Multimedia artist and filmmaking fetishist Bruce LaBruce has been dealing in both genres since the early 90s when he made No Skin Off My Ass, his first sexually explicit feature film, and co-starred in his friend Candy’s short film Interview with a Zombie, in which he played a gay member of the undead.
Against all professional advice, Bruce has been making porn movies ever since, albeit reluctantly. “I’m not a particularly avid consumer of porn, and I don’t follow the industry; not unpretentiously,” Bruce quips. “I consider myself not so much a pornographer as an artist who works in porn.”
After making three sexually explicit feature films (NSOMA, Super 8 1/2, and Hustler White), in 1999 he wrote and directed his first “legitimate” porno film, Skin Flick, made under the auspices of the German porn company Cazzo Films. The subject was neo-Nazi skinheads, characters that, one could argue, have a certain zombie-like quality. The hardcore version, released under the title Skin Gang, was a full-on pornographic product, shot in a relatively conventional porn style, and packaged and promoted with an adult entertainment industry audience in mind. “It was even nominated for nine gay adult video awards in the U.S.,” Bruce beams.
His following film, The Raspberry Reich (2004), about a gang of extreme left wing would-be terrorists – another zombie-esque bunch – was also conceived as a porn product, although the softcore version, which nonetheless contained sexually explicit material, managed to play at over 150 film festivals worldwide. (The hardcore version, entitled The Revolution Is My Boyfriend, was released by the porn company Wurst Films.)
In 2008 he finally stopped pussyfooting around the living dead theme and made an actual zombie flick, called Otto; or, Up with Dead People. Another of his sexually explicit art films, Otto also played at more than 150 film festivals despite, or perhaps because of, the infamous gut-fucking scene, in which a gay zombie penetrates a hole in the stomach of a fellow gay zombie with his undead cock. While touring the world with the film, he found himself in interviews making the lofty pronouncement that he believed zombie porn was the wave of the future, and that we will soon routinely see porous, corrupted flesh being penetrated by legions of lascivious zombies. “Zombie porn is practical: you can create your own orifice!” he assures.
So by way of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and to get the ball rolling (or, I suppose, balls), Bruce has pulled together the funding for an Untitled Hardcore Zombie Project, to be shot in LA this coming August, and starring one of the biggest names in the adult entertainment industry, Francois Sagat. He gives us exclusive access to the preliminary Peres Projects shag-and-shock showreel, splatter zombie movie effects created by LA-based FX whiz Joe Castro, as well as his new Vision of Excess IRA zombie project.
Heed Bruce’s immortal last words: “Get ready for a revolutionary zombie porn extravaganza!”