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I had the pleasure of some great email correspondence lately with some other zombie aficionados. First I want to give a shout to Carter Reid over at The Zombie Nation, who had sent me a contact back in March saying he was a fan of Zombie Ranch. Now, my email at that time somehow decided a contact form from my own website was spam and shunted it to the junk folder, where I only found it by accident a couple weeks later after one of Dawn’s emails shared the same fate. Fortunately, it was a case of better late than never, and Carter and I went on to have an interesting discussion about zombie flicks, in addition to doing the link exchange thing, etc. etc.
Carter’s site isn’t just his comic but the site of his rather prolific blog, which is actually where I learned about the site of the second group. You might expect that anything combining zombies and westerns pings my radar (and you’d be right), but so far most of the examples of the genre fusion I’ve run across have been on the campy side of the equation. I’ll probably talk about a couple of those in blogs to come…
Anyhow, enter Revelation Trail, a film and multimedia project in the works concerning the effects of a zombie outbreak in the American frontier of the 1880’s. I clicked on their “first look” link and was immediately drawn in, as I watched a scene depicting a man apparently so desperately lonely that he talks about the weather and his life to a zombie he’s caught in a bear trap. That sounds extremely campy as a concept, but it’s played straight, and–in my own damned opinion–it works. It’s the same sort of straightforward, humanistic style in the midst of the bizarre that I’ve tried to capture in Zombie Ranch. My only critical thought was it might have been even more powerful if he had gotten through his whole story and only then do we find out what he’s talking to, especially for trailer purposes… but that’s nitpicking. It was good stuff.
Even more impressive were the animated diaries of “Lilith’s Story” which are part of the website’s promotional materials. I can’t say enough good things about these little pieces of art, but I feel like I’d be destroying the experience to do so. So I’ll just say: go watch them. They’re not long, but they show a lot of care in every aspect of their craftsmanship, including certain subtleties you may miss the first time if you blink.
By the time I was done with the diaries, I had to write to the Revelation Trail team and gush. Then they wrote a long email back where, amongst other things, they said they came and checked us out here, and had some praise for Zombie Ranch in turn. Oh, and they mentioned they were greatly inspired by the movie Unforgiven, which if you know me at all (or have read this blog in the past), you know that’s a fantastic way to get on my good side. Not that they needed to after I’d seen their work, but it’s great to find that a group whose stuff you admire is as friendly as they are talented.
Anyhow, time to cap off the gush. But Revelation Trail is just getting started, and since I stumbled on them through pure word of mouth (well, word of blog), here’s some further mention. Check them out, tell your friends, join their Facebook. I think they’ve got something really memorable in the works, here.