“The most stunning, deeply felt zombie short film of all time”

- Film School Rejects

One fall day, I was driving to my parents’ place and thinking about Halloween costume ideas (as one does). I was still living in Boston and during that time of year, when the leaves have turned and the world is straddling the line between very beautiful and very dead, you can’t help but feel a sense of melancholy. Some might call this feeling depression, but whatever your preferred term, I was drowning in it, when my phone started playing some music I’d never heard before: a short piece for cello, marimba and piano.

In that moment, with the haunting sounds and pretty-ugly vistas filling me with a completely misdiagnosed sense of poetic yearning, I suddenly saw great tragedy in one of the dumbest Halloween costume ideas I’d ever had. Very quickly, I knew it should be a movie.

At the time, I was delivering pizzas and not doing much to advance myself as a human being. Another ingredient in the melancholy souffle. So I related to the poor aquarium worker that quickly became the center of the story. He didn’t want to wear his stupid outfit and hand out flyers for the rest of his life just like I didn’t want to deliver pizzas to shut-ins on the outskirts of Boston for the rest of mine. I imagined him (me) being turned into a zombie mid-shift, sentenced to carry that embarrassment, that flightless mark of failure, on his back for all time, one pathetic moment of his life smeared across eternity. The thought of that was pretty scary to me.

A little while later, I asked some friends to help me make it. By then, the gentle melancholy of New England autumn had turned into the grueling, ‘fuck you, it’s freezing’ bitterness of New England winter (probably also depression), but the idea resonated with them still. We got together for several sporadic shoots over the next ten months, placing our Penguombie (as we called him) in every possible zombie trope we could think of. Often it was just the small group of us, doing anything that needed to be done to set up the shot then quickly running into the shot to play another zombie, or victim, or dead body. We stole locations across the northeast, from a defunct dog track, to the New England aquarium, to a final shoot in Brooklyn, where we managed to wrangle 100+ volunteers to converge on a city block in Greenpoint and put on a (very illegal) zombie war for a couple hours.

The only official hires were our brilliant make-up artist Jaime Stone Dead and, of course, the incredible, lovely and patient Michael Wetherbee, who played our Penguombie. Both were center stage for this strange little production and both gave it the sick, sad beating heart it required.

Ultimately, the movie’s budget was just $1500, spent on food, gas, fake blood and a couple penguin suits. We rushed the movie to final cut — two weeks between that final shoot in Greenpoint and the day we released — so that the film could be out in time for (you guessed it) Halloween. And while we ran around New York Comic Con giving out buttons and stickers the following weekend, we were stunned to find that our short was going viral.

This movie brought many good things to my life. For one, I stopped delivering pizzas. For two, literally everything else on this site. Maybe the most satisfying outcome are the yearly emails I still get from people who’ve decided to go as Penguombie for Halloween. There’s a nice circularity to that: the former Halloween costume idea that became a movie that became a Halloween costume idea for many others. It’s very satisfying. It’s almost melancholy even…

Ok, I might have a problem. Enjoy the movie.

Praise for ‘Zombie In A Penguin Suit’

“By the end, it kind of makes you want to hug a zombie. Except don't do that. But do watch this, and don't stop until it's over.” – Huffington Post

“Beautiful, gory and surprisingly emotional” – USA Today

“Beyond exploring the deeper inherent loneliness of being a zombie, ZIAPS also obeys the first law of such films: Always be terrifying.” - Fast Company

“A very high-production-value, often scary, and ultimately very touching seven-minute short film.” – Boing Boing

“There's so much more going on beneath the film's funny title… who wants to see more from director Chris Russell now?” - Movies.com

“This haunting short film by Chris Russell will definitely make you sympathize with the ambulating vitality-deprived.” – i09

“This is seriously one of the best short films I’ve ever seen.” - Buzzfeed