The second of our disreputable anthologies, Nazi Zombie Death Tales, has recently found its way back to streaming after several years in the second-hand-copies-on-physical-media-only wilderness. The flick was shot as Battlefield Death Tales (so please don’t go into it expecting hordes of nazi zombies; the title change was made at the request of a supermarket chain who stocked DVDs high and sold ’em cheap back in the day) and features stories from the incomparable Jim Eaves (whose podcast The Honest Filmmaker is absolutely fantastic and you need to check out RIGHT AWAY), Al Ronald (one half of the incredible comedy duo The Electric Head who are currently gearing up for the Edinburgh Festival and are genuinely one of the most exhilarating live comedy acts I’ve ever seen) and myself. It was shot on a shoestring with a great deal of love and ingenuity, using every trick in the book to maximise every penny spent.

You see all those (genuine practical) explosions in the background at the beginning of Jim’s story? You’ll notice there are also practical explosions at the beginning of my own story. They’re the same explosions. We shot both scenes from different directions at the same time, so we’d be able to double up the impact of our pyro budget. That’s how you do it when there’s no cash in the bank, folks.

The film was released as Angry Nazi Zombies in the USA. Wanna know why, fact fans? After all, the word ‘angry’ seems a bit superfluous when you’re dealing with the two words directly following it. It’s because at that point, where physical media was still dominant but starting to dwindle, US distributors were very fond of releasing movies that started with the letter ‘A’ so that it’d be the very first thing you saw as you entered the horror section of your favourite DVD emporium.

In Germany it was called Nazi Zombie Battleground and had heavily redacted artwork to remove imagery banned in that country.

My own story in the movies, Devils of the Blitz, was inspired by my Dad. Back in 1941, he’d spent horrible nights sheltering from bombs with his mother, huddled in the cupboard under the stairs in their house in Westcliff-on-Sea. The experience never really left him and even by the time of his death in 2020, he was worried by the sound of the wind outside on stormy nights because it reminded him of those distant rumbles during the Blitz. When I was asked to write a WWII-set horror story for this anthology, I didn’t want to do anything that might be seen as glorifying the horrors of war. I also couldn’t quite shake the idea of sheltering in a cupboard under the stairs during unspeakable destruction and then started thinking, hey, what if there was something awful inside the cupboard, too?

That was the seed that set up my story, which somehow then managed to swerve into rubber puppet Gremlins territory because, hey, that’s the way my shit tends to swerve eventually. As a result, it’s definitely one of the strangest things I’ve ever written and probably one of the least popular. It generally gets a critical kicking when compared to Jim and Al’s bravura entries in the anthology. I’m okay with that, to be honest. Other than some issues with the sound mix (and one really poor composite shot I threw together myself at the last minute; you’ll know it when you see it) I’m proud of writing something strange and in such a different direction to the way I could have taken it. If you dig it, please do go and drop a quick review on Amazon, IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes; indie movies are relying on word-of-mouth more than ever before as we fight for visibility in a crowded marketplace against big hitters.

Click below to check it out.

Oh, and while your over on Prime Video please don’t forget to watch our incredible musical horror extravaganza Powertool Cheerleaders vs the Boyband of the Screeching Dead, too.

Indie horror forever!