There Will Be Bread: the short film that rose yeast from the grave
There are three kinds of people in this world: people who love zombies, people who are terrified of zombies and people who aren’t worth befriending. Kevin S. O’Brien is very much in the first group. He’s the highest caliber of zombie fan, the kind who’d drop an “outrageous amount” of money in a charity auction for the chance to appear as a zombie in the Walking Dead comic book series; who tried out three times to play an extra in Day of the Dead, in which he appears at exactly 1:28:08. But the pinnacle of O’Brien’s undying zombie fandom was in 1990, when, as a graduate student at Ohio University, he produced a short film called Night of the Living Bread.
The eight-minute homage parodies Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero’s cult classic that defined the modern zombie and began the grunt-filled, stiff-legged second and third films, Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985).
In O’Brien’s celebrated short film, killer bread rises (no pun intended) against humanity. A small group fights back with toasters instead of torches, and seeks safety by sealing off windows with sandwich bags.
The story starts just like the original. A couple pulls into a cemetery and when they get out of the car, they are attacked — by a slice of bread. Subsequent slices maul the man, while his girlfriend flees to a random, Hitchcockian house, where she joins the other survivors. By daybreak, everyone is dead except one man. It appears that all of the killer bread has left the house. The man is about to go outside when a climactic blizzard of white bread convinces him otherwise.
To make the film, O’Brien bought 110 loaves of Kroger’s white bread, back when a loaf was just 19 cents.
The couple that appear in the graveyard scene allowed O’Brien to use their condominium to film the rest of the movie.
“I put bread all over the place,” he said. “There were probably crumbs in their apartment for some time.”
In October of 1990, Night of the Living Bread premiered at the third annual Horror Film Marathon at the Drexel North Theater in Columbus.
“We kind of made a big deal out of it,” O’Brien said. The crew made little bread badges out of hardened clay, a trading card set and collectible action figures (pieces of toast) with name cards like “Crusty” and “Toasty” to hand out to the marathon crowd. O’Brien’s short film ran directly after Night of the Living Dead. It was an instant classic. Every year since, when Night of the Living Dead ends, the crowds start chanting, “Bread! Bread! Bread!”
After all the success at the Horror Film Marathon, O’Brien submitted Night of the Living Bread to the Hamburg No Budget Short Film Festival in Germany, where it took first place in the audience vote. Then, just for kicks, he sent his short to the studio that was producing the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead.
He got lucky. The studio needed a short film to bump the remake into the two-hour television slot. Columbia Pictures offered O’Brien a $2,500 advance for the North American film rights. Shortly after Halloween of 1992, O’Brien called the major television stations for the ratings on his short.
“I did some number crunching and figured about a million people had seen my film. I thought to myself, ‘How awesome is that!’”
The next shock was when Elite Entertainment, a company that restores cult classics, decided to include Night of the Living Bread on its Laserdisc of the 1968 Living Dead.
“I was a huge fan of Night of the Living Dead and here my film was being included on the definitive collection,” O’Brien said. “Student films do nothing, go nowhere usually.”
Best of all, Romero approved the inclusion of Night of the Living Bread on the “Millennium Edition” of his zombie classic. Apparently, Romero saw O’Brien’s short film and called it “a hoot.”
O’Brien has since created three more films for the Bread series: Loaf, a spoof on the final scene of Alien; Another Bread Film or a Shameless Marketing Ploy, which pokes fun at exploitation films; and Sandwich, an animated short.
Illustration by Brett Nuckles
Direct link: http://backdropmag.com/entertainment/there-will-be-bread-the-short-film-that-rose-yeast-from-the-grave/