Anthony C. Ferrante, director of the Sharknado series, returns with Zombie Tidal Wave

Starring Ian Ziering, Zombie Tidal Wave, brings the surfing dead back to the SYFY channel on August 17, 2019.

“I’m really happy it comes across as a pretty gory, zombie film,” Anthony C. Ferrante

Zombie Tidal Wave (ZTW) is the newest film from the creative team behind the Sharknado phenomena.  Directed and co-written by Anthony C. Ferrante,  ZTW is the latest cinematographic fusion between supernatural horror and geological disaster movies.

The unlikely combination of shark-exploitation and killer tornados, Sharknado, was a major hit for the SyFy channel.  The ludicrous notion, while scoffed at by critics, netted five sequels and billions of dollars in profit.  Yes, you read that correct.. BILLIONS and BILLIONS.  (It sounds better when you say that with a Carl Sagan voice…)

While SyFy executives are crossing their fingers and hoping Ferrante can repeat the success of Sharknado, he’s onboard for the love of the art.  Starting as humble do-it-yourselfer, inspired by the great horror directors of days gone by, Ferrante pulled himself into a film career with hardwork and a can-do attitude.   The skills he learned on low-budget horror movies, have helped him carve his own career. Despite the finical success of the Sharknado films, Ferrante seems like he would make movies even if he didn’t have a penny to his name.

Zombie Tidal Wave, starring Ian Ziering. Watch the world premiere Saturday August 17th at 9/8c on SYFY.

Slickster: Is there anything written or said about you that you’d like to clear up, right here right now?

Ferrante: I don’t hate Sharks! I made Sharknado movies, so some people might think I hate sharks.  I’m agnostic towards sharks.  They exist, they are part of the ecosystem.

Slickster:  Let’s nerd out. Since we’re talking about both zombies and sharks, do you remember Lucio Fulci’s scene in Zombi 2, where the zombie attacks the tiger shark underwater?

Ferrante:  YES! You know there were a couple earlier drafts of the Zombie Tidal Wave script where the writers kept trying to make nods and references to Sharknado, and we kept pulling them.  I felt that ZTW needed to stand on its own.  You have Ian (Ziering), you have me, you have me, you have Thunder… there’s enough tie-in with Sharknado.  We didn’t want to stop the movie and go, “Wink wink.  We’re the Sharknado guys.” 

But the thing is, when we decided were going to shoot in Thailand, and we had time and budget constraints I said, “You know, we kinda’ have to embrace the Fulci-ness of this movie.”  It started to feel very much like a Lucio Fulci Italian zombie movie.  And, since I’m Italian, I thought, “Why not let it just lean into that a little bit?”  The one scene that crossed my mind in all of that, was the zombie wrestling the shark scene.   I thought, as a homage to that, maybe we should have shark wrestle a zombie, but that never took any traction.  It was just a blip in my brain. 

There is a nod to Fulci in the movie though.  There is a band we called the Fulci’s.  We also threw in a nod to Doctor Butcher MD, so there’s a lot of little in-joke references that are only for nerds!… A lot little subtle things if you look closely for them.  It’s not in your face, but they are there. 

Slickster: So not as many Easter Eggs as you might expect, but fans of Shockwaves, Zombie Lake, or any of the underwater Nazi zombie movies might find some?

Ferrante: Yes! If you are very astute in the horror nerdom, there is defiantly a Shockwaves in-joke in ZTW.  But its ‘blink and you miss it’. 

The thing is, when you do these things, you want to put them in there, but you don’t want them to take over the film.   You people to have to root them out and have an ‘AHAH!’ moment.  

I’ve done that a lot in all my movies.  In Headless Horseman, my second film, we decided to make an in-joke to one of my favorite singers.  So we put a sign on a gas station that said, “ Roland Thompson’s gum sold here.”  It’s a reference to the Warren Zevon song, Rolling the headless thompson gunner, so I thought it would be funny.  Only one other person has ever caught that one, so it was a joke primarily for me and that one person.  Sometimes these in-jokes are super obscure.  Sharknado was packed with these kind of things. 

So, yeah, there are a lot of zombie easter eggs in ZTW. 

Slickster: We noticed from the Zombie Tidal Wave trailer, that there seems to be a lot of blue blooded zombies?  Does this have some significance in the movie? Was it required for ratings, like it was too gory? 

Ferrante: No, actually it was a story point.  There are two zombies in the movie; the water zombies who come from the waves and the islander zombies who are infected by the water zombies.  The water zombies have the blue blood. It’s a plot point and there is a reason for it. 

It had nothing to do with the ratings. Actually, the strangest thing about ZTW and the network…. I told Ian early on, “I’m gonna shoot gore. I’m going to go over-the-top with the blood.  When you see the dailies you’re going to see blood everywhere and then we’ll pull it back in the edit.”   Its better to have more (blood) than to go back and realize we needed two more blood squirts later.  

There’s a lot of blood in the film.  It’s very gory and practical. I wanted as much as possible to avoid using digital blood, but there are few shots where couldn’t avoid it… probably about 5-10% of things we couldn’t achieve without digital blood.  For example, we had a sniper shot on a leg that we had to do digitally. 

But, when we delivered the second or third cut to the network, I did what film makers in the 80’s used to do… I put more gore than I wanted in the movie, knowing that they would likely pull back.  And so we submitted it and the network was like, “Yeah. No problem. This is all fine!”   I was like, “WHAT!?” [laughs]  We literally blew the backs of zombie heads off and much more, and the network was completely fine with it.   So, ironically, we were the ones who pared back the gore to where we wanted it. 

Slickster: That’s wild.

Ferrante: It was fun.  We had a great effects team.  Alandra and Alex totally rock-starred it out.  I’m really happy it comes across as a pretty gory, zombie film. 

Slickster:  There’s a lot of controversy between fast-moving “rage zombies,” and the original “Romero slow moving zombies”.  It seems you strike a balance between the two in ZTW.  Care to weigh in on the subject matter.

Ferrante: Yeah, let me talk about that a minute. People have asked about it, and we were fully aware about this, so we tried to have our cake and eat it too. The water zombies are a little more lumbering , slower zombies.  The islanders are a little faster, but there is a mixture of both.  We kinda’ play with that a little bit, because not every zombie is going to be ravenous.  

Slickster: We’ve talked about Romero and Fulci, but one name we haven’t mentioned yet is Carpenter.  John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) was listed as major influence on you, and Mr. Carpenter is a name that constantly pops up among today’s brightest creators.  Can you speak to why this is and Mr. Carpenter’s impact on your career?

Ferrante: Halloween was a big important moment for me.  They were doing a reissue of it in the theater when I was kid and I persuaded my mom to let me go see it by myself.   The photos of Michael Meyers freaked me out… I thought the mask was actually his face! (laughs)  So, I got to go see it, and was scared shitless!  Halloween terrified me.  I’ve never been that scared in a movie ever since.  

That was when I fell in love with Carpenter’s work.  I looked up his other stuff… Assault on Precinct 13, and The Thing.   When people used to ask me what’s my favorite horror movie, I used to say “Halloween”, but now I say “The Thing”.  Thats because The Thing is a perfect film!  I could watch it anytime.   It’s a different kind of scare and unique creation that was absolutely vilified when came out.  

Slickster: It was hated.

Ferrante: Right. No one liked it, and yet it grew.  I enjoyed when I saw it.  But, looking back, they used practical effects and its held up very well.  You don’t see many flaws in that, like you see in the digital effects from movies as recent as ten years ago.  

Carpenter, like Hitchcock, understands suspense.  They both created suspense sequences that still hold up well today.  So, I think we owe a lot of allegiance to John Carpenter.

Someone came out of the screening last night and said, “This felt very much like a Carpenter movie.”  So, ZTW has my sensibility, but also has an 80s feel. We’re trying to emulate the 80s vibe, but with modern but in present day.   

There are a few anachronistic things that we put in there intentionally.  I purposely had the douchebag character, Blaine, wear a pink polo shirt and teal sweater.  He said, “It’s soooo hot,” and I said, “I don’t care! You’re wearing it!”

So yeah, Carpenter is a huge influence.  His movies are heavy on machismo. His hero are frequently a grizzled guy, and certainly Hunter Shaw (Ian Ziering) has that in Zombie Tidal Wave.  

But, just like in Sharknado, a lot of the female characters have that too, and they rise to the occasion. They get a lot of fun and cool moments too that you don’t expect.  I like playing with those types of conventions.  For example, the classic horror movie cliché, where the woman is running away and falls down.  In ZTW we turned that on its head and did to a male character, which I thought was kinda’ funny in a role-reversal way.

Slickster: The damsel in distress now changes gender.

Ferrante:  Exactly, I’ve always liked strong female characters. I think they are interesting.  Nova, from Sharknado, started off at the beginning one way and by the end she is this insane badass.  I always had fun writing her dialogue.  She talks a lot like I talk, so it was really fun make this quirky, odd character and see her progression through out the Sharknado movies.  It gives such an incredible arc over the six movies.   We took Tara Reid, who was like a housewife, and turned her into a super hero! (laughs)

That’s the great thing about making movies; once you create a world you can just start messing with it.  We did with ZTW too.   There was character who was supposed to die early on in the film, and the actor was so good (Will J)… and he’s also a singer, who was going to be in the band scene with the Fulci’s.  But then he came in and played some songs that we wrote on his ukulele.  I said, “Oh COME ON Man! Did you have to play that on the uke?! I can’t NOT use that in the movie now!” So we staved off his death and used that as a key moment. 

Slickster: So it was kind of humorous moment. 

Ferrante: Yeah, I’ve got an odd sense of humor and I tend to play things straight.  There’s this weird sense of kind quirky humor that we try to get away with.  Its absurd humor that is played straight and SOMEHOW we get away with doing it. 

Slickster: Like in the trailer where Shaw asks to his teammate, “What are we going to do about those things,” while they are on a small speed boat being surrounded by swimming zombies.

“What are you going to do about that,” responds his partner pointing a monster tidal wave bearing down on top of them.

Ferrante: That’s a perfect example.  We worked a lot on several drafts to get this quirky humor just right. 

Slickster:  So, this is a ‘first encounter’ as they say in zombie culture.  This will be the first time that Shaw and his partner will encounter the SURFING dead.

Ferrante: Yeah, it funny they use that, and there is no surfing zombies in the movie at all! (Laughs) I think thats really funny.  It’s a great tagline. 

It’s fun when you live with a project for six months and you walk into the edit room or doing the music and you lose concept of how the film is going to turn out.  You’re like, “Is this even working anymore?”  At that moment, it’s kind of this blob, but then you start putting it front of audience and see how they react to it. 

There is a moment when the first zombie appears in ZTW, and a shouts, “Get away from me! Get back!”.  Then the character takes a swipe at the zombie, and the sound effects department put a punch hit from the back of the zombie, so the audience never sees it connecting, but every time someone saw that in the screening they think it’s hilarious!  Its those little things that the audience remembers. 

If we can do one or two things like that – thing that people haven’t seen before – maybe they’ll remember the movie. 

Slickster: What is the best advice you can give to young people who may want to start a career in movie writing, producing or directing?

Ferrante:  Sure.  I came from a small town in Northern California.  I didn’t know how I was going to break into the movie industry, so I kept writing about films.  I finally got some cameras and started doing some stuff on my own.   I found SOME way in, because I really loved making movies.I did short films through high school and went to San Francisco State for film.   I’ve always been a film geek, but I watched A LOT of movies.   

One of the things that taught me a lot was editing my own short films.  It completely deconstructs the illusion.  I remember, one of the most interesting projects we did early in my career was a very bad parody of karate movie.  We actually did a couple of them.  The idea behind was this; we’re going take my friend and go shoot  a bunch of unrelated stuff, then stitch it together in editing. Then we’ll loop dialogue over it, like it’s badly dubbed to finish off whatever the story was supposed to be.  

At the time I thought, ”These are the most stupid and ridicules things we should be doing.”  But, I found out that doing those silly things taught me about editing.  It taught me about finding a way to make something work, especially when you don’t have something.   It taught me how looping can help develop a story point. 

There was small wooden gate at my house, and I had a character kick the gate.  In the backyard there was long gated fence that had been falling down.  So, we lifted the fence up and he kicked the other side and it crashed down.  I cut those two things together, and even though they were completely different shapes, colors and everything, the illusion of him knocking down the gate… WORKED.

It’s weird how you can trick an audience like that, once they are invested in what they are watching.  They don’t question it.  As the filmmaker, you know the trick, but they don’t.  That’s the beauty of film; there are some many tiny, subtle tricks you can employ.  Learning these tricks helped me later on, especially when you’re working in low-budget films. 

Look, if you’ve got a 100 days and $200,000,000 to make a movie, you can pretty much do whatever you want, the world is your oyster…. Spend a week shooting one page of script.  When you’re doing low-budget, which is where most of us start – you’re working with eighteen days to do everything.  That’s like twelve pages of screenplay per day.   Sometimes you can be precious.  You’ll have to think fast, and improvise. 

I remember a different short we did, and nothing was going right.  The cameras weren’t working and it was windy.  Eventually, someone was getting frustrated and they told me, “This not how movies are made!”  After moving to LA and working as an effects artists and second unit stuff, I called that person up and said, “You know what? This is EXACTLY how movies are made!”

There’s always something.  The lights aren’t working. The camera isn’t working.  A prop didn’t show up.  You have to think fast, and in some of those cases… real magic happens. 

Slickster:  Is there anything else you’d like to say, or talk about… zombies, horror, important movie director stuff?

Ferrante: Yes, I enjoy doing some of the music for my movies. I have a band named “Quint” with Robbie Wrist.  In all my films we usually end up doing four or five songs per movie.  It’s kinda’ fun, because we do it post (production), and then we sit down and write the songs.  Its kinda like writing a musical.  I always have a lot of fun doing this, and in ZTW we did a lot of 80s inspired songs.   We did one called “Club Dead” and one called “Party to Raise the Dead”.  There’s a punk song called “Suck it!’, so it’s really fun doing that.  There’ll be an EP out by the end of the week on iTunes called Club Dead. 

Slickster: Thanks for chatting with Slickster Mag!

Ferrante: No problem, it was great to talk with you. Let me know what you think of the movie.  I love hearing from the fans.