The making of a zombie movie: On the set with Hectic Films Part One - By N.L. Belardes

Zombie children? What's this world coming to??


The very creepy location of the Downtowner Inn, Bakersfield, Ca.

It was early Saturday morning. I filled two ice chests with soda and water and hauled ass into a downtown haunt that I have driven past for years. Oddly enough, the Downtowner Inn is on 13th Street—a perfect location for a zombie blood-splattered film.


Were there zombies floating in this pool?


Will this motel become a cult classic?

I was given a tour along with Rickey Bird of Hectic Films by one of the building’s caretakers. Let’s just call him Mel. He wore a baseball hat and took us up a creepy elevator across the street from the Inn. He told stories about lawyers and tenants, one including a rather notorious art scene writer whose scripts may be just as mental as some of the crazed zombies I was about to meet.

Across the street, make-up artists gathered in the Downtowner Inn parking structure. A few actors milled about, and eventually I met horror B-movie filmmaker and actor, D.T. Carney. Looking like he just stepped from a Boston punk band, he wore a Social Distortion T-shirt.


D.T. Carney as a zombie monster

D.T. is one of the coolest artists I’ve met. His pure joy for filmmaking and odd collection of zombie gear packed in his trunk was truly amazing—rotting bodies without the smell. Lots of rubberized decomposition. He’s in the movie Zombie Farm coming out soon and has an interesting list of horror film credits.


Is this film even real? Or was it a trick?

I drove D.T. to meet another Bakersfield filmmaker who hides out on the East Side off Loma Linda. His name is Richard McClue, and he runs a website called, The Sanctuary Independent Moviemaking Community. On the way, D.T. and I talked hockey, filmmaking, and eventually picked up a dolly that would be used for some cool film shots of zombies on the march… it was pulled from a shed, tucked behind the house…

It’s fun to be a part of big creative projects that involve words on a page. It’s even more fun when those words leap to cinematic life. When Rickey Bird sent me his script for Hectic Films’ short zombie flick, Wretched Flesh, I thought, this is a good opportunity to get gruesome....

And that’s because the zombie genre is way too fun. High body counts, you got it. Infection wiping out the masses. Lots of that. People caught in the middle of a life and death struggle of survivalist proportions? I love it. But then I’m also a lover of video games like Doom III and Half Life 2. Not to mention I’m a fan of zombie movies like Dawn of the Dead, Resident Evil, 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later.



What Hectic Films is bringing to Bakersfield is a continuation of modern American pop culture, a widespread infection by its own rights as so many people love zombie films, zombie video games, zombie books and zombie graphic novels.

I thought my book was sort of noir. Take Bakersfield, spin in some creepy fog, storms and urban murder and you have Lords: Part One. Now take Bakersfield, smash it into not just a noir style, but apocalyptic ruins. Add a pandemic of zombie infection and you’ll have an idea of what the Hectic Films guys, Rickey Bird and Jason Sanders are trying to pull off.


On the set of Wretched Flesh

I spoke to Rickey right after the filming and asked him about obstacles during the first day of shooting:

I think the biggest obstacle was simply a zombie movie of this magnitude has never been done before in Bakersfield. There’s no real plan. You do it and if it works, great. If not—uh oh. We were relying on so many people who weren’t getting paid. I was also worried that maybe one of our actresses, Sonya, well, I just knew her boobs were going to pop out from doing flips with her crossbow.

Seriously, I feel like it’s a milestone for local filmmakers. There were more people at our film shoot than people who showed up at the last BIFF (Bakersfield Independent Film Festival). If one person didn’t show up, we could have all been screwed. I think I smoked a 1000 cigarettes too. You have a light? Let me just say this too from myself and Jason. Thanks to the people behind the scenes. N.L., you were like our den mother, and many zombies were just really helping out. All I can say is, I’m down with the sickness. Let’s rock!


A giant zombie talks to Jason Sanders


The boys of Birdloaf Productions work with director/actor Rickey Bird

It’s true, they were not doing it alone. Filmmaker Andrew Waite performed camera work while other filmmakers helped out in the production or acting in the film, including Myron Ward of Vindictive Films, Horror B film master D.T. Carney, Jarad ‘Meathead’ Mann of Meatydish Productions (he has a very special gruesome role), Landen Belardes of Shamrock Films, and more…


More from the secret set of Wretched Flesh

What more can I say? I got to watch make-up applied to a mass of monstrosities, including kids. I got to meet a giant zombie over 7-feet tall. I got to spray people with fake blood made from… oh wait, I can’t tell you that. I got to drive while filmmakers shot footage. I even got to wander the creepy haunted halls of the newly renovated Downtowner Inn. This is a venue deserving of a tour that should include Chinese tunnels and ghostly Oleander area haunts.

In the meantime, the Inn is going to gain even more notoriety by having its walls splattered with fake blood. A Bakersfield Hollywood in the making? Who knows?

Now if we could just get some local psychics from the same Oleander neighborhood to hold a séance at the Downtowner to call up some ghosts from Lords of Bakersfield urban lore.

I wonder if Hectic films would be brave enough to shoot that!


An apocalyptic zombie nation?

Coming soon: The making of a zombie movie: Part Two.

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Friday, May 25, 2007. You can leave your response.