Horror Colony (2015)

Horror Colony

2015 (tentative), (2.35:1), Horror/fantasy, 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 borderline racist 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 just as bloody as anything I could imagine. One thing most Americans don't understand is how terrible the past really was. We see history in an unrealistic, romanticized and rose-tinted fashion. In reality, it was horrifying. For every valiant Sir Knight who exhibited gallant chivalry, there were at least a thousand women who tortured to death and children who snuffed it before they were two. Similar circumstances go for the founding of America. The first Thanksgiving did not really feature the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians cheerfully sitting down to a hearty meal of turkey, stuffing and corn bread together. In a way, by twisting this dark history into a horror film's plot, I believe I'm showing something far closer to the truth than what we know.

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 virus 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. Governor Josiah Winslow decides to kill two birds with one stone and throw the virus infected dead in the land of the Wampanoag. In the end, it all climaxes in a Thanksgiving zombie holocaust. In a way, the concept is now simultaneously more and less incendiary. On the one hand, the film's sentiment will be fairly pro-Wampanoag and they will be depicted a fair amount of care and accuracy. There will also be subtle homages to the War on Iraq and the strangely not dissimilar circumstances of how that came to be with the depiction of Governor Josiah Winslow being inspired particularly by George W. Bush, ironically both inherited powerful political posts entirely because of their respective fathers' connections. On the other hand, however, the fact that film deals with a much more historically relevant context may infuriate the political correctness lovers even more. The film will be the peniultimate J.L. Carrozza movie: a grand extension of what I began with Little Red Riding Hood and continued with Alison in Wonderland: an iconic/historic story filtered through a more grotesque, honest and decadent modern zeitgeist. Its concept will draw influence from everything from Hammer horror to Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds to Peter Jackson's filmography to Werner Herzog to Men 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.