Rising Stars is The Stargazer’s interview series where we sit down with young filmmakers to discuss their projects, inspirations, and goals. We recently had the opportunity to speak with director and screenwriter Kyle Ziton about his horror short and his upcoming feature film, along with zombies, hippies, and hope (oh my!).
Note: The following are excerpts.

The Stargazer: So, this is going to be a tricky opening question. If you could go on vacation right now in one movie or fantasy world, where would you go?

Kyle Ziton: The first thing that comes to mind is that I would love to have Thanksgiving dinner with Steve Martin and John Candy from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.

S: Oh, interesting! That’s extremely specific. Why?

KZ: I think the characters are interesting, and I’ve always been a big fan of the suburban kind of stuff in winter. That movie’s just one of my favorite comfort movies. The dialogue is so sharp; it literally is just a two man show. And the fact that you’ve got two legends of comedy, Steve Martin and John Candy, that click so well.… In movies, when you have great comedic actors, sometimes they don’t mesh as well. The fact that those two, at the height of their careers, mesh so well in that movie…. The dialogue and the comedy are so funny in that. For me, if I could go anywhere in a movie, for just an evening, that would be where I go.

S: That was an unexpected answer. I think you’d have a really fun time. So let’s talk a little about your short film, Working Title, which recently won a Best Horror Short Film Award. Congratulations.

KZ: Thank you so much. Yeah, that came out of the blue.

S: You weren’t expecting that to happen?

KZ: Well, the whole thing is – the curse of watching your own stuff is, you’re like: “Ah, I wish I could have done this better.” As you’re making it, you’re learning. So, by the time you get done making it, you’re better at what you’re doing, and you can’t go back and change what you’ve already done. I’m extremely proud of it, though. I mean, the cast and crew were great. It was stressful for a lot of us because it was a lot of our first times doing a big shoot. I think for most of the actors, that was their first “big thing.” It was them getting to do more acting stuff because with the short, I didn’t want to just have a bunch of kills onscreen. I wanted to at least give the actors a chance to have a character, perform, and have some big scene. When you have six main characters and you have about twenty minutes of screen time, you’re trying to pace out to give everyone a moment.

S: I like that you brought that up because I wanted to talk to you about how Working Title was so clearly influenced by other horror and slasher films, but did something really interesting with the characters. Unlike many of those movies, you didn’t have an iconic murderer character who is the main actor in the film. It was really centered on the victim characters. Can you talk a little about that decision?

KZ: Yeah. Well, I’ve always been a fan of horror, pretty much ever since I got into film. I’ve always tried to be a champion of horror because it’s the blue-collar filmmaker genre. All you need to make a horror movie is a mask and a bunch of actors. You can do really great stuff, and you can do super cheap exploitation stuff. When I went to film school, what really disheartened me was that when I was going to the writing classes, there was a lot of negativity towards specifically horror and slasher. It really got under my skin because of the fact that horror is the first genre of film. The oldest existing film we have is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, then you have stuff like Nosferatu. There were a bunch of people in my class who had never really seen horror, who were like, “Oh, it’s just a bunch of models who can’t act, who get killed by a guy in a mask.” No, you can do interesting stuff with the genre! For example, the original Black Christmas – that was the first movie to ever deal with abortion. That movie came out a year after Roe v. Wade, and you have the lead character dealing with that. Then you have Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even Halloween, which were dealing with the idea that we were starting to see people like Ed Gein, Charles Manson, and the Nightstalker, and all of these people who were just horrible people, murdering people. Horror films represent the horrors of the decade they’re made in, so for me, Working Title was an attempt to take everything back to basics. There are so many slasher films now that feel the need to wink at the audience and say, “Oh, we know what this is that we’re playing with. We don’t need to take the slasher stuff seriously.” And the idea behind Working Title was, let’s do it sincerely. Working Title wears its heart on its sleeve. Yes, we have the jock, we have the nerd, we have the main survivor girl, we have the stoner. We have all these characters, and the idea was let’s let them be people for a little bit. We had the jock date the hippie character, had the stoner character – and this isn’t as much in the short as I wanted it to be – but had the stoner character be an openly gay man in the 90s and be friends with the hippie, and there’s the scene where he’s in the barn saying, “Oh, you won’t be a fifth wheel….” Everyone’s got some underlying problem that they’re dealing with. That’s where the idea for the pitch came from: The Breakfast Club gets killed by Jason.

S: Oh, that’s a fun pitch. I think all of that comes through, and the sincerity works really well for the film. But besides the fact that like you said, horror is the first genre, what else draws you to working in the horror genre? Your upcoming feature film has some of those horror sensibilities as well.

KZ: It’s the genre that allows self-reflection more so than any other genre. It’s also the only genre, to me, that has made the successful transition into having mostly female leads. 98% of my scripts have female lead characters, and to me that’s important. As a kid, I was always more into the arts and stuff, and the genre is specifically designed to be creative and allow you to have a group of characters that are different. Horror is also the only genre where you see different cliques hanging out and it’s not a problem. Even in almost any early Friday the 13th movie, you’ve got stoners, you’ve got the jock, you’ve got the “promiscuous girl,” you’ve got the main girl, and no one is being rude to anybody. They’re all just friends. They can all just chill and hang out, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And often, specifically in slashers, you have a killer who has the ideology of the 1950s, who wants to go back and be more traditional. They have some kind of phallic object – like a machete, a claw, a knife – and they are trying to get rid of the lead female, who most of the time is progressive, in the sense of pushing forward and heading into the next decade. Then the main girl “penetrates” and kills the evil man that’s killing off her friends. I think there’s some interesting symbolism there, specifically when slashers were big in the 80s. You’re thirty years after the 50s, which had kind of the traditional Americana ideology. So thirty years after that, you have a response of a generation saying no. We want these ideas gone.

S: That is a really interesting point. I think you’re right that they tend to be more progressive. They change with the times. Even if you think about some recent thriller horrors, like Us, or anything like that.

KZ: If you even look at one of the greatest directors that we have now, David Fincher, a lot of his films are structured – I’ll use Zodiac as an example. Zodiac is structured to be kind of like a horror slasher film. Seven, also. Alien, from Ridley Scott. That structure for me is one of the things I love about the genre, because it allows you to have a group of people that you get to know. At the fifteen-minute mark, you get something supernatural or something that throws in a new curve. You have the building of tension, then you take away the comfort of these people’s security, you strip certain characters away (and hopefully the audience is invested in those characters), and you get to see the hero, the heroine, triumph over the villain. I think the structure is really what makes a lot of horror films.

S: Yes, and like you said, there’s so much room to be creative within the structure. Building on that, let’s talk about your upcoming feature film, Last Stand of the Dead, which is in pre-production right now. For those who may not be familiar with it, what’s your quick elevator pitch?

KZ: Apocalypse Now but with zombies, set twenty-seven years after the outbreak happened.

S: Wow, that’s ambitious! Working within the limits of the pandemic right now must be interesting.

KZ: It is! It’s very interesting. We were supposed to shoot last November, then we got pushed back to March. This pandemic is just kicking everybody’s butt, and hopefully we’ll be able to get it filmed this year. 2020 and 2021 are not the best years to start going into filming.

S: That is true. But maybe there is something to be learned when you’re making a zombie film.

KZ: Exactly. The irony is not lost on me.

S: So, we’ve talked a little bit about what influences your work, but specifically for this film, what was the inspiration?

KZ: Well, I wanted to make zombies scary again, not so much as the monster, but because of what they do. I mean, there are some great zombie comedies, Sean of the Dead, Zombieland. But for me, the fact that the zombie is the most modern day of the created monsters because Frankenstein, Dracula, and Wolfman are from like the 1800s and 1600s, the fact that the zombie came out in the 1960s, the fact that it is the most modern monster we have, and the fact that the zombie represents an economic crash, is interesting. If you look back, zombie media sells really well during times of economic depression, and vampires do really well during economic boom. I think what made me want to do this film was that I wanted to do a movie with zombies, but I wanted to treat them as an actual threat. But also, the big kicker was that I wanted to do it thirty years after everybody gave up, because every zombie movie is “Oh my god, a week ago, the world was normal!” We’ve seen those characters. For me, the winning idea was that this is thirty years after everything has happened. The world is just kind of in stasis at this point and everyone’s kind of hiding out. There are certain people who are factioned off, but there aren’t world governments. An entire generation has grown up in this world. It’s dealing with my feelings on global warming and the responsibility we have to the next generation. In two generations from now, what is the world going to be, and how are people going to deal with it? Are they going to hate us, are they going to feel sympathy for us, are they going to try to live their lives out, are they going to try to survive? Is it worth surviving? It was an interesting series of questions to ask to those characters.

S: That climate change stuff is super powerful, especially when you think about some of the signs that we now leave at nuclear dump sites and places like that… it’s like an apology to the future.

KZ: Right! And that’s the thing: How do people feel about it? Are they angry about it? What do they feel and what do they have to survive now because of consequences that were beyond their control?

S: That is something that we’re dealing with now, so that is a really great message. On that note, what do you hope that audiences get out of the film?

KZ: I’ll say this: there are three antagonists in the story. Each of the antagonists could have helped the main characters, but they chose not to, either for greed, for patriotism, or for the promise of something that can’t happen. I think what I want the audience to take away from that is that this is the only life we have and what we do in it matters, so don’t not help people. This is probably gonna be the most hippie thing I’ve ever said, but the only way to save everybody is through love and compassion. That’s really the only thing that can do it, and the consequences to the world if we don’t do that… the world’s going to go on; we’re not going to survive it. At a certain point, you just have to look into the abyss and say, okay. Let the dead have it. I think that’s the interesting metaphor with zombies – they’re us. We’re looking at the rotten, dead versions of ourselves. That’s the powerful image that has been lost in a lot of zombie movies. They take away our individualism, they take away our life, and they literally make us walk around empty and sad. I don’t want that.

S: Well, the hippies were right about some things, right? Switching gears now, for Working Title, you co-directed with your friend, Matthew Monelli. This is your first time as a solo director, which is exciting. Can you talk a little about what that’s been like and how it’s been different for you?

KZ: Well, first, I have to thank Matt. He was just going to direct Working Title, then he brought me on as co-director, and I am eternally thankful for him allowing me to co-direct. And now, getting a chance to solo direct is a little scary, but what’s nice about it is that it allows me to create a full vision. Working Title is 100% our vision, but the reality is that whenever you’re working with another director, you are working with somebody else on that level, and you can’t get everything you want. I think Matt would agree with me on that. Now, every single shot is going to be mine, in a way. It’s exciting, and scary, and really rewarding. What’s great about it is that I’m working with a lot of the same people from Working Title on the production side. I’m even bringing back some of the same actors. It’s really going to feel like a reunion in some ways, which is really good. I’m looking forward to getting on set and filming. Hopefully it works out!

S: Oh, I didn’t know you were working with some of the same crew! I’m sure it’s kind of comforting to have the same people around.

KZ: Exactly, and it’s nice because we’re all on the same movie level. We all know the same movies, so I can turn to my DP and say, “You know that shot in Apocalypse Now where they’ve got the light behind the guy and the silhouette?” And he knows exactly what I’m talking about. There’s a shorthand, which is really helpful. Tristan [Ellis, the Director of Photography] saved my butt on Working Title a lot, and I’m sure he’s going to save my butt on Last Stand.

S: It’s great to have a solid group of people you can work with, and I’m looking forward to seeing the film when it is finished! One more question: What is your ultimate mission as a writer/director and what kind of stories do you ultimately want to tell?

KZ: I want to tell stories that are not the “billion-dollar movie.” I don’t want to make the genre-defining movie, ironically. I want to make a movie that would have inspired me when I was a kid. I want to make those movies. I want to make the movies that have the indie spirit, and some character stuff, and some emotional stuff. I want to take genre films – like zombie, slasher, deal-with-the-devil movies – the genre stuff that everyone else has given up on, and I want to try to make a drama out of it. I want to put drama back into genre.

 

Kyle Ziton graduated from Full Sail University with a degree in creative writing in 2018. After graduation, he moved back home to Fargo, North Dakota, where he works as an independent filmmaker. His horror short film, Working Title, available to view on Troma Now and AVAIL TV, recently won Best Horror Short at the 2020 Hollywood Florida Film Festival. Currently, he is in pre-production on a feature film called Last Stand of the Dead, which will mark his solo directorial debut. He also lends his talents to a television show called Splintered Barrel, for which he has written the pilot episode. Kyle can be found on Facebook as Kyle Ziton and on Instagram at @spaceshippoet.

Written by: Cassidy Elibol