We were zombie hunters once… And young

Let Imagethief escort you into the wayback machine and take you back nearly three decades to the tumultuous and magical year of 1983…

A first-term Ronald Reagan is staring down the Evil Empire. M*A*S*H is coming to the end of its legendary run. American troops invade the island of Granada and win. Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”, Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” and Phil Collins’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” are monster hits, but a brash, young woman implausibly named “Madonna” is raising eyebrows with poodle-skirts and a song called “Lucky Star.” Spy Hunter, Gyruss and Mario Brothers hit the arcades. Apple Computer brings forth its masterpiece: The Lisa, yours for only $9,995. And your correspondent is a fifteen year-old sophomore at Palo Alto High School.

Buffeted by the triple-whammy of pop culture, hormones and nerdiness, my friends and I reacted to this foment in the only way possible: We made a zombie movie. Every nation and tribe has its rite of passage into manhood. In the Amazon, youths of the Xicrin tribe subject themselves to wasp stings. Young Masai men have to kill a lion. If you were an American suburban youth in the 1980s, you filmed a home-made zombie movie. Or, anyway, that’s what I and my main collaborator Mark Murnane did. Thus 1983 will be remembered for introducing audiences to two horrifying movie creatures: The Ewoks and the teenage zombies of Metro Circle.

It wasn’t easy. 1983 was also the year of the first consumer camcorder, but they were about as common as private submarines. Even VCRs were still magical. My friend Colin was the only person I knew who had one, because his dad was an anesthesiologist who could afford rarefied luxuries. It was top-loading and had clunky, old-fashioned tuner knobs on the front that went chunk! chunk! when you turned them. I thought it was awesome. Colin’s dad also had a Kaypro computer. I’m convinced to this day that’s why the chicks used to cling to Colin.

The upshot was that if you wanted to film something you had to be old-school and actually film it. Fortunately, I had somehow finagled my dad into buying a used Super-8mm sound camera. It had some German name like Braunschweig or Schtüpphammer and was the second coolest object I ever owned. The coolest was my giant Millennium Falcon play-set, purchased before the Ewoks destroyed the magic.

I made a lot of idiotic movies while I owned this camera. I hurled a dummy off the top of my dad’s four-story Victorian for the death scene in a gangster piece. I recreated a news set and called myself “Dan Rather” to do a bunch of news satires (highlight: throwing a cupful of flour into the face of my friend Dan Terdiman to simulate the ash from Mt. St. Helens). I put my brother in a brown bedsheet and latex monster mask and had him irradiate me with pin-scratch death rays shot from his eyes. I set fire to every conceivable object –including, in a moment of Ewok rage, my Millennium Falcon play set– in the name of special effects research.

But none of that stuff was as involved as the zombie flick my friends and I put together that year. The working title was “Solstice of the Dead” (“Night” and “Dawn” already being taken by that poser, Romero). For one thing, it wasn’t cheap. Super 8mm sound film cost nearly $20 a roll after processing. If you shot on the slower 18fps speed you got a shade more than three minutes out of a roll. Once you shot something, it was in the can and there was nothing to do but pray you nailed it. No videotape do-overs or instant-reviews. If you blew a shot, that was irreplaceable inches of film stock pissed away. We might as well have been running dollar bills through the sprockets. In some small, adolescent way I understood the stress of a professional film producer watching the sun set on a working crew costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. In 1983, even in Palo Alto, $60 of film amounted to roughly the same thing to me.

It was also a major creative undertaking for a bunch of teenage geeks. We had lights (or rather, one light). We had a vehicle for the opening shots. We had separate houses for the exterior and interior shots. We had props (guns) and makeup (zombies). We shot day and night. We had stunts. We wrote a script, blocked our scenes and shot reverse angles. We edited the raw footage on a manual editing block with tape.

The reason why I am taking this monster detour into my misty teenage memories is that about a year after we filmed “Solstice”, the reel vanished into a box in Murnane’s house, never to be seen again. At least, until three days ago when Murnane posted it on YouTube, having finally recovered the reel from the bottom of whatever shoebox it had been living in and digitized it. This was the first time I’d seen this film in 26 years. To oversimplify a complicated set of emotions, it made me nostalgic. It’s strange to watch the fifteen year old version of myself romping around in the glow of suburban, American youth, and to be reminded of the things I imagined for myself when I was that young. It’s strange to see first-hand something I’ve reminisced about for nearly three decades. And I wanted to share it.

Sorry for that. Don’t get your hopes up. This is not the work of prodigies. For one thing, it’s the roughest of rough cuts. Sixty seconds of a four minute movie is dedicated to one triage scene. Also, the location sound didn’t survive the transfer, so you’ll have to imagine what we’re saying to each other. It’s not that hard. “You take the back, I’ll go in the front!”…”Argh!” and so on. If I get a version with sound I’ll post that, too (take that as a threat). Plus there is some random junk at the end, including a very brief shot of my brother, who is an actual professional filmmaker today.

Still, it’s pretty good fun, and comes with a dramatic Butch-and-Sundance style charge-into-the-unknown at the end. Also, you can play “spot Imagethief.” Try to guess which skinny punk is me. For those who can’t tell, here are a couple of captures. This one is just me, and I’m packing (a toy gun, admittedly). In this one Murnane is on the left and I’m on the right.

While I’m still in touch with a few of the people in this film thanks to Facebook, I don’t think I’ve actually seen any of them face-to-face since we all graduated in 1985. My 25th high school reunion is this summer. I’ve never been to any of my reunions, and I doubt I’ll make it to this one for the usual reasons. But seeing this old film again takes me at least part of the way there.

The Players (in order of appearance)

• Ray Weiner: Zombie on the lawn
• Will Moss: Zombie Cop 1
• Mark Murnane: Zombie Cop 2
• Jerry D’Onfrio: Athletic zombie in tube socks
• Brad Weiners: Zombie Cop 3 (AKA unlucky Zombie Cop)
• Rick Scouffas: Zombie behind the couch (and crack stunt man)
• Unknown: Zombie in the night 1 (Anybody care to identify themselves?)
• Joel Sisk: Zombie in the night 2
• Plus behind the scenes help from others.

Note: I’m not positive we made this 1983, but it was thereabouts and I would have found as much goofy trivia from any year.

Note 2: Title of this post with the deepest of apologies to Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph Galloway.