There’s a lot of overlap between horror and comedy. Both genres rely on timing and tricks designed to disorient you. The Civil Dead finds some new areas of overlap.
Gulf Shores, Alabama, natives Clay Tatum and Whitmer Thomas met when they were 11 years old. “We grew up making a lot of stuff together, and our goal moving out to L.A. was to make a feature,” says Tatum.
The pair found some success in Los Angeles’ famously bustling comedy scene, and later produced the FX animated series Stone Quackers. The Civil Dead came about during the early days of the pandemic, when producer Mike Marasco offered them a modest amount of funding — and access to his extensive camera collection. “I was like, if I still wanna make a movie, it’s got to be limited,” he says. “I have to think of ideas that I can shoot with just me and Whit, and for some reason the idea of him being a ghost worked really well for the idea of shooting something during a pandemic where resources are even more limited. If I’m the only person that’s able to see this ghost, I’m not gonna want to be around other people.”
Tatum stars as Clay, a struggling photographer failing to make it in Hollywood. “He’s a little bit like what I am at my worst parts, being an L.A. asshole who’s chronically lazy and is too embarrassed to admit to his wife that he’s broke,” says Tatum. “Our goal in this movie was to make me somewhat unlikable, because there’s a trend that we notice in movies where sometimes there’s a movie where the lead character is neither good or bad, and just randomly, bad things happen to him. We wanted to avoid that and have this character be actively bad and actively be the reason bad things are happening to them.”
When he sees his old friend Whit on a photoshoot, he soon realizes that the guy he ghosted a few years ago is now literally a ghost. Whit and Clay’s relationship becomes more and more fraught, as the stresses of being seen and not seen pile up. Horror comedy comes in many forms, but this might be the first ever horror cringe comedy — think Larry David meets Ghost Story. “The one thing I knew that we had going for us is like a certain chemistry that comes out of just knowing each other since we were 11,” says Tatum.
The Civil Dead is a finely paced comedy that doesn’t overstay its welcome, with an ending that is shocking when it happens, then makes more sense the more you think about it. It makes comedy out of the horror of awkward social interactions, and asks how low you would go if you knew you would get away with it.
The Civil Dead plays Thursday, Oct. 20, 8:30 p.m., Studio on the Square as part of the Indie Memphis Film Festival.