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Bad Jobs: 3 Days on a Zombie Horror Film
Los Angeles, 1997. I’m in a Hancock Park mansion for three marathon days working on a low-budget mafia/vampire/zombie flick starring an ex-Playboy Playmate and an actor who’s been dead for more than a year. My pay: $75 a day. My position: props/art department. The fact I’ve never worked in props or art department is never discussed.
The male lead is John Carradine who died ten years earlier. The producer, a well-known straight-to-video king, had the foresight to hire Carradine for several days work in 1987. He had him wear dark suits and appear on gothic sets uttering classic lines like, “They need human blood to survive,” and “By day they sleep, by night they kill.” Somehow, entire screenplays were written around Carradine’s dialogue and now he’s starring in his fourth posthumous film.
Day one finds me as assistant snake wrangler. I guard a ten-foot long boa constrictor in a glass tank, feeding it a small white mouse every few hours. Just prior to shooting, I’m told to rub Vaseline on the snake’s skin so it will gleam beneath the 5K lights. I reach into the cage and the boa bites me between my thumb and forefinger tearing away a patch of skin.
“Don’t grab him there,” the prop man/animal wrangler yells. “Grab him behind the head.”