'Anna And The Apocalypse' Trailer: A Zombie Comedy That Is Also A Christmas Musical
Zombies and comedies go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Christmas and musicals go together like peppermint and, well, chocolate. But what happens when you take all of those seemingly disparate elements and cram them together into a single movie? You get the new zombie comedy Christmas musical Anna and the Apocalypse, which features characters singing and dancing their way through an undead uprising during the holiday season.
Yes, movie is real. And yes, you can watch the Anna and the Apocalypse trailer right now.
An obvious touchstone here would be Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead – another U.K. horror comedy where characters cracked jokes between scenes of shocking violence and gore – but then you see the characters start to sing and dance and be merry and realize this is its own beast altogether. Anna and the Apocalypse looks to tickle those who like zombies getting their heads exploded and those who enjoy some festive holiday cheer. I won't lie to you guys: on a conceptual level, this movie looks like my kind of thing. I just hope the gag can sustain a feature-length running time.
Anna and the Apocalypse is based on Ryan McHenry's BAFTA-nominated short, Zombie Musical, but he tragically passed away after being diagnosed with cancer before the feature could enter production (it was during his time in the hospital that he achieved viral fame with his "Ryan Gosling Won't Eat His Cereal" videos). McHenry is credited as a co-writer alongside Alan McDonald, but John McPhail stepped up to direct the feature expansion following McHenry's death, and the results look like they could be a ton of fun.
You can watch the short film that started it all below:
Anna and the Apocalypse premieres at Fantastic Fest tomorrow, so keep an eye out for our review in the near future. Here are more plot details from the Fantastic Fest guide:
Teenage Anna's life is typical enough. Chafing against the narrow horizons of her small town, she dreams of bigger things. It's not so much that she doesn't love her friends and family — she does — it's just that they're all so... familiar. So typical. So predictable. Her childhood best friend aches for a romance that she has no interest in, no matter how close they might be. The school jock that she had a fling with is proving to be disappointingly predictable in his behavior. And it's becoming progressively harder for Anna to conceal her disappointment with just how satisfied her widower-father is with the blue collar simplicity of his never-changing existence. And then it all goes to shit.
The night of the high school Christmas concert marks the arrival of the undead in Anna's small town. And so begins a struggle to band together and survive. Future dreams are forced aside by the overwhelming need to survive the present in this winning Scottish musical-horror-comedy.