Tamara Mack’s neighbor keeps peeking out of her kitchen window. • Her silhouette pops in and out as she watches the horror unfolding across the street on Mack’s front lawn. • Mack’s midtown home is the staging area for “The Z,” a zombie movie that her company, Medrosa Film Productions, is producing — one of several low-budget horror films made in Tucson this year. The residence is bustling with activity, as the crew preps for action. • Scott Barker, the director and screenwriter for the project, discusses strategy outside with James Arnett, the director of photography, at one point asking if he would like to wear a trash bag to protect himself from blood spatter. “Sure,” Arnett responds.
“If they don’t get the camera sticky, I’ll be happy.”
People are also reading…
Inside, special effects coordinator Francisco Guerra — a custom framer at Posner’s Art Store — is busy creating the blood, using Karo syrup, food coloring, mashed bananas and soap.
“Syrupy blood will hit the shirt and bead off,” he says, stirring the concoction in a plastic mixing cup like a demonic Julia Child. “A little dish cleaner will help it soak.”
When the kill scene begins, a brutal portrayal of a man getting sliced and diced by a weapon-wielding zombie, Mack’s neighbor is back in her kitchen, looking out at the melee.
She is joined by a couple watching from their driveway and passengers from a passing car.
“My neighbors are definitely used to it,” said Mack, 46. “It is a fun street.”
Closed sets aren’t a luxury for Tucson’s hor ror filmmakers, but neither are most of the perks that are commonplace in big-budget Hollywood films.
There are no craft service tables , no private trailers for the actors.
Nearly all of the cast and crew on “The Z,” a movie that pits a team of security guards against a new breed of predatory zombie killers, are working for free.
The production has depended primarily on the kindness of local home and business owners, with scenes shot at the Meet Rack, the Surly Wench, Sir Veza’s and Snap Fitness on North La Cañada Drive.
“We killed somebody in an alley on Fourth Avenue at 11 o’clock at night,” Barker said. “He was screaming his lungs out in multiple takes and nobody ever came to see what was happening. That was scary in itself.”
Yet creative minds all over the Tucson area are willing to go without in order to get their visions onto film.
Marana director Billie Brannock is currently in pre-production for her second horror short, “Ruthie Jean’s Special Recipe,” a movie about cannibal grannies, which she hopes to begin filming in November.
Brannock, 58, spent 16 years as a paraprofessional with the Marana Unified School District and is a published author, with five horror and young-adult fantasy titles to her name.
She got hooked on horror films as a child growing up in Phoenix.
“We would watch these cheesy, black and white films like ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Billy the Kid vs the Werewolf,’ ” she said. “My sisters would be under the blankets in terror. I would be riveted at what was on the screen.”
Her first horror short, “Bloody Kisses,” adapted from one of her short stories, was released in 2012.
Brannock said the cast and crew on the project worked for next to nothing.
“I work on a shoestring budget,” Brannock said. “I don’t provide much of anything. I offer a free DVD copy of the film, an IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base) credit. They get to eat on the set and I’ll pay for gas. That is pretty much it.”
“The Z” is the second horror film created by Medrosa Film Productions, with Barker at the helm.
Its first collaboration, “Dead on Site,” about a group of college students who meet their end during a live webcast, was released in 2008.
Barker, who is executive editor of Tucson Lifestyle magazine, said that unlike romantic comedies and genres of that ilk, horror movies can be made inexpensively and still develop an audience.
“Horror is a lot more about the concept than it is about the actors,” he said. “ ‘Paranormal Activity’ and ‘The Blair Witch Project’ didn’t have any major actors involved but still made millions at the box office because people liked the execution.”
“The Z” will take more than a year to film when all is said and done, around the same amount of time George A. Romero took to make “Night of the Living Dead.”
The crew already has wrapped the last of its major scenes and it is in post-production.
Barker said they hope to premiere the movie at The Loft Cinema and enter it into as many film festivals as possible when it is complete.
The ultimate dream, common among low-budget horror filmmakers, is that a major studio will catch wind of the film and either buy the idea outright or pay Barker and his group to turn it into a silver screen classic using studio bucks.
He uses Sam Raimi’s cult horror film, “The Evil Dead,” as inspiration.
“Raimi shot on Super 8 with a budget of nothing, using people no one had ever heard of,” Barker said. “But he got a lot of money handed to him to remake it.”
Barker calls “The Z” a calling card to the entertainment industry.
Still, for people willing to put the time and energy into making horror films, he added, it is not all about the fame and fortune.
“You know at the end of the day, you can look back and say, ‘Wow, that was really cool. I’m glad we did this.’”
