One of the most entertaining things to do at Deptford Cinema as a volunteer programmer is to think of unusual film seasons to screen. As a community of film lovers, we love to debate, in great detail, ideas for movies or seasons at the cinema. As a consequence, sometimes volunteers will come up with odd ideas such as a season of films about cats, or more obscure, a season of goat-themed films. Some of these ideas will come to fruition and others won’t.

It was during one of these conversations that one of our volunteers suggested screening a season of films about zombies, but this wasn’t just any ordinary zombie movie season, it had to be a programme of zombie films not in the English language. After all, most of us have seen countless zombie films and TV shows mainly from the USA or the UK. What we wanted to do was show a great variety of films from around the world that hardly ever get shown in British cinemas.

To start with, we needed a name for the season… we tried all sorts of names but nothing really worked. So we decided to Google the word ‘zombie’ and find out what it means. We ended up in Wikipedia (yeah I know) which informed us:

“The English word "zombie" was first recorded in 1819, in a history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey, in the form of "zombi". The Oxford English Dictionary gives the word's origin as West African and compares it to the Kongo words nzambi (god) and zumbi (fetish).”

The word ‘zumbi’ caught our eye; while not exactly the meaning that we were looking for, ‘zumbi’ was close enough and also had a nice ring to it, and so we had a name for our season: Zumbis

Now we needed a tagline, calling it ‘zombie films not in the English language’ or ‘zombie films not in English’ just sounded naff. Finally, one of us came up with:

“A season of zombie films from around the world”

So, we had a theme, we had a name and a tagline. Now we just had to choose the films.

We started with a long list of zombie films not in the English language. By luck, another volunteer had already programmed a Japanese zombie film for screening, so we added that as the first in the season.Our preliminary list looked like this:

ONE CUT OF THE DEAD (Shinichiro Ueda / 2018 / Japan) [already programmed]

[REC] (Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza / 2007 / Spain)

DEAD SNOW (Tommy Wirkola / 2009 / Norway)

TRAIN TO BUSAN (Yeon Sang-ho / 2016 / S. Korea)

THE NIGHT EATS THE WORLD (Dominique Rocher / 2018 / France)

WHAT’S LEFT OF US (Christoph Behl / 2013 / Argentina)

JUAN OF THE DEAD (Alejandro Brugués / 2011 / Cuba)

OJUJU (C.J. Obasi / 2014 / Nigeria)

We decided to discard some movies for this first season, including a French movie as we already had one, and THE WAILING (Na Hong-jin / 2016 / S. Korea) because we didn’t consider it a zombie movie. We also decided to screen JUAN OF THE DEAD much later in the season as we had already shown it before. We wanted to start the season with films never shown before (at Deptford Cinema anyway).

Each of us took one film to programme. This would involve watching the films, first of all, and if they were good contacting distributors to secure the license, book the film on our scheduling calendar, prepare posters, prepare online tickets and online publicity.

Of course, all this is easier said than done. To start with, this was going to be an ongoing season (for as long as we could find foreign films about zombies) and the first hurdle, as usual, was to find the holder of the distribution rights to be able to screen these films.

[REC] was a prime example; at the time it proved impossible to find a distributor who had the screening rights. It was a great shame because this was a very popular film which spawned a series of copycats (including a Hollywood remake). OJUJU was another film we found difficult to secure the license for. In the end, we settled for the easier ones:

ONE CUT OF THE DEAD (Shinichiro Ueda / 2018 / Japan) [already programmed]

DEAD SNOW (Tommy Wirkola / 2009 / Norway)

TRAIN TO BUSAN (Yeon Sang-ho / 2016 / S. Korea)

THE NIGHT EATS THE WORLD (Dominique Rocher / 2018 / France)

WHAT’S LEFT OF US (Christoph Behl / 2013 / Argentina)

So we had our films, we had a season name, a tagline but we still needed a season logo. After a few attempts, one of our volunteers came up with:

Our Zumbis season went live.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there. As usual, life conspired against us and our plans. For instance, The Night Eats The World, despite being a French film, the entire dialogue is in English. This deviated from the premise of a zombie film not in English but we all agreed that it fulfilled the criteria of being ‘from around the world’, also it’s a very good film! Next, due to one of the programmer’s personal issues, the Argentinian film What’s Left of Us had to be cancelled.

Apart from that, the season went ahead as planned, we had a great turnout of people coming to see these films and we were quite pleased with the result.

This means, now that we have the framework, we can always resurrect the season in the future with new and fresh zombie films from around the world - be they in English or (preferably) not. The return of the Zumbis...

Carlos, Mathias, Peter, Sunil.

Edited by Caroline.

The Making of a Zombie Film Season