MOVIES

I was a teenage zombie filmmaker

Teen filmmaker Emily Hagins and her horror film are the subject of the Austin documentary 'Zombie Girl: The Movie'

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM CRITIC
Thursday, September 18, 2008

Kids are mixing buckets of blood, mom's painting a severed head and the girl with the bobbing blond ponytail is telling a teenager how to play the scene.

"Just act sort of like yourself, but you're being chased by zombies," she says in the breezy sing-song of an all-American tween.

Emily Hagins is the director of the movie "Pathogen," which she wrote when she was 10 and 11. Here, at age 12, she is shooting her horror opus on location in a faceless Austin neighborhood, amid tidy lawns and modest houses. She squinches one eye and raises a small Sony Handycam to the other.

"Action!" Emily half-blurts, half-mumbles. It could be the least authoritative call to action ever spoken on a movie set in the history of cinema.

But it works. The performer lopes away from a clutch of hungry zombies, all of whose faces are an ashen shade of spearmint and most of whom are too young to see a zombie movie without parental supervision.

The zombies are slow. They lurch. They lumber. Just the way Emily wants it. Zombies are poky, not fleet, she explains. At least her zombies are poky. It's an aesthetic choice, like the one she later makes about how much ground beef and fake blood should be applied to the belly of a zombie victim.

That's vision. Emily knows what she wants and how to get it. That's directing.

While Emily was making her movie, during the summers of 2005 and 2006, three adult filmmakers were making theirs, right alongside Emily and her ragtag band of volunteer undead. Aaron Marshall, Eric Mauck and Justin Johnson shadowed Emily's production for more than two years, documenting with their own handheld cameras a quintessentially Austin film story, a moment of homemade can-doism that has ascended into the annals of local DIY folklore.

Emily, now 15 and a sophomore at Liberal Arts and Science Academy High School, still gets the random query from local strangers. "They're like, 'Did you by any chance make a zombie movie when you were 12?' " she says with a bubbly laugh that would sound nervous if she wasn't so poised.

The resulting documentary about Emily's grand project is "Zombie Girl: The Movie," which will have its world premiere Sunday and Thursday during Fantastic Fest at the Alamo South. Directors Marshall, Mauck and Johnson, as well as Emily and some of her cast, will be in attendance.

"Zombie Girl" is a movie about a movie in the tradition of such notorious making-of chronicles as Eleanor Coppola's "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse" and Les Blank's "Burden of Dreams." If that's a disproportionate comparison in scope — the disasters and travails that befall Emily are mostly shrug-offable — it's equal in themes.

Below the veneer of a girl writing, directing, shooting and editing her own full-length feature — and all the theatrics that will naturally produce — hum the bigger life dramas of a teenager harnessing nascent creative impulses, staying within her means, going to school, doing homework and harmoniously coexisting with her mom and dad (and a sweet pet dog). It's a portrait of the artist as a young woman, a girl who's putting aside the pastel-hued Care Bears that populate her bedroom for the blood and sweat of indie filmmaking, even if some of that blood is corn syrup and food coloring.

Austin filmmakers Marshall, Mauck and Johnson discovered Emily's production at AustinActors.net, where she had posted an audition call. They were immediately drawn to her spunky determination to realize a long-gestating dream, which was sparked when she and her mother, Megan Hagins, saw Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" films and became unstoppable after Emily saw the Australian zombie comedy "Undead" at Harry Knowles' annual Butt-Numb-A-Thon.

"Here was this girl who was a lot younger than us doing the things we didn't start doing until we were older," says co-director Marshall, a University of Texas radio-television-film alum, still sounding impressed.

In the course of three years, the filmmakers shot 146 hours of footage and spent a year whittling it to 91 minutes. While making "Zombie Girl," they held a fundraiser to pay for the rights to use scenes from "Undead," a fee Marshall wouldn't disclose. In a neat coincidence, both "Pathogen" and "Zombie Girl" won grants from the Texas Filmmakers' Production Fund. Emily got the bigger grant.

Fueled by innocent movie love, Emily threw herself into her project, learning along the way. Her mom stuck with her the whole time, enthusiastically filling the roles of producer, boom holder, extras wrangler, make-up and special effects artist and, of course, proud but concerned parent. The directors of the documentary, who split filming duties, stated from the outset that they would be hands-off observers, no matter the predicaments Emily encountered.

"We didn't want to interfere," Marshall, 30, says. "It was hard as filmmakers seeing Emily doing things, learning and making mistakes. We could have given input but we didn't want to soil what she was doing. We let it unfold."

In "Pathogen," we watch what happens when a cancer-fighting contaminant is accidentally flushed into Austin's water supply. The contagion transforms people into the living, groaning dead, and a group of plucky teens confronts the scourge to save the city.

Inspiration, desperation and mounds of tape were Emily's filmmaking tools. You feel alternate waves of joy, tension and exhilaration as she nails a shot or struggles to recruit enough zombie extras for the grand finale or, in a poignant scene, she inadvertently records over some hard-earned footage.

Oh, mom. That kind of tension also sluices through the documentary, as Emily, an only child, and mother Megan bond in traditional filial ways, with equal parts affection and friction. Despite working a full-time job, Megan Hagins gives and sacrifices to a Mother Teresa-ian measure, even if she does understandably snap on occasion. ("Emily, now!")

It's this undercurrent of family engagement and interdependence that deepens "Zombie Girl," elevating it above just a look at today's anyone-can-do-it digital filmmaking revolution and its pros and pitfalls. Love, of family and of art, and the passions driving it emerge as resonant and inspiring themes.

"I really liked it," Emily says of the film. "I just pretend it's not me on screen. I prefer being behind the camera."

Emily has already shot and edited her second feature, another horror story, "The Retelling," which you can read about at her Web site www.cheesynuggets.com. She estimates it will cost $7,000, about the same as "Pathogen." Donations are welcome.

Talking about the new movie, Emily radiates a mix of aplomb and self-effacement. This girlish precocity is on full display in "Zombie Girl," especially when she's in the heat of directing a scene.

Zombies shuffle in the middle of a suburban residential street, when Emily's father Jerry tells her that cars are coming. But the director won't be stymied by piddling safety precautions.

"Zombies don't walk on the sidewalk," Emily tells him. (Well, duh, dad.)

Later, dad interrupts a scene inside a local grocery store. He tells Emily that the group of very bored zombies waiting outside wants to know when she will be ready for them. She points to a teenage boy and replies, "After his head gets chopped off."

cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649