why the Resident Evil movies sucked so badly. They took a genre based on guts and grue and homogenized it. There were less headshots and disembowlings than an episode of Murder She Wrote. Paul WS Anderson! You know nothing of the genre!

Ever since I pretended to be a zombie in the playground with my mates, I've always dreamed "What would my zombie film be like?"

And so that brings me to Fleshbeast.

The title borrows heavily from the genre. It promises gore, blood, maybe naked chicks (they're aren't any I'm afraid, naked chicks that is).

Zombie Headshot? Tick

Gut munching? Tick

Unhappy ending? Tick

I had intended to make Fleshbeast an unrelentling gore-fest. But it ended up being far less bloody than I has orginally envisioned. Sometimes your filmmaking sensibilities take over and you hold back, when you should just let the blood run free. So, inspite of my best attempt to mimic the genre...I have failed, at least to some degree.

Though it does have some scenes that I like to think I would've copied back in the playground...had I seen this film when I was ten.

Lee Andrew Matthews (Director, Fleshbeast)