By Shannon McGrew
In NIGHT OF THE ZOOPOCALYPSE, after a meteor unleashes a virus that turns zoo animals into zombies, a mountain lion (David Harbour) and wolf (Gabbi Kosmidis) lead a team of surviving animals to stop the virus and rescue their zoo.
For the release of NIGHT OF THE ZOOPOCALYPSE, Creepy Kingdom's Shannon McGrew spoke with co-director Ricardo Curtis and Rodrigo Perez-Castro. During their chat, they discussed everything from turning a Clive Barker concept into a family film to balancing scares and laughs in their animated zombie adventure.
Thank you both for speaking with me today. To start things off, what initially drew you both to this story?
Ricardo Curtis: The story was originally an unpublished graphic novel for adults by Clive Barker. Our production partner at Copperheart and writer Steve Hoban had secured the rights to this. He approached me and said he had this idea from Clive Barker and wanted to make it a family film. Once he gave me the pitch I knew there was something there. I then reached out to Rodrigo, who I've worked with for a long time.
Rodrigo Perez-Castro:Â I love everything horror, and when Ricardo told me the very simple premise of a zoo zombie invasion, I was like, of course, this is perfect, we need to do this, let's find the most wild original way to make this happen.
Ricardo Curtis: Clive gave us as much freedom as we wanted to turn his concept into a family film. It's not exactly his genre, but it's ours. It's the best way for creatives to really work; where you have a concept and the freedom to put your stamp on it. At the end, we showed it to him and he really loved it.
What were some of your biggest influences when developing the film's visual style and tone?
Rodrigo Perez-Castro: We grew up with [movies] like Gremlins, Ghostbusters, and Labyrinth, all the lovely things from the 80s that made us who we are. We felt like there wasn't much like that anymore for kids to enjoy, so we wanted to channel a lot of that in terms of just giving kids that fun, spooky ride, like going to a haunted house.
Ricardo Curtis: You wanted that feeling where you look up to your older brother, sister, friends and they're watching something and you know you're not supposed to watch it, but you want to so you sneak in, go to a theater with a bunch of your friends, and then after you watch it you survive it and are a big kid now.
Rodrigo Perez-Castro: We used to stumble upon things on TV back in the day, which is very hard now because of streaming. So we're hoping that people can stumble upon this movie the same way.
Stylistically speaking, one of the movie's biggest influences was the approach to lighting. This movie happens in one night, and we knew we wanted to make it interesting and not dull. We looked a lot at Dario Argento's Suspiria to draw from the colors, saturation, and crazy vibrancy. That was a huge, huge influence. As horror fans, there are many influences in John Carpenter's films and Spielberg's, things we have in our DNA.
Ricardo Curtis: You'll see in the film that we have a lot of callbacks, a lot of things that we know exactly what they are because we saw the original films, but a lot of our audience have no idea what that stuff is and so we introduced them to it along the way. That way, young and older audience members can enjoy the film because we're talking at two different levels. The tone was our most difficult thing, because how do we make something that actually is for an entire family, without taking away the scares? Without scaring the pants off everyone in the audience? We had this concept of what we would do; every time we had a jump scare, we would follow it up with a laugh.
Rodrigo Perez-Castro: Walt Disney used to say that for every laugh, there should be a tear, and we were like, for every scare, there should be a laugh, which was a balancing act. When we have very tense moments, we always follow them with relief and laughter.
Ricardo Curtis: Part of that balance is its timing, where we had jokes, and where we put the scares. We also created a character named Poot who's a pygmy hippo and she steals the scene every time she's in it but she's not scared throughout the entire film. She thinks this is all a great big game. If she feels she will be okay, all our younger audiences will think everything will be OK, too.
The film features a stellar cast. What were you looking for when finding the right voice actor for each role?
Ricardo Curtis: We are an independent film so we're not backed by a giant studio with tons of cash. Those types of films are often motivated by star power, and for us, we're not opposed to star power, but we're much more interested in the quality of the voice within the film, which can bring these characters to life. When we did our casting, we listened to lots and lots [of voices], but it's not like we stopped on the biggest box office draw, we stopped where we heard the best voice. A great example of that is our lead actor Gabbi Kosmidis, who's a virtual unknown, but she did a fantastic job. When we heard her voice we stopped right there.
Rodrigo Perez-Castro: Then there are people like David Harbour who we had pretty high on the list [for the mountain lion] and he wanted to do it! Regarding your initial question, we were looking for more contrast than anything. So much of this is an ensemble piece so we wanted these characters to sound very different. They reflect unique personalities and animal species, so the contrast was a big driving force.
I grew up loving Disney animation and later became obsessed with Laika's distinctive style. I noticed that NIGHT OF THE ZOOPOCALYPSE takes a unique approach to animation - can you share more about that?
Ricardo Curtis: Since this is an independent animated film, one of the benefits is we get to make the calls, and one of our calls as experienced animation professionals is that you want to create something new, original, and that stands out on its own. You want to make it look and feel like it's only its thing. When you look at [the style of] an Aardman film or a Laika film, only Aardman's doing that, only Laika's doing that. We wanted our film to be like that as well.
Rodrigo Perez-Castro: We were also driven by what the movie was. We knew that we wanted to get away with a lot of spooky, horror body tropes such as zombies dropping limbs and heads rolling, all that kind of stuff. We could only get away with it if we went very stylized and cartoony. We went back to the beginning of animation history with The Skeleton Dance and very rubber-hosey limbs and things like that. That's really where we found our inspiration. When you look at all our mutants and see that they're dropping their limbs, it's basically what Disney was doing in the '20s. It's very much that animation style, but there's also other things that we love. For example, Ricardo and I love Muppets. Our characters are very muppety. There were definitely a lot of things that we both loved that we injected in the style of the film and the characters.
Ricardo Curtis: There was also discovery as we went along. This is a zombie invasion, and will we do Night of the Living Dead zombies? No, we're an animation, we can do far more than that. So, Rodrigo came up with this concept...
Rodrigo Perez-Castro: ...to make them gummy. Which was kind of a weird, random thing since we can't do gore because we want to stay PG. One time I was eating a normal gummy and I was like, why don't we make [the characters] gummy textured so they can drop all these body parts. I pitched it to Ricardo and then we pitched it to the producers. I thought they would say we were crazy, but they said, let's do it! Then we had the art director do this beautiful concept of the gorilla as a gummy, which looked so cool.
Lastly, if you had to survive a zoopocalypse in real life, which animal would you want as an ally?
Ricardo Curtis: Initially, I guess I would think a very large creature, but that means that large creature could become a very large zombie, which we have in the movie. Maybe something fast and cunning, like a fox. Something that could actually help survive and out think the zombies, cause zombies aren't very smart.
Rodrigo Perez-Castro: I'm going to go with an elephant. I'd go big. Let's scare the mutants with another big animal [Laughs].
NIGHT OF THE ZOOPOCALYPSE arrives in theaters on March 7, 2025.