Zombie horror hits Littlehampton in new sci-fi short

Writer and co-director Dave Thomas who also plays the main victim in the piece is promising a visually striking horror/sci-fi short, just over six minutes under the title Neon Hell. Dave has put the film forward for around 30 festivals after which he is hoping to make it available publicly.

“I'm really into film-making anyway,” he explains. “I work making adverts for social media and I've always been interested in visual effects. I wanted to make a film where I could practise visual effects so I wrote a short treatment and showed it to my friend Juan Veliz who is a really good film-maker and cameraman.

“It's the story of a mystery cube that hops from person to person and takes their souls. The story starts with the mystery cube being delivered to the main character, and the story follows this main character as he finds out what the cube does and as he has his soul taken. I wanted it to end with a cliffhanger which is the main character taking the cube to the next victim. The sequence where he has his soul taken is neon flashing lights. His soul is taken out and put into the cube which collects souls. The victims are left as zombie husks. They are just meat machines.

“We filmed it in Littlehampton. I live just near the town, and a lot of it is in my house and in my little street, and we managed to rope in my son's grandparents (on his mother's side) to lend us their front door!”

The credits music is by a band called SKiNNY MiLK who originate from Littlehampton, but now live in Brighton.

“It took me a year to do all the post-production. I was working in the evenings and at weekends when I didn't have other work and it was just fun not to have a due date and just to be able to take the time that it needed. There were lots of challenges and I learned a lot while I was doing it. I've already started writing another one.

“I don't think it is particularly scary. I've shown it to my son who is nine and he thought it was quite funny. He knows that it is all special effects though I wouldn't recommend it for really young children. But my son does get a mention in the credits because he helped me with one of the special effects which involved a smoke machine in a bin and he had to cue the smoke machine. He wants to be in the next one now and maybe I will give him a speaking part. There is no dialogue in the first one. I really am not an amazing actor so I decided to tell the story without dialogue!”

Dave has already come up with the story and the title for the next one: “We're going to make it more purposefully funny and we're going to call it Seagull. Juan is from Argentina and when he came over here, he couldn't believe the size and the aggressiveness of the seagulls that we have. He talks about the seagulls and how crazy they are so our plan is to do something about seagulls that are attacking a documentary film crew. We're still at the initial storyboarding stage but we might be able to start production probably in August. We have just got to raise some money. For this first one, it cost about £200 but I'm not sure how much the next one will cost.”