After a Director Dies, Friends Finish His Life’s Work: A Zombie Musical

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/movies/anna-apocalypse-ryan-mchenry.html

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“Anna and the Apocalypse” is a zombie movie. But it’s also a ghost story.

In 2009, a Scottish film student named Ryan McHenry went to his close friend Naysun Alae-Carew with a delicate question: Would you like to make a zombie musical?

“He’d been watching a trailer for ‘High School Musical,’” Mr. Alae-Carew recalled, “and he thought it would be vastly better if Zac Efron were eaten by zombies.”

Mr. Alae-Carew admits he hesitated, but that he should have leapt at the idea. “Ryan had this kind of visual comedy brilliance,” he said. “He would tell you an idea that made no sense. And then he would just do it and it came to life.”

The resulting short film — “Zombie Musical” — won a Bafta, the British equivalent of an Oscar. Mr. McHenry’s Vine series, “Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal,” featuring clips of the actor at his most serious, seeming to refuse a proffered spoon of Corn Pops, went viral in 2013. He and Mr. Alae-Carew, now a producer, seemed to be on their way, and by 2014 were well into developing a feature version of “Zombie Musical” with much of the team behind the short.

“We were going to take over the world,” Mr. Alae-Carew recalled thinking at the time.

Before they could, Mr. McHenry received a diagnosis of bone cancer. He died at 27 in May 2015. (In tribute, Mr. Gosling made a Vine of his own, eating cereal.)

But the feature Mr. McHenry had planned and largely written — retitled “Anna and the Apocalypse” — was realized by his friends and fellow “Zombie” makers and will open the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Scary Movies XI” horror series on Friday. The point is lost on no one that the plot — about unspeakable catastrophe upending youthful lives — mirrors, in certain ways, the story behind “Anna.”

“One of the reasons I’m so proud of this project,” said Alan McDonald, co-writer of the feature, “is that I can look at what we all went through and almost map that onto our lead character — which is the strangest thing to say about a 17-year-old girl.”

The film, starring Ella Hunt as Anna, a plucky high-school heroine who confronts zombies with songs and a baseball bat, has been on the festival circuit, where it has received strong reviews. A commercial release is planned for November.

“All of us involved, including those who didn’t know him, would trade the film we’ve got to have Ryan back,” Mr. McDonald said. But there’s some consolation, he added, in having proven to themselves the thesis of the project: “that it’s a valid thing to live in today’s world; that really, really, really awful things can happen to you, but you can come out the other side and still want to make a positive difference.”

The crew members needed to pull themselves together after Mr. McHenry died, and they also needed a director — someone who could handle the excesses of the “Glee”-with-a-pandemic-at-Christmastime idea Mr. McHenry had cooked up. They found John McPhail, whose favorite musical is “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” and whose 2015 feature, “Where Do We Go From Here?,” was a romantic comedy set in a nursing home.

“This is our guy,” Mr. Alae-Carew recalls saying.

What ensued was a highly collaborative process, in which writers, composers and producers tweaked each other’s work — and songs — refining what Mr. McHenry and Mr. McDonald had already created. For the music, Mr. McHenry had indicated to the songwriters, Tommy Reilly and Roddy Hart, what he wanted right in the script: “a Taylor Swift moment happens in the cafeteria,” or “Lisa sings an innuendo-laden Christmas song,” which Mr. Hart said was the most fun the two had composing: “It’s essentially ‘Santa Baby,’ but a lot dirtier.”

The songwriters, Mr. Reilly added, were providing “music for people to be eaten to.”

Mr. McHenry still has a writing credit on “Anna and the Apocalypse,” but Mr. McPhail is the undisputed director. “That was incredibly important,” said Mr. Alae-Carew, “because we needed this to be John’s film. We couldn’t expect him to achieve Ryan’s vision, a guy he never met. That would have been super unfair. Plus, it’s a zombie musical. It’s complicated enough.”

Mr. McPhail said he never felt anything but totally welcome, even if the suggested course of study was a bit rough. “I tried to watch ‘High School Musical,’ but after 10 minutes I bailed. And the boys said, ‘Watch the first season of ‘Glee,’ and I bailed on that as well. But when I came on board, they called me the captain of the ship. And they backed me 100 percent.”

Still, no one involved, said Mr. Alae-Carew, can feel anything but odd each time he or she sees the title.

“I had a conversation with Ryan in January 2015, and I asked him, ‘Would you want us to make the film, if the worst happens?’” And he said yes, that we should. That it belonged to all of us. That it was the first proper thing we’d been able to make together. I’d just hoped it wouldn’t be the last thing we’d be able to make together.”