Making a movie on a 45 pound budget isn’t just difficult, it’s pretty much impossible. Yet, as Marc Price, Welsh-born director of what is probably the cheapest film to ever premiere at Cannes, cheerfully admits: “We spent most of it on very cheap tea and biscuits. But only on Sundays, because most people were hung-over and needed sugar.” Sainsbury’s Basics? This is Moviemaking Basics, and it’s helped Colin, one of the first ever zombie films told from a zombie’s perspective, net an enormous amount of buzz.

Colin is an odd beast of a film: it follows its zombie protagonist as he shambles around Tooting, London, and records his interaction with his terrified victims and horrified, still-human family who try their best to ‘rescue’ their erstwhile son. It combines scenes of slapstick humour (Colin confusedly trying to escape a kitchen), extremely surreal tenderness (his aghast family weeping over their undead son) and incredible violence (achieved with a lot of golden syrup, red food colouring and hot water, according to the director).  Critics have called it ‘oddly touching’. “We wanted Colin to have a lot of heart,” Price says. “We live in relatively enlightened times. Slapping a label on something as either bad or good doesn’t wash with audiences. We wanted to take a character that people would look at and say ‘bad’ and give him more emotional, complex layers.”

Price advertised for zombies on Facebook, looked for volunteer make-up artists on industry websites, ground pasta shells to imitate the sound of bones snapping, and taught himself sound design, all in between working for a London courier company. For the past year and a half, Price had been answering phones on the night shift while editing together the movie on an old version of Adobe Premiere. In fact, the judicious use of shakycam (as used in The Blair Witch Project), was intended to not only hide the poor quality of his dad’s ten-year-old Panasonic camcorder (“it had a lower resolution than a mobile phone”), but also to his friends’ “crappy acting”. Hearing Price talk about Colin is not unlike hearing your best mate chat excitedly about a project conceived in the pub over too many beers.

Price, however, is reluctant to take credit for a movie he conceived and nursed to life: “the one thing I’m determined we shouldn’t have is ego. We’re making stuff to entertain”. The ‘we’ is Price’s production company, Nowhere Fast, made up of him and his friends, although there is no question that Colin is essentially Price’s unique creation. Price, however, demurs, saying he owes an enormous amount to the volunteers and friends kind enough to come along– although one suspects that getting to pretend to be a zombie and eat people’s brains was a very big factor in attracting people to turn up. Who doesn’t love a bit of brain food?        

While Price had directed two short films before and has a design degree from Swansea Institute of Higher Education, he’s never come this close to the big time. Colin was first shown at Abbatoir, a Welsh horror film festival, which caught the eye of his current agent, Helen Grace. Grace admits that she cancelled the meeting she had the next day and instead stayed up all night watching it. It was also Grace who suggested going to the Cannes Film Festival this summer. Price himself spent the entire showing in a bar, drinking nervously: “I couldn’t stomach people walking out.” A few months later distribution companies like Pathé were fighting over the “cheap little camcorder movie” the director expected only his friends and “a few horror bloggers” to watch.  As we speak, he’s actually editing together extras for the DVD release and preparing for another horror film festival.

“It should always be about the content, the characters, the story – not the technical quality.” Colin isn’t just a triumph of British budget filmmaking at its best. Its construction also has an undeniable whiff of feel-good community spirit about it – who knew that zombies could bring so many people together, and for free?