Feature Film Lesson: Ideas (The Hook)

I love the idea of making a zombie film and after thinking about locations and budget I need to think about what’s going to make my film stand out from the crowd. Let’s face it everybody and their wife are making zombie films so I’m going to have to give it a fresh angle, something different. Night of the Living dead created the template for modern zombie movies; a master piece of low budget horror where a group of survivors hole up in a farmhouse besieged by a horde of marauding undead. It’s a formula that’s been copied over and over again.

So one way to make my film different is to avoid a situation where our heroes get trapped in one location. My initial idea is to centre the film around a zombie hunter or a group of scientists who want to tag the zombies to help them see behavioural patterns. Flying against wisdom my other choice is to go extreme and set my zombie in a really confined space like a toilet cubicle that ends up with three or four protagnists in it. All of these ideas work well in terms of location and cost so I’m going to stick with them when I move onto the next stage plotting.