The Tribune Democrat, Johnstown, PA

Filmmaker shooting zombie movie in region

Randy Griffith 
rgriffith@tribdem.com

WINDBER — To say that Blair Murphy is an aficionado of the macabre is like saying the Steelers play football.

Murphy’s haunts in Windber’s former Grand Midway Hotel include a barroom bedecked with skeletons, bizarre murals, coffins and a black ceiling. It has been the host location for two DraculaCon gatherings dedicated to “music, literature, history, film and the paranormal.”

A costume contest and private dinner in the historic hotel’s dining room highlight the convention, which helped launch filmmaker Murphy’s latest project: A low-budget zombie movie being shot at locations across the region.

Footage from the convention’s events will be included in the film.

“I don’t want to mislead anyone,” Murphy said. “There is nobody backing it. We are a bunch of friends getting together who have certain skills.”

In fact, the whole thing didn’t start out to be a feature-length film at all.

It was supposed to be a quick video showing off unique locations in Greater Johnstown and western Pennsylvania to entice Hollywood filmmakers.

“State Rep. Frank Burns wanted to create a film commission,” Murphy said. “What a film commission does is court Hollywood. You show them, ‘Why not make your movie here rather than going to Canada or someplace?’ ”

Burns calls Murphy “a tremendously creative guy,” and applauds his attempts to raise the region’s visibility. Burns said he has not been able to identify funding for a local film office, but hopes Murphy and others can coordinate with Pittsburgh’s film office.

Zombies were just supposed to be an attention-getter, Murphy said.

Shooting locations were planned around several area landmarks and geographic features.

“It started out as a gimmick to chase characters from location to location,” Murphy said. “I underestimated how popular zombies are. As soon as I started shooting, more friends than I asked for volunteered.

“A lot of people came out of the woodwork.”

What was supposed to be a 10-minute video quickly grew to a half-hour. Soon, Murphy and his team realized they would have enough for a short feature film.

Shooting began last fall and has continued intermittently as the mood and artists’ availability permits.

“This is being shot on a barbecue level,” Murphy said. “The shooting schedule is whenever I throw a barbecue and convince everybody to come to town.”

Murphy, 46, is hoping the winter weather continues for another shoot later this month.

He won’t give the exact date or location because he doesn’t want a lot of outside noise or traffic. He will not reveal the working title either.

“I am purposely vague about the whole project,” Murphy said. “Parts of it are forming as we go along.”

Why zombies? Murphy suspects that western Pennsylvania’s history as a location for the genre has fueled its popularity. Director George Romero’s 1968 cult classic, “Night of the Living Dead,” and its 1978 sequel, “Dawn of the Dead,” were both shot around Pittsburgh.

“It is the signature monster for the area,” Murphy said.

“New Orleans has vampires. We have zombies.”

For Murphy and his crew, the living dead have another advantage:

“They are cheap,” he said. “It is a lot easier to create a zombie than a werewolf for instance.”

In fact, when word leaked out he was filming zombies, volunteers showed up in their own makeup. It was almost like a contest to see whose creation was the “ghouliest.”

One volunteer boasted he had a special talent.

“He said, ‘I can jump out of a second-story window,’ ” Murphy said. “So we put him in the film.”

The problem was: He couldn’t do it. But the footage of him hanging from the window and being pulled back inside made for good horror.

Murphy said his creative group feeds off the community’s response.

“The result has been all kinds of talented people coming on board,” he said. “Their enthusiasm translates directly into value out of this.”

A native of New Jersey, Murphy earned his bachelor of fine arts in cinematography at University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. He spent a decade in Los Angeles working for the likes of Marvel Films, producer Stan Lee and pop music star Prince. He produced and directed the low-budget horror film “Jugular Wine: A Vampire Odyssey,” which was released directly to video in 1996.

He moved to Windber about 10 years ago when he and two artist friends bought the decrepit Grand Midway Hotel after finding it on the Internet.

Eventually his partners moved on, but Murphy says he’s here to stay. He clearly has found a home in the spooky hotel.

Although he is reluctant to talk publicly about specifics, he agrees with local legends of ghosts in the Grand Midway.

Murphy’s websites, www.iliveinahauntedhotel.com and www.cemetery.net, include descriptions of the ghosts and visitors’ stories of encounters.

The Web pages also show how the 32-room Grand Midway has become a magnet for artistic souls and fans of the bizarre. In addition to DraculaCon, the hotel has hosted the private event Kerouac Fest since 2003.

The summer gathering of artists continues the legacy of beat generation guru Jack Kerouac.

Born in Lowell, Mass., in 1922, Kerouac was a novelist and poet who coined the phrase “beat generation.” He died at the age of 47 in 1969.

“This building has a pretty tight circle of artistic friends,” Murphy said. “There are local people within 30 miles and people who travel here from L.A.and New Orleans. That group has been the creative force.”

It is the same group that performed William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” outside the hotel in Miner’s Park during June’s Windber Rumbles motorcycle events connected with Johnstown’s Thunder in the Valley.

Murphy said he developed both his passion for filmmaking and his morbid sense of style from his family. His father was a funeral director and his grandfather was a projectionist.

“I always wanted to play with the toys,” Murphy said.

Some of the Grand Midway’s decorations come from his father’s now-closed funeral home.

Others were donated and still others were collected through browsing local thrift stores.

Murphy said he has enough zombies for this month’s shoot, but could need a few extras next month.

“A lot of zombies will get killed,” he said. “I might put out an announcement like: If you are free show up between 3 and 5 on a certain day.”

 
HOTEL ZOMBIE SHOOT so, the rumor is true, Butch Patrick, AKA Eddie Munster, is in the film. And he was great too. A real blast. We shot most of it back in the Fall. It reminded me of that scene in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta started dancing, and for viewers all kinds of earlier iconic pop culture memories started crackling.


Butch Patrick with Ben Mack in the local train graveyard...


Butch Patrick with Phat Man Dee!


Damien arrives soon. Jaemi, Deanna, Skot, Manuel, Margaret, Crystal, Steph, Kyle, Frick brothers, Cinema Bill, Chef Thom, and Magic Mark to soon follow. Very exciting. I feel like we are about to embark on a history-making wkd in no budget film. I even rented a fire engine! "Great men I had known in my youth, great heroes of America I'd been buddies with, with whom I'd adventured and gone to jail and known in raggedy dawns, the boys beat on curbstones seeing symbols in the saturated gutter..." -Jack Kerouac


This photo, because of the people in the background, reminds me of Herk Harvey's 1962 moody creeper film Carnival of Souls. It starred Candace Hilligoss. It was without question the scariest movie I ever saw as a little kid. (I was raised in a funeral home, so quiet ghouls floating around to organ music was pleasant but terrifying.)


I just experienced the most pure, spiritual, flawless, creative, enchanting, frictionless, well earned, delightful, lucky, marvelous, magical marathon weekend of independent filmmaking of my entire life. I feel like a million dollars. Maybe a billion dollars. Can't wait to kick back and watch the footage.

HOLLYWOOD MISSION I took Deanna to Los Angeles this week. We drove hours North to tour the magnificent San Simeon Hearst Castle. I can not stress enough the influence William Randolph Hearst's home-as-art-canvas has had on me with the Grand Midway Hotel. Later filmmaker Orson Welles mocked the castle as lifeless in his brilliant Citizen Kane, but the place was anything but... I walk around it almost crying. "How does one write even a forward for this journey into a period and place so touched with the golden haze of nostalgia as to be almost unreal?" -Ronald Reagan on San Simeon


HOLLYWOOD MISSION ...watched beautiful sunset along coast covered with thousands of burping elephant bull seals. Enchanted long walks, romantic red wine, Mexican food... Day #2, take Deanna to Venice Beach, my old stomping ground! Yet another fantastic city-as-canvas, designed 1905 by eccentric Abbot Kinney. Deanna meets guy covered in hair, also meets Rocky the 5-legged dog. Next, we grand tour Hollywood itself, film industry, movie studios, Walk of Fame, Chinese Theater, cruise Sunset Blvd, mansions, evening drinks, I miss living here, the huge influence slipping into Windber, meet singer Terry Prine and bride for Cuban feast, midnight hang with living legend Manuel Ibarra and his sweet girlfriend, deep sleep in Malibu...

HOLLYWOOD MISSION the real reason I am out here... Sunday morning camera friends Paris Patton and Sarah Morrison assist me in second unit filming for the hotel zombie movie. Manuel Ibarra and Deanna are in the scene, poolside, mountaintop over glorious Pacific Ocean. Our big secret? Actor Eric Roberts of the brilliant Bob Fosse movie Star 80, The Dark Knight, Cable Guy, Best of the Best, Pope of Greenwich Village, TV's Law and Order, brother of Julia Roberts, etc etc etc, is now in our film. Bam! He also kisses Deanna a few times for the opening scene (his idea). Later, actor Robert Downey Jr stands behind us in line at lunch. Deanna asks me this morning, "Was this weekend just a dream?"

"Not the Chef!"