Today’s behind the scenes focuses on Chris Cline, our wonderful zombie!
Very few of my non-filmmaker friends watch horror flicks and certainly haven’t seen the ones I watch religiously and draw a lot of inspiration from…except Chris!! He knows what I’m talking about when I bust out the Fulci and the Argento.
Stella Buio came about when he said to me one day at work that we should write a giallo together. The term giallo, for those who don’t know, refers to a type of Italian murder mystery film from the 60s-80s. They’re lurid and sumptuous, like the pulp novels for which the genre was named (“giallo” means “yellow” which was the colour of the cover on an Italian pulp mystery novel from those years.) Eventually, the term morphed into a catch-all for 70s/80s Italian horror as giallo directors like Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento moved into horror. (That’s the gist of the history of gialli, but I should say that I’m no scholar or expert.)
That night, I became possessed by the basic idea for Stella Buio. It wasn’t a proper giallo for more reasons than I’m an American who shot the film in Sarasota, Florida in 2012, but I wanted a Fulci-style (but he had to have humanity) zombie and stupidly gory effects and Bava / Argento lighting and with our budget and certain other restraints, I got most of that. :D The picture above (and the link to the trailer below) serve as proof as I continue to work feverishly on the film.
Photo by Shawn Bowen