Die You Zombie Bastards! An interview with  producer Haig Demarjian

A few weeks ago, I picked up a car from a motel in the tiny, briny seaport city of Gloucester, Massachusetts, 30 miles north of Boston. That's one of my jobs, ya know, low rent repo man. Anyway, I was picking up the keys at the desk, when the horsey but pleasant woman behind the counter asked me if I've ever been to Gloucester before. I told here I hadn't, and she handed me a bunch of brochures featuring quaint little tourist traps, many of which ended in the word "shack".
"Well, what do you think of our little city so far?" She asked.
"Let me ask you a question", I said. "Just how many fuckin' fudge shops does one town need?"
She gave me the same kind of tight-lipped, pitying smile most gloating locals do when they're faced with a boorish city boy jerk like me.
"Oh, there's more than candy here", she said, without missing a beat. "We have some wonderful scenic seashores. Lots of famous people come here to visit. You never know who you might see!"

The poor woman had no idea how right she was.

Beyond the summery façade of clambakes, high-brow art galleries, and picturesque lighthouses, there's some crazy kinda evil going on in the city of Gloucester. Zombastic Productions is a renegade collective of b-move superfreaks who wait until the cover of darkness- or at least until off-season- to use the city as their own toxic playground, literally painting the town red as they churn ever forward into splatter flick infamy. "Die You Zombie Bastards" is the fearsome name of their magnum opus. A rocking , rolling, full length splatstick epic shot in 16mm, "DYZB"
Has been in the making for 5 years, and will finally see the light of day this September. Although I haven't seen the final product- no one has, it's not done yet- the three minute mindgrinder of a trailer that's been making the rounds, filled wall-to-wall with cartoony-gore, half naked chicks in green body paint, serial killer romance, and full contact rock and roll, was enough to convince me to get in touch with the zombie peddlers themselves and find out just what the fuck is going on up there. I talked to one half of Zombastic's writing/producing/directing duo, Haig Demarjian (partner Caleb Emerson was busy fishin') about the whole torrid, twisted tale.

Hey, bro. How's a guy get a name like Haig, anyway?
It was my dad's name. I had nothin' to do with it. It's an Armenian name. It's actually the name of the legendary king and founder of Armenia.
I'll be damned. You get into that much, being Armenian?
Not so much, but I get more interested in it as I get older. Maybe I'll make a movie. That'll be in   my"Shindler's List" phase.
But for now, it's about zombies.
Yeah. I'm in my "Duel"/"Jaws" phase.
How'd you end up in Gloucester anyway?
Well, Caleb's from Gloucester, and I married his sister. If it wasn't for his sister and I going to school together, we never would've met. We moved back here, and Caleb went to RISD (Rhode Island School of Design, natch) to study film, so he ended up in Providence. He's still there, so Zombastic Productions is split between Providence and Gloucester.
So, you shot some of "Zombie Bastards" in Providence?
Yep.
I knew it, man. I like Providence, but everything there always looks a little damp to me. I was watching your trailer last night, and I was thinking, man, Gloucester is just as fuckin' damp looking as Providence.
Both cities have treated us well when it comes to dampness.
I bet. "Die You Zombie Bastards" was originally part of a trilogy called "Red's Breakfast"...
The third part of "Red's Breakfast" was Caleb's thesis film for school. It's called "Red's Breakfast 3:Die You Zombie Bastards", and it's about a half-hour long. I co-wrote that with him. When he got out of school, he said, "Hey, we ought to turn "Die" into a feature. Do you want to do it?" and I said "Sure!" We spent about 2 years working on the script, hammering out 5 different drafts until it was where we wanted it to be, and then we said, "Damn, this is going to be the greatest film ever, and no one in their right mind is going to want to produce it." We briefly entertained the idea of trying to get somebody else to produce it, but then we figured, no way. No one wants to put up money for something as insane as this. So, we just formed a production company, which took about a year to figure out, and to raise enough money to start shooting, and then we started.
Righteous. Give me a quick overview of what this film's about.
The tape's rolling, right? Ok. It's the world's first ever serial killer-superhero-rock and roll- zombie-road movie-romance. It's got everything. It's got Zombie Girls and Dog Men. It's got the half-man, half-fish Amphibious Guy, it's got more theme songs than you can shake a stick at, its got the Coconut Face Man, it's got Vlad the Impaler...
Yeah, but does it have a message?
In the words of Viv Savage, "Have a good time, all the time." No, I guess the message remains to be seen. What I do know is that it's like a b-movie, only with much less of a budget, and more heart. Basically, the lead character Red Toole (Tim Gerstmar) is a serial killer, his wife Violet (Pippi Zornoza) is a serial killer, but yet they're very charming and lovable. Red's wife gets kidnapped by the evil villain, Baron Nefarious (Geoff Mosher). Then it becomes a road movie as Red goes on a quest to find her. He goes from Pittsburgh to Sweden to West Virginia to Gloucester, and finally to the Baron's evil lair. Along the way he runs into rockabilly legend Hasil Adkins.
The one man band, the Hunch.
The Hunch himself. We went down to West Virginia to shoot him in his element.
It must've been a bitch to get him to recite his lines.
Well, he reads and writes but...not really a lot. So what you end up doing is, you're feeding him his dialogue line by line, and he spits it back out in his own garbled, screaming, mumbling, backwoods, wonderful kinda way. Hasil provides the narration for the movie, which...see, he's unintelligible to begin with, so it takes this movie that's almost unintelligible to begin with, and makes it even worse. He also trains Red in his own brand of hillbilly Kung Fu, and he performs a song exclusive to the soundtrack of "DYZB".
Was he aware of what he was saying?
Sometimes.
Did he know what the movie was even about?
Well, you know, with any actor, they often don't know the whole story, they just know what their scene is about. With Hasil, his sequence in the script was only written as a page long, because we knew anything we scripted, he probably wouldn't say it anyway. We just went with the idea of "Let's shoot a scene at Hasil's house". We shot it almost in a documentary style, with a loose script. Our director of photography, Jared Alterman, has made a few documentary films, so our movie almost has that feel, only it's so bizarre and over the top that it's a really weird match. The whole movie is about really weird matches of things, like it's not exactly what it should be, yet it is. It's like a real nightmare gone wrong.
There's some other notable cameos, too.
Jason King Kendall is our other notable cameo from the rock and roll world. He's probably best known as the lead singer of the Amazing Royal Crowns, and now the Deterrents. He's great, an amazingly animated character. He plays Kentucky Bob, the host of the marvelous game show "Kentucky Bob's Wife Swapping Rodeo". The other notable appearance is porn legend Jamie Gillis.
How'd that come about?
In the usual weird Zombastic way. We were working on the script, writing the character of Stavros, who's kind of the hero's guardian angel, a sort of foreign accented suave guy. Caleb and I wrote the script 100 miles apart, sending each other chunks of it back and forth over two years. So this Stavros character started to emerge, and I remember writing some of the Stavros stuff one night, and thinking to myself, "Man, Jamie Gillis is the guy for this part." He just has that heavy, ethnic kind of character to him, and honestly, I've always loved his acting. I know it's funny, cuz he's a porn star, but he always brought a lot of believability to what he was saying in those roles. Anyway, I'm working on the script and Caleb calls me. He says, "You know the Stavros character? I was watching '800 Fantasy Lane' last night, and I thought, Jamie Gillis is the guy for this." I thought, 'Shit, that's so weird!' That tends to happen with us, though. We think with one big stupid mind. It's kind of creepy, but it's true.
So, you just called him?
I think Caleb just started emailing him. It turns out, not only did he play Dracula twice, in the two 70's porn versions of Dracula, but he also played a zombie hunter in this movie called "Night of the Zombies" directed by Joel Reed of "Bloodsucking Freaks" fame. So Caleb emailed him and said, "I know this is a crazy idea, but we wrote this part, and we were thinking of you when we wrote it." He emailed back and said, "Hey, I have experience killing zombies. Let me know when you're ready to shoot."
Beautiful.
Yeah, so he came out here for a couple days to shoot his scenes, and it was great. It was actually kind of weird to be in the same air space as Jamie Gillis.
You also have zombie girls! Where did you find them?
Well, one of them (Jennifer K. Beal) was a figure model at a school where I taught (Haig's a college prof by day), and the other two- one is a friend of Caleb's (Zhana LaRenard), she's a photographer, and the other one is a woman named Sadie Blades, and she's a drummer in this Providence band called Sawzall. The funny thing about getting the zombie girls together was- see, the "Maldanato Triplets" go out on safari and end up getting zombified later in the movie. But we were going to shoot their safari scenes first, in 2001. The problem was, the star of our movie was in Thailand, so he wasn't around to shoot...
What was he doing in Thailand?
He tends to go over there for a few months, and live there. And enjoy himself.
Uh huh.
So, he wasn't coming back for a couple months, and we...
But wait, you can only be up to monkey business in Thailand, right?
Uh...you should interview him about it.
You're talking about Red, right?
Yeah, Tim Gerstmar. An amazing guy.
I saw Red's Breakfast, man. I think that guy might be crazy. He only seems like he's half-acting. Are you sure he's not going to Thailand to kill and eat hookers?
Maybe, I dunno. Tim is Red, that's all I know. That guy's got more charisma than a roomful of Rock Hudsons. Anyway, what was I talking about, the girls?
Yeah. Sorry about that.
So, we shot these safari scenes up in Vermont. There's this lake up there with these two glacial rocks. It looks like a tropical island, pretty much. We didn't even have the girls until the last minute. It's always like that. You're tearing your hair out, going "If I don't find a third actress, I'm going to have to rewrite this whole scene." Or, "What if the third actress is Chicano? Will that work? Three sisters, and one of them's Chicano?" Stuff like that.
Tell me some of the other things were gonna see in this movie.
Dogmen fights, ninjas, giant mosquitos. You never saw anything like this movie.
Any nudity?
Oh yeah. As Hasil puts it, "Titties and cookies". A little T&C. Your gonna se the marvelous Sandy Kennedy as Super Inga, in a scene that's a tribute to the Russ Meyer films...
Is it fair to say that you're a bunch of hipsters?
I dunno. Is that good or bad?
Depends. Not good if you're too self-referentially hip.
Naw. We're just making a movie that's got all the stuff in it they we want to see. Were trying to do something that's new, but has all the stuff in it we like, too. I mean, if you're going for bankability, you don't get Hasil Adkins. I mean, 99% of the people that see him in the movie are going to go, "Who?" But the other 2% are going to be blown away. 99% from 100 is 2, right?
Yeah, I think so. You shot the film on 16mm, which looks great, especially since so many people are shooting on digital video these days.
I agree. That's one of the reasons we did it that way. Of course, it smacks you in the face every time you get the processing fee bills, which made up most of the cost of this movie, but man, it does look like somethin'.
Is Troma picking up this movie? (Troma is releasing Red's Breakfast on video soon)
Can't really say. I know Lloyd (Kaufman- Troma pictures founder) really loves this movie. In a recent interview he said 'Die You Zombie Bastards' is going to be one of the greatest films ever!' He says that about a fair number of movies, though.
What's the connection?
Caleb worked on "Citizen Toxie- Toxic Avenger part 4" back in 1999. He did a bunch of jobs there. He ended up being the casting director, and he's actually in the film. I appear in the film as well, in a bit part. Basically, Caleb met everybody that ended up being the core people for "Die You Zombie Bastards" while working on "Citizen Toxie." It was definitely a major jumping point for us.
Would you like to see this film playing midnight shows at the local arthouse theaters?
I would love to, because it's that kind of movie, and I think it will eventually end somewhere like that, but initially, I think it's just going to go to VHS and DVD. Mostly because the cost of making a film print, and cutting a negative, is just too prohibitive.
Too bad the days of Drive-ins and grindhouses are gone.
My dream would be to have Zombasticpalooza, taking it to drive-ins, bringing a band along, have a spookshow, just make it a madhouse event. Cuz, ya know, I love film, and when I'm looking around out there, I realize that you have to give people something they cant' get from their computer. You have to give them something more, an experience.
Right on. Did you guys ever run out of money along the way?
Plenty of times. We're out of money now.
But you're almost done, though.
Yeah, there's a couple of little things that still have to be shot. No major productions, just shots to tie things together. We'll probably do that in June. From there, it's screenings, film fests, film markets, and whatever. Hopefully...

Official site: Die You Zombie Bastards  
Only members of the Zombastic Army get to go to the initial screenings of "Die You Zombie Bastards" this fall, so join up now. And while you're there, buy a mug or somethin', the boys need the dough. Oh yeah, and if you're an attractive blonde that wants to play a "Sleeping Swedish Girl", get in touch with Haig. Of course, I'm not sure if that's a personal ad or a casting call. You never know with zombie bastards.

Post Script: A few days after we finished the interview, Haig emailed me with a list of other DYZB cameos that he forgot to mention while I was grilling him. The capitals and exclamation points are his. The jerky comments are mine.
ALL FOUR GUYS from SUPERKOLLIDER play ZOMBIES and a NINJA!
(Superkollider is a nu-metal band.)
Ricky Magic from the PHOTON TORPEDOES plays a NINJA!
(a psychobilly ninja, even.)
Ken Cmar, CEO of Wonderdrug Records, is all OVER this movie!
( I can't imagine what the selling point is here. Unless you're trying to sell Ken's mom a ticket)
and Deek, the invincible WBCN DJ, plays a ZOMBIE
(Deek is the most annoying DJ I have ever heard in my life.)
Pippi, Kelly & Claudia of SAWZALL are in it
Pippi, Miles, Chris and Mark of THRONE OF BLOOD are in it
Miles and Erik of NINJA VS. WRESTLER,
Dan and Matt of VINCIBUS ERUPTUM, and
Jolly of THE WHITE MICE are all in it!!!!!
(I think these are all Providence bands. Three things I like about Providence:
Cheap strip clubs.
It's damp. I like damp.
Besides the Midnight Creeps, Providence bands stay the fuck in Rhode Island.)
PLUS!
The soundtrack features... music by CLUTCH, Hasil Adkins, Psychocharger
and Sawzall, as well as a salvo of THEME SONGS by Superkollider, The Photon Torpedoes, MedLab, The Hangmen, Chuck McCann (of Los Gatos Locos)!
(I, for one, look forward to hearing Brian Small drawl out the words "Die You Zombie Bastards" in that junkie cowboy drawl of his.)

-Sleazegrinder