The power of funk compels you.
Main Cast: Martel Rudd, Kristopher McAfee
Director: Henry Kaplan
Hmm. Well, that’s one take on the zombie genre…
We’re in a parking lot outside a business complex in an anonymous city well into the zombie apocalypse. Two zombies are waiting out there for any of the people hiding inside to come out when something hits a boombox on top of a pile of garbage and the radio plays, very briefly, a bit of song that gets a zombie’s attention. Then the music dies and the zombie stops moving. Time passes. More zombies gather while the people inside cower in the dark.
After hearing a noise from a pile of garbage, the zombies attack it and one of them tosses the boombox to the ground, causing it to start playing again, a song familiar to the zombies. The one from before wakes up and starts moving, dancing to the song blaring from the speakers.
Another zombie, his lot partner from the opening, sees this and steps closer, first observing, then joining in the dance. The film cuts back and forth between zombies in a parking lot and two co-workers at a pizzeria dancing the afternoon away in the back room to entertain their co-workers on a slow day.
The music plays and the dance continues until the two zombies finally stop and stare at each other, both realizing they’re not zombies anymore. Just before the rest of the horde attacks.
This is WE TOGETHER by writer/director Henry Kaplan and it’s the latest in my review of the horror shorts on the Alter YouTube channel.
Now I’m not saying music doesn’t cure the zombie apocalypse, I just thought it would have been something like Prince’s HOUSEQUAKE or The Time’s JUNGLE LOVE. Not that the song played here (no idea what it is, and Shazam was drawing a blank, too!) isn’t funky and meant to get you moving, it just wouldn’t have been my personal pick for the song that would bring me back to myself and remind me of my humanity.
WE TOGETHER is a good little short, and if the artist responsible for the music wanted to use it as a video for the song, it would have gotten heavy rotation on MTV in the 80s and 90s when things like videos mattered. I mean the concept is very original and the dancing scenes, intercut past and present versions, was very well executed. As a horror short, however … I don’t know about all that.
I will give this one 3 stars anyway, though, because of what it IS, not what’s meant to be. Whether I come across this 7-minute clip in the wild or find it on a horror short film page is neither here nor there. The important thing is I found it and now I have this idea of “the power of music is strong enough to cure zombism” in my mental rolodex.
I say give it a shot, it’s free. We’d post it here but it’s age restricted. So click through to YouTube.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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