A present from Ryan’s son Raff;

Play Dead will be a part of the NYC Zombie Crawl festivities on Sunday, May 30th in Williamsburg, Brooklyn! Before the afterparty at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn there is a free meet and greet with ‘Play Dead’ author Ryan Brown as well as the cast and crew of ‘Play Dead: The Movie”, and you can even buy copies of his book and have him sign it! Also, we’ll be premiering the ‘Redband’ trailer for Play Dead as well as selected scenes from the movie!

This is a first for the NYC Zombie Crawl that the whole event is all ages…and the best part is there will still be booze if you are over 21!  Entry for all events is free except there is a $10 cover for the final screening and dance party!

It all starts in Brooklyn at 3pm at The Charleston
174 Bedford Ave (Between N 7th & N 8th) Brooklyn, NY 11211 – The first stop and the crawl event FREE and is ALL AGES! Zombies can eat pizza and drink booze (if you’re over 21+) while civilians are zombified for two hours!

We’ll have our zombie technicians on hand to zombify the crowd but we also encourage civilians to come zombified as well as we will be doing a zombie costume contest! We also encourage a sports/varsity theme in honor of Play Dead, so bring out your best undead jocks, cheerleaders and football players! The crawl will start about 5:00pm and go into the evening before ending at the official after party at 7:00pm!

At 5:00pm, the zombies will mobilize up Bedford Ave and head to:
McCarren Park – N 12th and Bedford – Zombie Football Game – Blood Fights, Human Tug O War with Disgraceland Hook Squad and more madness! Win prizes including DVD’s from Backseat Conceptions!

At 6:30pm, the zombies will mobilize again and head back down Bedford avenue for grand zombie parade to the final stop:

7:00pm – Zombie Dance Party A Go-Go with Play Dead, Ryan Brown and the Raspberry Brothers
Knitting Factory Brooklyn – 361 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11211
- Free book signing and meet and greet from 7-8pm with author Ryan Brown and the Cast and Crew of Play Dead: The Movie
- $10 after 8pm for the Zombie Dance Party A Go-Go which includes:

- PLAY DEAD premiere screening of the Redband trailer and some selected scenes
- The Raspberry Brothers, a team of NYC comedians who will mock the hell out of campy old zombie flicks (MST3k stylee), including clips from Zombie (Lucio Fulci, 1979) and the Crazies (George Romero, 1973) and more!
- Zombie Dance Party with DJ Jeremy Bastard (Trash, NC-17) with zombie go-go dancers, a hot zombie contest, live music and more madness to be announced!
The zombies from THRILL THE WORLD, the Michael Jackson’s Thriller-dance-around-the-world-on-the-same-day-at-same-time event who will be coming out to teach people the thriller dance and we’ll be doing a dance and sing-along! We’ll be doing sing-alongs to other classic Monster hits too!

Stay tuned to www.nyczombiecrawl.com for the official routing and more announcements about entertainment and other goodies being added!

And here are the full credits for Play Dead, we could have not done this without our fabulous cast and crew!!

CAST
Cole Logan – Brandon Tyler Jones
Savannah Hickham – Kate Boyer
Booker Lamont – Chris Gonzalez
Manny – Michael O’Connor
Black Mona Monique ”Gata” Dupree
Coach Hickham – J.D. Brown
Sheriff Curtis Clark – Ed Noone

JackRabbits Football Team – Michael Harkness, Anthony Brown, John Sakmann, Ilya Rashkovskiy, Joe Zang, Josh Potter, Dennis Pozo, Chris Godwin

Badgers Football Team – Tim Cronin, Sean Coia, Jay Conquest, Pete Lodge, Michael Chadwick, Andre Brown, Derek Felton

Cheerleaders – Jessica Czop, Caitlin DiGian, Heather Doyle, Stacia Eve Paul, Carmela Hayslett, Katrina Naidas, Kim Reo, Chelsea Wittick

Produced and Directed by Doug Sakmann
Assistant Director – Evan Meszaros
Second Assistant Director – Ray Foley
2nd Second Assistant Director – Gina Izzo
Director of Photography – Jarred Alterman
Assistant Camera – Alex McCarron
Gaffer – Zafer Ulkucu
Stunt Coordinator and Key Grip – Tim Cronin
Grip -Alexander Lewis
Sound Recordist -Jason Wasley
Art Director – Illya Radysh
Special Effects Supervisors – Marissa Masella
Paul Mafuz
Special Effects Coordinator – Josh Potter
Special Effects Makeup – Jessica Jacobs, Fawn Doherty
Special Effects Assistants – Nicolle Clavell, Zac Amato, Melissa Vento
Production Manager – Nick Esposito
Production Coordinator -Julia Saunders
Stills Photographer – Joey Mas
Behind the Scenes Feature – Joe Frantz
Production Assistants – Christian Arney, Max Ferver, Anthony Zagarella, Sean Coia, Joe Zang, Nick Hastis, Joe Reidl

Post-Production
Editors – Doug Sakmann, Nick Esposito
Sound Design – Anthony Zagarella, Doug Sakmann
Digital Effects – Nick Esposito
Color Correction – Nick Hastis, Joe Reidl
Post Production Supervisor – Nick Esposito
Behind the Scenes Editing – Joe Frantz, Joe Reidl

Original Score by Mr. 19 AKA Cleric

Bus Crash Footage Courtesy of Troma Entertainment from “The Toxic Avenger Part 3”

Special Thanks
The Philadelphia School District, John Kent, The Greater Philadelphia Film Office, Frankford High School, Kampus Klothes, Namifiers.com, Lloyd Kaufman and Troma Entertainment, Ryan Brown, Jack Creighton, Joe Shields, Kerrie, Amy and Simon and Schuster, Halloween Adventure, Steve and Liberti Church

Horror director Doug Sakmann has teamed up with Gallery Books and author Ryan Brown to bring Brown’s zombie novel Play Dead to life.

“We always have a lot fun with zombies so I jumped at the chance to work with Ryan and the great source material provided from Play Dead. I decided the best way to go about it was to approach it as if we were making a movie, so we turned sections of the book into scripts,” Sakmann explains. “Over two days, we shot 12 key scenes to piece together a trailer, and came away with enough footage to make a short film. The trailer we’re now releasing is just a taste of what’s to come for Play Dead.”

Play Dead (available now) follows the Killington High School Jackrabbits football team, who is one win away from the school’s first trip to the district championship. On the way to the game, the Jackrabbits’s bus plunges into a river, killing every player except for bad-boy quarterback Cole Logan who is certain the crash was no accident—given that Cole himself was severely injured in a brutal attack by three ski-masked men earlier that day. Bent on payback, Cole turns to a mysterious fan skilled in black magic to resurrect his teammates. But unless the undead Jackrabbits defeat their murderous rival on the field, the team is destined for hell. In a desperate race against time, with only his coach’s clever daughter, Savannah Hickman, to assist him, Cole must lead his zombie team to victory.

“We first told you here about the translation of Ryan Brown’s new zombie-football novel PLAY DEAD to the screen, and now we’ve got the first look at the trailer.

Directed by Doug Sakmann, the preview “is just a taste of what’s to come for PLAY DEAD,” he says. “We will be releasing a more extreme red-band trailer in conjunction with the NYC Zombie Crawl event Sunday, May 30 in Brooklyn. That will premiere at the Crawl after-party at the new Knitting Factory in Williamsburg. We’ll have Ryan Brown on hand for a meet-and-greet and to sign books, and before the screening we’ll do a Q&A with myself, Ryan and the cast and crew of PLAY DEAD: THE MOVIE. Also, Joe Frantz of MTV’s JACKASS and VIVA LA BAM has put together an amazing behind-the-scenes feature on the making of the project, which will also be released in the next few weeks.”

All this is prelude for what Sakmann hopes will eventually be a full-length PLAY DEAD movie. “We always have a lot of fun with zombies, and Ryan’s book has given us so much great material to work with. It would be a pleasure to be able to bring the full story of PLAY DEAD to the big screen!”

The aforementioned Zombie Crawl starts at The Charleston, 174 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, with the ghouls assembling at 3 p.m. and then heading up at 5 p.m. to the first stop: McCarren Park and Bedford and North 12th for a zombie football game, blood fights, a human tug of war with Disgraceland Hook Squad and more. “We’re looking for some varsity zombies to join us!” Sakmann says. “All zombies are welcome, but we’re going to be playing some undead, football so zombie cheerleaders and jocks are encouraged to join in!”

From there, the Crawl “will be heading over to the Knitting Factory [361 Metropolitan Avenue] for a free meet-and-greet with PLAY DEAD author Ryan Brown and the cast and crew of the movie from 7-8 p.m. After that, the main party is $10 and includes the showing of the red-band trailer, other screenings and, after 10 p.m., a zombie dance party with DJs, zombie go-go dancers, a hot zombie contest, live music and more madness to be announced!” For more info on PLAY DEAD, check out its official website.

From the Vegetarian Star:

“Unlike meat used for food, dead animal props isn’t a common requirement for most films, so the industry probably isn’t spending millions of dollars on it. What do you guys think?

Should we not make such a fuss of using real meat this way in movies and instead focus energy on ensuring live animals aren’t being abused or hurt in the entertainment industry?”

Here are some responses:

“If these animals evolved to a level of sentience equal to that of people they would no doubt have scores of their ranks aspiring to contribute to the world of art and film just like us people. Mr. Sakmann is only following in the steps first taken by the famous Body Worlds exhibit and the controversial yet highly respected work of Joel-Peter Witkin, except he has opened the spotlight up to animals of all walks, not just us highly evolved apes. This should be heralded as a feather in the cap (a feather found on the ground and not pulled from a living bird) for animal activists who should be looking to end discrimination against animals in the art world.

I’m a 15 year veg, and I think this is a great thing.”

“its dead people eating dead animals, see it would be bad if they were alive because that would just be…. terrible, live eating the dead.also the footprint (carbon) of a plastic prosthetic is probably 10 fold greater than a chunk of flesh, and i am sure the parts were given to the horses to eat in the end because all horses tun into jello in the end anyway, so it was a dead on dead then animal on animal crime, no one loses except vegetarians and the local chineses restaurant.”

Savannah Hickham (Played by Vegan Kate Boyer) discusses the merits of eating a horse with Cole Logan (Brandon Jones)

“The gridiron gets gory in PLAY DEAD, a new novel by Ryan Brown that’s also being brought to the screen by Backseat Conceptions. Fango got some exclusive behind-the-scenes video (see it below) along with details on the project—including one facet that’s already been controversial.

Real meat and guts were incorporated into the makeup FX—which elicited an angry post over at the Vegetarian Star website, which complained, “Completely disgusting and uncalled for, especially considering how easy it is to make fake flesh props for the screen.” Sakmann’s response: “They don’t know how much it costs to make fake parts. If they want to pay for them, by all means I’ll use them, but until then I’ll just go to the Asian market and buy them for $3. I think it looks better anyway. It’s not like I killed anything to make the movie; they were already dead!” In the clip below, Sakmann demonstrates just how to make some tasty guts with easily purchased supermarket items.”

Check out the promotional trailer that Michael Brown’s (Ryan’s Dad) production company made for the book!

Also here is an interview with author Ryan Brown, we’ll have more with him soon too!