Will you venture Into The Zombie Underground?

Directors/screenwriters Jeff Buhler and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo have commenced work on yet another feature script/project, this one for Fox, entitled Into the Zombie Underworld.

“We are working on the script right now,” offered Buhler. “It’s based on this article about a guy who went to Haiti when his wife was part of the UN peacekeeping mission there, just before the earthquake. The article had some parallels to The Serpent and the Rainbow, in that he started digging into the secret voodoo world that exists there. He embarked on this mystery, learned how neurotoxins work, and of the hidden zombie world, which is a very real thing. The article was fascinating, and we’re adapting it now as a feature.”

Of their take, Buhler stated, “I love zombie movies, but I feel that the supernatural version of zombies that we’ve seen in television and cinema has really been explored in every different possible way recently. This was a chance to take a step back and to explore the roots of the mythology [because] the idea of people coming back ‘from the dead’ is a very real thing. They are poisoned and paralyzed and buried, and it’s real. It’s been documented by numerous sources. These people are not monsters. They’re victims. Essentially they’re being trafficked. There’s a whole underground market for people that have been turned into brain-dead slaves from neurotoxins and brainwashing, and it’s really crazy and incredibly scary.”

“Another element I find interesting is that from a Western perspective we always think, ‘As Americans, we are here to help. We are going to come to your country and fix it.’ And it’s like, ‘Hey, we don’t want you to. This is part of our culture. Haiti has zombies.’ I think somewhere I read a quote that said, ‘In Haiti ninety percent of the country is Catholic, and one hundred percent believes in voodoo.’ It is just part of their fabric of life, and you can’t reset a culture, especially one that has no interest in changing. In fact, chances are better that it changes you, and that’s interesting to me.”

~dreadcentral.com