They move slowly. They eat brains. They smell bad and look even worse.
They are zombies.
But those aren’t the zombies of director Grace Lee’s new, genre-melding film, “American Zombie,” which premiered Saturday at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
Lee, who grew up in Missouri, graduated from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television with an MFA in film directing in 2002. She started working on her last film, “The Grace Lee Project,” while still in school.
“The Grace Lee Project” examined the lives of a group of Asian-American women who share the director’s name.
For “American Zombie,” her feature directorial debut, Lee worked with a crew comprised mostly of UCLA alumni.
“It was nice to see a lot of people you went to school with working very competently on a very complex movie shoot,” said John Solomon, who was Lee’s classmate and graduated from the undergraduate program in 1993 and the graduate program in 2006. “It’s not a big movie by Hollywood standards, but it’s definitely a big movie by UCLA standards.”
Set in Los Angeles, “American Zombie” follows two filmmakers named Grace Lee and John Solomon working together to make a documentary called “American Zombie,” which chronicles the lives of “four high-functioning zombies.”
That’s right: It’s a movie about Lee, played by Lee, making a movie about zombies.
However, these zombies aren’t your typical flesh-eating living dead.
“What do you really know about zombies aside from what you see in the movies?” Lee asked.
To prepare for the movie, Lee and her cowriter Rebecca Sonnenshine sought out any form of zombie lore they could. The movies ranged from the popular George Romero “Night of the Living Dead” series to Caribbean folklore steeped in voodoo.
“The interesting thing about zombies as opposed to vampires or other monsters is that they have no literary basis,” said Sonnenshine, who graduated from UCLA in 1993 with a degree in film. “They’re strictly a conceit of comics and movies.
“Our zombies don’t walk around with their wounds on display. They’re zombies passing as humans. They don’t look so different, but they do have skin issues.”
While a zombie movie may seem like a drastic departure from the quasi-autobiographical “The Grace Lee Project,” the two films may not be so different.
“It’s actually not that far of a stretch. It’s like “˜The Grace Lee Project’ but with zombies,” Lee said. “It’s taking my interest in personal documentaries and marginalized communities. I think zombies qualify as a marginalized community. There’s a blurring between the lines of fiction and reality.”
Further confusing true and false, Lee and Solomon both appear in front of the camera playing characters with their own names and traits.
“If you watch the film, John and I are friends from film school, and we play friends from film school,” Lee said.
“The role in the film is based on a job that I had after I graduated, which was shooting trauma cases in the UCLA emergency room. The character in the movie is named John Solomon and he’s a guy that films trauma cases,” said Solomon, who is not an actor by trade but instead a writer and director. “I’m playing a jerky, asshole version of myself. It was pretty easy.”
Lee also drew inspiration from the city she lives in, shooting most of the film on location throughout Los Angeles.
“We wanted to make a film about Los Angeles using the parts of the city that people don’t always see,” Sonnenshine said. “Los Angeles is a mysterious city. There are lots of hidden people here. It’s like exploring the landscape of Los Angeles through the eyes of an outsider.”
In Slamdance, “American Zombie” has found a suitable venue.
The Slamdance Film Festival was established in 1995 in response to the more-moneyed Sundance. Both film festivals are held simultaneously in Park City, where the movie industry gathers every year in late January to see the best that independent film has to offer.
“Slamdance is run for filmmakers by filmmakers. That’s their motto,” Lee said. “It’s much more grassroots. Sundance started out very indie too, but Slamdance has kind of taken that role.”
Film festivals are an integral step in the independent film world, especially for fledgling directors hoping to recoup costs and find audiences for their films.
Following Slamdance, “American Zombie” will be shown at several other film festivals. However, after the festival circuit, the film’s future is still up in the air.
“In rare cases, people sell their films at Park City, but we don’t know if that’s going to happen,” said Lee. “For me as a filmmaker, I just want as many people to see it as possible.”