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 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 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, of course, the incredible, lovely and patient Michael Wetherbee, who played our Penguombie. Both did so much for this strange 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.