LUCIDMEDIA

Up with Dead People (and Bruce LaBruce)

Written by Rachel Rain Packota Wednesday, 14 October 2009 09:57

“I kind of got tired of these zombie films that treat zombies like worthless, homeless people”, says Bruce LaBruce over the phone from his Toronto pad. “They’re like the underclass, totally discriminated against…I’m just trying to stick up for the zombies!”

Zombies have been granted a massive day-in-the-sun lately with no less than forty-two new zombie centric films released this year (including the succinctly titled Eat Me!) yet the underground Canadian filmmaker doesn’t feel they are truly getting their fair treatment. When LaBruce began working on a script about a lonely young man who cannot express himself or truly connect with those around him, he began to notice parallels between the mythological monster and the actual experiences of a young homosexual.

“[Zombies] are very allegorical”, explains LaBruce, “[and] I was making a film about this alienated, teenaged boy [who is] gay, so in a way his zombie exterior is an outward manifestation of his inner angst and anxiety.” An un-closeted gay man himself, LaBruce was disturbed by the statistics of suicide amongst gay teens, and found himself encountering many young people in person who described themselves to him as “[feeling] dead, or that they were dead inside.” Two-and-two fit together, and Otto was born.

Otto or Up With Dead People was the 2008 film in which the “current generation” of zombies, inexplicably, are all gay, which doubles their chances of being attacked by normal people. Not only are they homosexuals who lust after man flesh, but they are zombies who actually EAT man flesh! There are zombie bashings and burnings in Berlin (the city where Otto… was shot), and soon Otto fears that not only does love and tenderness seem to elude him, but he might not even live long enough to find it.

Shot on location in Germany, the title character was acted by a capable Jey Crisfer, an unknown Belgian fan of LaBruce, who was only 18-years-old when principal photography began. “We put him through a lot…I think on the second day of shooting he turned 19, and we buried him in a graveyard”, laughs LaBruce in reference to Otto’s “emergence scene” for the film-within-a-film called Up With Dead People.

Crisfer himself is a young, gay man. LaBruce acknowledges that the similarities between him and Otto were what won him the part. “I wanted the character to read as a teen… it had to be someone who really was quite young… and then also someone with very delicate features,” he recalls. Otto had to be a character that could pull off the ‘undead stare’, but encourage empathy towards his plight. Criser’s MySpace profile immediately caught LaBruce’s attention.

“He was an art student, he was gay, [and] he seemed very sensitive”, says LaBruce of his first impressions of Crisfer. “He had a slightly, verging on emo, personality.” Sulky, zombie teenagers are almost surely emo, it seems.

One phenomenon of the teenaged group, perhaps to a greater extent than other age, is their need to develop a self-identity. Although the filmmaker character Medea believes Otto is a boy who is strongly convicted that he is a zombie, his actual identity is never truly brought into question until he encounters a relation from his past, ‘real’ life. While Otto’s status as a true zombie is then questioned, there is no conclusive indication one way or another.

“I thought it would be too obvious to have him revealed as a ‘real boy’ at the end… subjectivity is what the movie is partly about,” explains LaBruce. “If that’s what he believes [that he is a zombie], then that’s what he is.” He sees the concept of a teenaged, gay zombie as a mere stretching of the truth rather than an outright myth.

“[Otto]’s supposed to have an eating disorder, he’s suffered melancholia, and maybe schizophrenia, [and] he ends up homeless. And a huge percentage of homeless people do have schizophrenic disorders,” LaBruce points out. Indeed, there are scenes of Otto, unable to eat anything else, munching on dead animals off the ground, and being fixated with the concept of being dead and feeling alone. If he does and feels these things that a zombie would, then it would make sense to him that that is what he is. “That’s his perception of himself,” says LaBruce. Zombie is as zombie does.

“If you’ve ever cruised a public toilet or bathhouse at night, it really is like Night Of The Living Dead”, LaBruce suggests, “and not necessarily in a bad way… but, it’s very dark and can be very scary, and with body parts coming out [from holes in the walls]… and you don’t know who’s body parts you’re touching. It can just be like a horror movie.”

Horror aside, Bruce LaBruce found the metaphor of Zombie-as-Homosexual so engaging, he recently set out to make another zombie film, this one set in L.A., and this time there was far less beating-around-the-bush about the sexual content. It still fits in with the theme of “no revolution without sexual revolution” (quote from his 2004 film The Raspberry Reich), as “there is still a strong minority of people [who feel]… [it’s] something subversive to have sex in places you’re not supposed to have sex… it is still kind of a political statement.”

L.A. Zombie was shot in Los Angeles this past August and stars French model and porn actor François Sagat as “an alien zombie who goes around L.A. and finds dead people and f***s them back to life. But, like Otto, he might just be a homeless schizophrenic who thinks he’s an alien zombie.”

To be a zombie, or not to be a zombie? It seems that some people want to save themselves through zombiedom, and some want to save the world through zombiedom, but either way LaBruce is enjoying the ride through the world of the undead. “I have a scene [in L.A. Zombie] where a guy’s chest is ripped open and his heart is still beating, so that was fun!”