HAMPSHIRE – Local people who turned out in bitter cold in January 2008 to pose as zombies for the movie "Bled White" – or who simply were inconvenienced because Hampshire's main downtown street was closed to traffic for parts of three days during the filming – finally will get a chance to see what came of their pains.
The horror movie will be shown to the public for the first time at the Clearwater Theatre, at 96 W. Main St. in West Dundee on Friday.
Director Jose Gomez of Geneva said the doors will open at 7 p.m., with the screening to begin at 8, followed by live music. Admission is $8.
Gomez said most of the cast and crew will be there. In fact, the event is officially being described as a "cast and crew event," so a gala premiere can be held some time later.
Filming began one weekend just after New Year's in the bitter winter of 2007-2008. Hampshire's village government agreed to close State Street for scenes showing vicious "undead" zombies taking over a small town, with the zombies played by whatever local volunteers showed up. Hundreds of people expressed interest, but Gomez said only about 30 actually endured the bitter cold and snow.
Later scenes were shot between January and March of 2008 in forest preserves and rural areas around Maple Park and St. Charles.
Gomez, 36, said he keeps a "day job" delivering subpoenas, foreclosure notices, etc., for the Kane County Sheriff's Office. In fact, he might never have made "Bled White" if he hadn't been assigned a few years ago to deliver a subpoena to someone who used to live in the Hampshire building then occupied by Kelli Tidmore, the sometimes actress who would become the film's producer.
He couldn't find the man he was looking for, he said. But he met Tidmore and began talking about how he had made some short films and was interested in becoming a filmmaker. They struck up a friendship. And as the winter of 2007-08 turned vicious, she suggested they make a new kind of zombie movie by setting it outdoors in the snow. With spring thaws setting a deadline, he wrote the screenplay in a week.
They shot the story on high-definition video for a budget of less than $30,000. The actors mostly came from the Chicago stage world, Gomez said, except for DeKalb actor Matt Prochazka.
"I'm very grateful we live in a time when you can get an HD camera and shoot something that looks like film without having to raise $100,000 or $200,000" as even bargain-basement would-be amateur filmmakers had to do 20 years ago, when they had to buy expensive film stock, Gomez said.
Gomez and Tidmore, who now lives in Elgin, learned recently that their film had earned an honorable mention from the Los Angeles-based Tabloid Witch Awards. It will be screened in LA this fall as part of the awards' festival of horror films.
But Gomez said he and Tidmore still are looking for a distributor to book the movie into theaters and release it as a DVD.
"We see our characters blurring the line between zombie and human," Gomez said. "Both turn to the simple need to feed, no matter the cost in lives. If zombies kill for food, and humans kill for food, are they really the same?"
"Bled White" is "noteworthy for its desaturated sepia tones, lending the film a distinctive look apart from other zombie films," the Tabloid Witch judges wrote.
"I did not want any scene to have the colors we're used to seeing in our daily life," Gomez said. "I wanted everything to feel uncomfortable."
For more information, see www.bledwhitemovie.com and www.hollywoodinvestigator.com/2009/horrorfilm2009.html