John Skipp’s Rose: The 3D Zombie Puppet Musical Wants You!
Steve Barton
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If there’s one thing our readers (and horror fans in general) complain about more than anything, it’s the lack of original movies. Well, here’s your chance to quit griping behind your keyboard and finally take some ACTION!
Horror author-turned-filmmaker John Skipp has been prepping Rose, his 3D zombie puppet musical, and he’s turned it into a full-on horror community experience by calling on fans and zombie walk groups everywhere to contribute.
Check out their crazy promo video on Kickstarter.com that lays out all the details on how you can make this movie a reality. You’ll get your name in the credits along with a wide variety of cool incentives based on your pledge.
The plot in Skipp’s words: “Rose is a super-hot, hilarious ex-mental patient with a cable access puppet show in downtown LA. But now it’s 48 hours into the zombie apocalypse so she’s running rescue stations and musical numbers round the clock, trying to keep people’s hope alive…and periodically pausing to pulverize the skulls of the zombies trying to bust down her door.”
So what are you waiting for? Kickstarter has been hugely successful for other films, and this is their first major horror title…so quit complaining about remakes and show the world that the horror community has power to make original movies by donating a buck or two to this grassroots project.
From the Press Release:
“Big buck investors come and go, but the audience for cool zombie entertainment is incredibly loyal, and staggeringly huge.” So says bestselling horror legend John Skipp, who is taking an unusual grassroots approach to funding his much-anticipated 3D zombie puppet musical extravaganza, Rose.
Rose — think Pee Wee’s Playhouse meets Night of the Living Dead — is the story of Rose (newcomer Chase McKenna), a hot machete-juggling ex-mental patient with a cable access puppet show, who becomes an unlikely hero of the zombie apocalypse. “Mixing hardcore horror and wacky Bizarro is what it makes it fun,” he says. “Its abnormality is its strength.”
So on Monday Skipp launched a 45-day campaign on the popular website Kickstarter, with the goal of raising $250,000 for the live action feature. He is appealing, in particular, to the thousands of Zombie Walk groups around the world, by offering incentives that include using actual zombie walk footage in the film.
Kickstarter is a site devoted to audience-funded creative projects of all shapes and sizes. In the case of Rose, a $1 pledge gets your name listed (“Visibly listed,” Skipp stresses) in the “Special Thanks” portion of the credit roll. $1,000 gets you an Associate Producer credit. Other incentives range from books, personal thank-you calls or Skype conversations to signed copies of the screenplay, set visits, active zombie participation, and Skipp actually flying to your town, in order to do live commentary on a screening in your own home.
“I got invited to a Facebook group called ‘The Zombie Apocalypse,’” Skipp says, “in which over 400,000 people signed up to say, yes, if the zombie apocalypse happens, I will definitely be attending. Several hundred thousand more remain unsure as to whether they’ll show up. I don’t know if that means they think they’ll be already dead, or what.
“But it made me think, ‘Man, one skinny dollar from each of those folks, and we could make this movie twice!’ And I think Kickstarter’s an amazing model for funding wildly original projects that mainstream Hollywood wouldn’t touch. And those, of course, are the films we need most.”
The campaign ends on February 24, 2011, while the team — including producer Jane Hamilton (Parasomnia) and Almost Human FX (Quarantine, The Crazies) – gets prepped for production. For more information, interviews, and inspiration, go to Kickstarter.com and the official Rose website.
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