The zombie with the heart of gold

The school hallway is silent except for the shuffling. Eerie blue lights throw slashes of shadows behind a crowd of monsters in ripped skirts and bloodstained jackets. They limp forward, arms grasping, yearning, stretching toward the lanky figure in front of them.

“Okay, everyone take two more steps forward… except you three guys move back into this light, and really bunch up. Sometimes it feels really awkward to be this close to people, but it doesn’t look like it.” The object of the undead’s obsession is director Rodrick Pocowatchit, and he’s giving them blocking instructions on the set of the independent film production The Dead Can’t Dance.

Rod releases the extras to finish their makeup and I tag along. In the corner of the school cafeteria a makeup artist sprays a thin layer of white over a zombie’s face and arms with an airbrush. “Hey cool!” I say, “Could you give me a tan with that thing?”

“I sure could.” she retorts, without skipping a beat.

Another makeup artist dribbles fake blood from a straw onto the cheek and shoulder of Lisa, a zombie in a long tattered skirt, who explains her character’s backstory. “I’m an art teacher in my late 20s/early 30s who’s fallen in love with one of her students and he fell in love with me. But he’s only 17 so I tell him, you’re too young — let’s wait a few years; he goes into a rage and is about to kill me but the disease gets to me first.”

The extras are fascinating — and convincing — but I scan the crew and extras in search of one monster in particular: the lead zombie, known only as “Stupid”. Finally I spot him, filming behind-the-scenes footage with a video camera. (Everyone does double — or quadruple — duty on this set.) He agrees to chat with me for a few moments between shots of zombie makeup.

The man behind Stupid is Wade Hampton, a long-time friend of the director. He’s a zombie by night, and a graphic designer and painter by day. “As I was reading the script for The Dead Can’t Dance,” Wade says, “it sounded like such a fun thing to try and I said to Rod, ‘It’s great and I want to play Stupid,’ and he said, ‘Good — I wrote it for you.’ (Rod not only writes and directs, he’s also the producer and lead non-zombie actor in the film.)

In the script a pandemic turns everyone into zombies except Native Americans — and one white man with massive sinus congestion. “The virus hasn’t totally taken me out yet,” Wade explains, “I’m still kinda on their side because I haven’t turned, so I’m the zombie with the heart of gold.”

But the heroes have yet to figure that out. Wade describes an altercation in a scene where one of the Native Americans, in self-defense slams Stupid with a history book, causing him to fall and scrape his fingernails down a chalkboard. Then Stupid screams his head off. “You just have to get past any — any embarrassment. You’ve got 20 people watching and it takes me about two takes to get completely past that, and then I can just be a dumba** and I completely don’t care.”

As the title implies, music plays a pivotal role in the movie. Wade explains, “My whole motivation is getting this phone to make beautiful music, so basically every one of my scenes is me holding this cell phone up begging someone to turn the damn thing on.”

Does Stupid finally hear beautiful music? Does the heart of gold triumph over monster nature? Do the dead dance? The cameras are still rolling.

For more information visitMspan http://www.harmyfilms.com/.