- C. Spinney
The Mennonite of the Living Dead
Updated: Mar 2, 2020
After three years of tinkering and laboring, The Mennonite of the Living Dead is finally finished and available for rental!
This film was born from frustration and failure. The majority of the cast and crew had worked together on no-budget productions before, and we were gearing up to produce our most ambitious feature yet. After the script was finished, this project quickly revealed itself to be a little too ambitious and we sidelined it until more resources could be put together.
That’s when I began joking around with Steven Lowry and Marcus Lawrence, two of my best friends and most frequent collaborators. “We should just rent a cabin and film a sleazy horror movie. We could all stay there for a weekend and just crank it out.” Famous last words.
A story quickly began to take shape, and it started to seem like we could channel the momentum of the old project into this new, more spontaneous venture. We nailed down a weekend in August, 2016 - at the height of the full moon - and started planning for the shoot. Or should have started planning, really.
Instead we quickly learned exactly why nobody tries to shoot an entire movie in a weekend, but the fruit of our breathless, frenzied labor was this fun little film. It’s a love letter to all of the no-budget horror films I adore, which clog up my DVD shelves and cause friends to question my taste. Now they have further reason to do so.