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

- Film School Rejects

Many years ago, when I was still living in Boston, I was delivering pizzas and not doing much to advance myself as a human being. On one brutally New England October day, with the leaves turned and the world straddling the line between very beautiful and very dead, I was driving a car full of pizza and thinking about Halloween costumes. Specifically, I was thinking about dressing as a zombie and then throwing a giant penguin costume over it, one costume on top of another, and this was enough to amuse my soft brain to no end. And as I drove, completely self-amused, my phone started playing some music I’d never heard before: a short piece for cello, marimba and piano.

Suddenly, the sounds, the bleak autumn views and my very stupid Halloween costume crashed together in my mind into something tragic and absurd. Very quickly, I knew it should be a movie.

I decided the protagonist would be an aquarium worker, who had been forced to dress as a penguin for the day and hand out flyers. Being a pizza delivery guy with no real prospects, I related to him. 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.

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, but the idea resonated with them still. We got together for a few 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 whatever was needed to set up the shot then quickly running into the shot to play yet 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 the incredible, lovely and patient Michael Wetherbee, who played our Penguombie. Both did so much to give this small, strange production the sick, sad beating heart it required.

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.

I never did end up wearing that costume.

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