Night Of The Living Deb Began As "Really Shitty" Shaun Of The Dead, Then Adopted Female Lead
Zombie comedy Night of the Living Deb didn't begin with a leading lady, reveals it's creator Kyle Rankin. It actually started as a "really shitty version of Shaun Of The Dead" after 20 pages of script.
Thankfully he decided to take it to a friend, Andy Selsor, who suggested it needed a women to take the spotlight and then "went away and wrote a very funny script" while Rankin took to Kickstarter.
It was a great way to test and see if people were "zombie-d out," but they obviously weren't as the Kickstarter went on to provide the greater share of the movie's budget. "The response was really positive and that kind of encouraged me to keep going."
"When I started writing those 20 pages I was like “Oh, it would be really funny if a zombie apocalypse happened right after an awkward one-night stand.” That was what the original idea was. And then as soon as I started writing a kind of affable but a little ditzy kind of guy, that’s when I realised “Oh this movie will just be lost in the shuffle and kind of panned,” and also it didn’t really interest me," Kyle Rankin told SciFiNow in an interview.
"My own writing didn’t interest me because of the male lead! My wife and I just had our second daughter, we’re having a little girl now, and I want to make something that she’d think was cool when she was 14 or 15. I hadn’t really seen a female type Shaun Of The Dead."
Night of the Living Deb stars Maria Thayer (Deb), Michael Cassidy, Chris Marquette and Ray Wise. It will premier in the UK during the Film4 FrightFest on August 29th.