It’s Fall, Y’all got the opportunity to sit down (virtually) with director, screenwriter and actor John M. Ware, 40, of Birmingham, Alabama to talk about zombies, Halloween, his 2014 movie, Thr33 Days Dead and the Syfy channel reality show, Town of the Living Dead, that followed the film’s production. So, grab some candy corn, turn the lights off and get reading!

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Question: Can you explain in your own words what Thr33 Days Dead is about, like plot, underlying messages, anything like that?

Answer: It came about [when] my buddies and I were sitting around and they’re like, “Hey, we need to do a zombie movie.” And, I was like, well, okay, that’s what I’m studying for, is to make movies. And I had some advice that the easiest — and it definitely didn’t turn out to be true — but the easiest, quickest type movie to make would be a cheap little zombie movie.

Basically the plot is three guys go out on an early-morning fishing trip, and they’re not aware that the night before, some bad guys had done some grave robbing and they got really sick because the body exploded on them. It turns out that the guy [whose] body exploded had been in some kind of military testing program and the body explodes. It turns the first guy into a zombie. He bites his friends, they start to scatter and that’s basically the beginning of the movie. The three original friends that were on the fishing trip, they’re stuck out in the middle of the lake because they see everything going on and they’re trying to figure out, “What the hell do we do?”

So, they think, well, maybe we should go into town and see if there’s somebody that can help, or if there’s somebody left, and it turns out once they get back into the city, the whole city has been overrun, as well. They meet up with a brother and sister who owned a sporting goods store — obviously they need guns and ammo and all that kind of stuff — they find out that these two people that are holed up in this store, actually own the sporting goods store. And that’s where they set out on their adventure to try and figure out what the hell is going on.

Question: You just mentioned that you went to school for film. Just curious — where’d you go?

Answer: I went to UAB, University of Alabama at Birmingham. They have a really great broadcasting program there. Everyone there had worked in the film industry at one point or another and they knew that the reason people were coming to that program was to make films. So, I didn’t go to film school, but I went to broadcasting school and it was taught basically as a film course.

Question: Where can Thr33 Days Dead be found and where can people watch Town of the Living Dead?

Answer: The show is no longer available. Syfy had it up for a while on Amazon and their rights expired to it. I’m in a, I mean, I wouldn’t say a battle, but I’m in a disagreement over rights as far as the film is concerned. There’s a director’s cut that I finished. If you’ve seen the network cut, which was what aired on Syfy, you should really see the director’s cut. I’m trying to work with the original distributor to get the director’s cut distributed. 

The director’s cut is basically all the footage that I didn’t get to show with Syfy, some of our earlier footage that supposedly “had been lost” because of the show and “I found it.” There were just a few scenes that we had not shot when Syfy showed up and made us redo the whole thing. Like I said, for purposes of the show, we “lost” the footage and had to reshoot the whole movie while they were here. I  used maybe, I don’t know, I’m going to say five to eight minutes of Syfy footage in the director’s cut out of 90 minutes. That is just original footage that we had shot on an SD camera and, personally, I think it visually looks better. It tells the story better, because I was going for an Evil Dead ‘80s kind of feel to it, anyway.

Question: What was it like to direct and act in a movie and what was it like to be on a reality show?

Answer: Directing and acting, it’s a lot of work. Like, it’s a lot of hard work and people don’t realize what all goes into preparation and sometimes you have to perform what people call mental gymnastics. You have to look at a scene and figure out how you’re going to shoot it and then you show up to a location that you want to shoot and you’re like, “Well, this is completely different than what we had originally envisioned,” so you have to change everything around. Sometimes you have to work within limitations as far as people are concerned. We had to shoot around a lot of people, if that makes sense, because we all had real jobs, daytime jobs. And I still have a daytime job, which sucks, but sometimes people couldn’t be there and you had to figure out a way to shoot around them and make them fit in later. Especially if they were pivotal to the scene, you could shoot them later, but then you had to go back and figure out where to put them and how to put them in there to make it appear as if they were there the whole time. 

As far as the reality show goes that’s a point of contention with me, really. It was fun. I really enjoyed it while it was going on. I would probably do it again if the opportunity came up, but I would definitely be in more control of what is being portrayed on the other side of things. Long days, it was like 12-hour days, just like filming the movie, except there was someone filming us while we were filming. It could be a little bit of a distraction at times, especially when they’re like, “Hey, we didn’t get that, can you do that again?” It was a show within a show, I guess you could call it.

Question: Do you have any upcoming projects?

Answer: I am working on a crime drama, which is about crime and corruption in a small Southern town, based off of an opioid epidemic that is currently going on in the town where I live. I don’t think people really understand the impact that opioids have on small communities. Of course there’s documentaries and such. And then Ron Howard just released a film called Hillbilly Elegy, and I’ve heard that it was really bad and that it was basically a rich man’s idea of what goes on in a poor community. The new film that I’m working on is called Muddy Waters. It’s about a detective who comes back to his little town in the middle of an opioid crisis and he has to figure out where it’s coming from and put a stop to it. I feel like if I can get it made, if I can get it funded, it will do tremendous things for not only the fight against the opioid epidemic, but it’ll open people’s eyes to what the hell is really going on in these little towns.

Question: To speak about zombies and Halloween more directly: Zombies, are they just for Halloween?

Answer: No. I mean, obviously The Walking Dead usually runs for a couple months after Halloween. That’s the biggest thing. It wasn’t Halloween when Zombieland came out, and I know that because I finished the script for Thr33 Days Dead the day before Zombieland came out. I didn’t time it that way, it just happened that the script had finished being written the day before Zombieland came out, because my buddy worked at a movie theater and we would always be able to get in and see the movie the night before, like a screening kind of thing. But yeah, I don’t think it’s just a Halloween-type thing. Although, you know, scary movies in general normally only play at Halloween. 

And here’s the thing. With the current climate that we’re living in now, there’s nothing more perfect than the zombie film, because if you look at some of the bigger [films], some of the smaller ones even, the main idea is that some disease is going around and it’s killing people and it’s changing them into other people, basically other things. I’ve actually got a sequel written to Thr33 Days Dead that I’ve been trying to get off the ground for a while too, and it’s all about the vaccine and what it does to people and how it can affect people and that kind of thing. I didn’t know when I wrote it that it was going to happen this way, but it’s more pertinent now than ever.

Question: Do you celebrate Halloween and if so, how? 

Answer: I mean, we normally go all out. Like I live Halloween year round, personally, and I would dress up every day if I didn’t have to go to my day job. We put up lights and dress up and hand out candy, just like everybody else. I was the only house on my block that was playing Halloween music for the kids to listen to as they went by and trick-or-treated. Now, even this year, we had a bunch of trick-or-treaters. People were very conscientious. There were masks worn, and basically the kids would be in their car and they would get out and get candy and then go jump back in the car. There weren’t big groups of people, obviously. Everybody was very conscientious about what was going on, everybody stayed apart, everybody wore the proper face coverings and whatnot to keep the spread of the virus down. We played music and kids walked by and we gave them candy and kept our faces covered and kept them six feet away. But it was fun, because everywhere else Halloween was cancelled, [but] they didn’t cancel it in our city. All the kids had fun. Everybody was aware of what was going on, so everybody was careful. But that’s basically how we do it every year, minus the six feet.

Question: What did you dress up as?

Answer: This year I was a vampire. I’m usually a vampire or the Joker. That’s my two go to

costumes. I was going to try something different this year and a few hours into trying to figure out the makeup, it didn’t work out so I had to step back and go to one of my old standbys.

Question: What do you think it is about the undead that fascinates us so much? Why do you think people love zombies so much? Why do you think we fear them?

Answer: I think it’s the unknown and people are generally scared of the unknown, because if you, again, look at some of the biggest zombie films, there’s really no answer as to why people are turning into zombies. Night the Living Dead starts in the middle of the outbreak. [In] Zombieland, you don’t know what the hell happened. You get some [movies] where there’s an explanation, like Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, there’s an explanation toward the middle, toward the end of that film that it’s caused by this supersonic pest control that they’re using that wakes up corpses. But like I said, it’s a fear of the unknown, basically.

Question: What does our fascination with zombies say about us as people?

Answer: You know, I don’t know. It’s a way of explaining what happens next, I guess. Christians and believers in different religions believe in a heaven and a hell. Then there’s that whole scientific element of what really happens next. And I think that zombie films are a way to explore what happens next, kind of.

Question: Lightning round! Whether it’s in your own scripts or in things you watch, which do you prefer . . . slow moving or fast moving?

Answer: Neither. I think that I don’t have a preference. It just depends on the story. Like, 28 Days Later wouldn’t have worked with slow moving zombies and Night the Living Dead wouldn’t have worked with fast movie zombies. And The Walking Dead, they have a mix. They’ve got some fast zombies, they’ve got some slow zombies, so that’s the more realistic approach, I believe. If they’re all slow moving, you can get away. No big deal. If they’re all fast moving, there’s no chance in hell. So, you have to have a good mix to make it seem realistic.

Question: Talking or silent?

Answers: Silent. Well, not silent as in they don’t make any noise, but they don’t have, scientifically, I guess you’d say, the capacity to speak any longer.

Question: Brain eating or flesh eating?

Answer: Both.

Question: Infection or reanimation of the dead?

Answer: Infection. I’m not a believer too much in the whole, like, “there’s dead corpses and they rise up out of the ground and they become zombies.” My zombies have to have been infected while they were alive. Much like The Walking Dead, they die and then they turn, you can’t be buried and then come back. There’s no blood in the body. There’s no way for the virus or chemical or whatever to transport itself throughout the body reanimating the whole thing.

Question: Self-aware or not self-aware?

Answer: Self-aware. As far as self-aware though, they don’t know that they’re zombies, but they do know that they were, I don’t want to say that they were alive, but they still think they’re alive. But their only animal instinct is to eat. I touched on it a little bit in Thr33 Days Dead — the paper boy at the very beginning, he’s still trying to deliver papers even though he’s been turned into a zombie. That comes from an interview I saw with [George] Romero who said that they remember. I think they know, because in one of his [films] — I don’t remember if it was Diary of the Dead or Survival of the Dead — there’s a postman and he’s still trying to deliver the mail, even though he’s just doing it to one mailbox and he’s not even getting it in. He shows up every day, he puts it toward the mailbox and then he leaves. He remembers what he did before he became a zombie.

Question: Evolved or not evolved?

Answer: Well, I have to say there is going to be an evolution. If this were to really take place, there would be some sort of mutation along the way at some point, unless they stopped it at its very early form, there would be some sort of evolution going on at all times. But, not to the point to where they’re talking and they’re able to use guns and that kind of thing. It was Land of the Dead where the one zombie was able to learn how to use a gun. And then also in Day of the Dead, where they taught the one zombie to use a gun and they were trying to teach him to be more human-like, I suppose. But there’s a certain evolution that would go along with it, I believe.