Horror Colony (2016)

Horror Colony

2016 (tentative), (2.35:1), Horror/fantasy/action, color.

Crew
Director/Writer: J.L. Carrozza.

Horror Colony is a basic concept I've had since shortly after Little Red Riding Hood. The basic idea, of Pilgrims killing the local Native American populace with the zombie/ghoul virus and ending up almost exterminating themselves too, was introduced to me by Dave Luce. The concept really intrigued me and I kept it in mind. Admittedly, in the years after Romero did Dawn of the Dead, zombie films have been done to death, no pun intented, with Romero's creations being actually much closer to ghouls, but they have seldom, if ever, been filmed as period pieces. My initial concept of the film was a sort of schlocky Troma-like treatment, it would have been shot in the woods with much of my short films' collaborators with similar production values and a complete near-slapstick fantasy world just like Little Red Riding Hood. The American Indians would have been depicted in the comic "ignorant stereotype" manner with the elements of about 17 different Native American tribes all conglomerated into one silly mess. I wrote a treatment and then put it aside, thinking of it little as I made Dream House and tried to do Alice in Wonderland. Several of the concepts conceived in this early version have, however, made into my current vision.

Then early on in 2009, I became interested in the project once more after I caught part of the excellent miniseries We Shall Remain on PBS. I suddenly got the idea to make the film further down the road with high production values and mix it with real history which was really just as bloody, if not more so, than any horror film I could imagine. One thing most people don't understand is how terrible the past really was. We see history in an unrealistic, romanticized and rose-tinted fashion. Perhaps this understanding and the desire to subvert societies' lies is why I feel compelled to make such dark fairy tale films. In a way, Little Red Riding Hood, Alison in Wonderland and Horror Colony are all part of a "Fractured Folklore" trilogy with Horror Colony the peniultimate entry. The story of the first Thanksgiving and mental image of the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians cheerfully sitting down to a hearty meal of turkey, stuffing and corn bread together in a way the biggest fairy tale of all. In a way, by twisting this dark history into a grotesque horror plot, I believe I'm showing something far closer to the truth than the sanitized and romanticized yarn we believe.

Horror Colony will be set in the time of King Phillip's War, a time when the Wampanoag Indians and the Puritan colonists in Plymouth were in violent conflict. When the Puritans burn a girl at the stake for "adultery", she makes a pact with Satan before she dies and puts a curse on the whole colony which causes the dead to rise and soon the zombie plague is overrunning the colony. Meanwhile, Chief Metacomet or King Phillip and the Wampanoag Tribe is growing more hostile by the day toward the increasingly less tolerant colonists. Plymouth's Governor Josiah Winslow and Captain Benjamin Church, the leader of the English army in the New World, decide to kill two birds with one stone and throw the plague infected dead in the land of the Pokanoket. At the end of the day, it all climaxes in a grotesque Thanksgiving holocaust as Phillip is defeated and the English have a Thanksgiving celebration that is invaded by hordes of ghouls. I want to film the movie in rural Canada, especially Nova Scotia, as New England is largely too developed. Rural Canada looks a lot like what New England looked like pre-industrial development. However, New England has plenty of undeveloped wilderness so I will probably shoot some smaller scenes here before and after the main unit's photography. Its style will draw influence from everything from Hammer horror to Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds to Peter Jackson's filmography to Werner Herzog to Man Behind the Sun. I am currently at work on a draft of the script which is being written concurrently with that of Coup D'Etat.