July 2002, right after the premiere of Binge & Purge (my last shot-on-video picture), I felt good, but still unfulfilled. The movie had been fun to make, we made new friends, and I told the story I set out to tell, but at the same time I felt a nagging sense of doubt. It was as though I had temporarily gained clairvoyance of some kind and I could just see the bad reviews as they came in. Not just because of the movie being so different from either of the Meat Market movies, but because I felt rushed while I was doing it. Almost like I was trying to beat myself to an imaginary finish line of my own construction. That feeling of a lack of completion was what drove me to craft Exhumed, a cross-genre movie, told as an anthology, with three stories of the undead in different time periods, each done in the style of a certain cinematic era. The stories would be interlinked with each other, and at its core the movie would be good solid horror. The title would take on a triple meaning, literally, artistically and metaphorically. Ambitious, to be sure, but something I felt I wanted to tackle and really do right.

Taking on three genres; samurai, film noir, and post-apocalyptic, was a fairly grand endeavor, and I didn't restrain myself from writing scenes set in the Antarctic, 1940's burlesque clubs, or fog-enshrouded forest groves in ancient Japan. After coming up with a wild and convoluted storyline (with echoes of Lovecraft) I had to sit back and look at it practically to see if it could all be done. There were plenty of costumes left over from previous movies I could use, a few ideas for sets and locations, but I still had to spend a month shopping around for props and new equipment. Not only that but since I was shooting the post-apocalyptic scenes first, I had to come up with either a prison cell, or a set of jail cell bars to make a room look like a prison cell. Although I had been lucky enough to shoot a few older movies in a derelict police station here years ago, it had since been torn down and my only option was to build a simple prison set. So I made a set of cell bars out of a few pieces of wood and long PVC tubing. When painted, it looked enough like jail cell bars to be convincing, but was still light enough for one person to haul around.

While I was working on the set decoration, I had also decided that it was high time to find some real actors, and if they couldn't act too well, to at least keep their dialogue to a minimum. I held auditions, with a 'panel' consisting of myself, some of the already-cast leads (from a pool of actor friends), and a couple friends not really attached to the movie just for some objective opinions. From these we managed to score some good performers, and a few crazies too. It's both amusing and disturbing to receive angry emails or phone calls from actors who've been turned down, telling me that the movie was the worst thing they'd ever heard of, and that was their 'advice from above'.

Getting down to shooting is both incredibly fun and fulfilling, and at the same time often frustrating. Exhumed was no exception. I had almost forgotten what it was like making incessant phone calls to actors trying to make sure everyone will show up at the proper location, or to haul out huge amounts of equipment and bags of costumes to and from the set, or to clean sticky fake blood off everything at the end of the day. Something I also realized upon shooting (that I suppose I should have taken into account on the previous movies) was that I really didn't have the resources or budget to show the immense scale of the story. So I had to improvise with lighting and shadows (and later with sound design) to fool the audience into thinking they were seeing more than they really were. It also helped to partially hide the makeup effects, whether a body being sliced open by a chainsaw, or a snarling werewolf in shadow, or darkened lighting schemes, to suggest a greater level of realism. On this picture, as with Binge & Purge, Jason Ward created most of the prosthetics and special effects makeup, and to great advantage.

Shooting of "Last Rumble," the post-apocalyptic segment, was completed first. It was probably the most makeup-heavy portion of the movie, with gangs of rockabilly werewolves and vampiric mods on scooters, numerous mutilated troopers and undead, and three of the lead actors outfitted with special contact lenses. After this I moved on to the film noir story, "Shadow of Tomorrow." This segment required even greater attention to detail since I was trying to recreate a specific period in real history, not just a mythical future of war-torn devastation. This will sound terribly corny, but one of the greatest inspirations for working on Exhumed was the documentary on the making of the Lord of the Rings on the extended Fellowship DVD. The insane amount of detail worked into everything on those films made me realize just how important tiny details can be, even if the audience only perceives them on a subliminal level. I became consumed with the need to fully detail costumes, maps, newspapers, and every set, no matter how long the scene would actually last in the movie.

Locations were fairly easy to come by for this part of the story. Victoria, BC is filled with great old buildings, one of which is the tiny house I live in that was built in 1893! This, along with my extremely talented girlfriend Claire (who designed all the costumes and did the women's hairstyling) made for a very smooth filmmaking experience. We even managed to get period handguns from a contact in the local antique firearms collector club. By far the most rewarding shoot we did was the opening graveyard scene. I had worked for days carving and painting fake gravestones, making crucifixes and scouting the location by an old train-yard. When we got to shooting it I was so enamoured with the set we had put up that I shot twice as much coverage as I had planned, and with perfect luck we wrapped up and finished tearing everything down just as it started to rain.

Preparing for the "Shi no Mori" (Forest of Death) segment was also highly detailed and a lot of fun. Again, my luck prevailed as I had two very talented Japanese friends who were skilled in martial arts. They helped me to translate my English dialogue into an antiquated 19th century-style of Japanese for them to speak, and we spent hours working out the fight scene choreography. They were also very enthusiastic, screaming practically every line during rehearsals. This was probably the easiest portion of the movie to shoot, since it had only three real characters, and only two of them with any lines. Every scene was shot outdoors, with much of the final battle scene done on a friend's large outdoor lot so we could hook up lights for the all-important final showdown.

Editing started in May of 2003, as I decided to leave everything until the end of shooting. There were a few reshoots of a handful of shots I wasn't quite happy with, but for the most part I had all the components I needed to make the movie happen. It was tedious, but like shooting, ultimately more rewarding than anything else. Because I had shot such a huge amount of footage (a little more than 12 hours) I had plenty to work with to pare down to a feature-length picture. If shooting and editing the movie can be likened to piecing together Frankenstein's monster, then adding sound effects and a music score are the lightning that bring it to life. Sound effects are so important to add a further layer of texture, especially on a low-budget that can't afford to show the overpowering spectacles of a mainstream Hollywood movie. Hours were spent with friends recording sword noises, undead groans, crazed laughter, even the 'noise' of squirting arterial blood-sprays that surely exist only in the universe of cinema.

With this rough edit done, all I had left to do was hand it to Justin Hagberg, who had done the music score for my three previous pictures. Unfortunately he had been on tour with his metal band until I had finished editing, but he came home in time to check out the rough cut and begin work. He concocted another great score that, just as I was trying to do with the visual storytelling aspect, used separate styles for each segment while all clearly coming from the same movie.

Even though the DVDs weren't quite ready in time for the premiere the week before Halloween this year, we had a master copy we used for the theatrical showing, and it was incredibly successful. We filled the theatre for an 11:30 PM showing and I can honestly say it was one of the best nights of my life. After the show I was surrounded by smiling friends and bombarded with hugs and handshakes. The enormous weight of worry and fear had been lifted, and I knew that what I was doing was not just good and fun, but really what I love doing. So now here I am, sending out dozens of copies, knowing that Exhumed was not only worth making, but it's something I'm genuinely proud of, and unlike my previous pictures, I send out with no reservations or excuses.