Zombies head downtown for scene in film

It’s 6:15 p.m. Friday, and maybe a dozen people are milling around Venue 515 in Manitou Springs.

Strangely, only a handful of them are dead.

Most, it seems, don’t even know that a scene for a feature-length film by Michael Bliss and Ben Willis will be held here tonight.

“No, really?” said James Reiter, who looks pretty human at the moment. He and his friend Tyler Campbell, both 21, won tickets to the event on the radio. “That’s what’s going on?” Of course, if you wait around, they’ll also show perhaps the most sacred of zombie texts, director George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” said Bliss, who works by day at KRDO News 13 and is responsible for Blissfest, a festival patchwork of music, film and other arts.

“When (the film actors) say, ‘They’re coming to get you, Barbara,’” Bliss explains, “then the zombies here will attack the audience, and the audience runs out.” Three cameras are set to capture it all.

By about 7 p.m., a grim reaper and few more of the undead make the scene, including Sean Tuck, 47, and his 14-year-old daughter Chandler. Their makeup, created by Chandler with a glue gun and double-sided tape, is on-the-money scary: There are trailing intestines, bloody gashes, a bullet hole through the cheek and other unfortunate contusions.

“She’s got to work on the groan,” he says. He demonstrates.

Chandler nods stoically, taking a deep pull from the straw in her red Slurpee. Then she opens her mouth to reveal the cherry-red tongue of the freshly satiated zombie.

The film will be shot in Manitou Springs over the next six to nine months, says Willis, who is wearing a suit apparently splattered with blood. His character, he says, is an undead office worker — partly because Willis wanted to wear the suit and partly because that’s his line of work.

“In the movie, I actually get to rise from the grave,” Willis adds.

Dressed as a clown and conspicuously pale, Bliss wanders the growing crowd with a video camera. The film may debut at Blissfest, he said, but he hopes the finished film will eventually travel the indie film festival circuit. Maybe a long-held dream of becoming an actor or filmmaker will finally come true. For Willis, too.

Taylor Mueller, 14, watches Bliss from the ticket table. She’s dressed in a real wedding dress and a gray, black-and-white veil. No one’s done her make-up yet. Bliss is her dad.

 “I was surprised he really wanted to do it,” she says. “But we have, like, 50 zombie movies, and he just decided to do it.”

“I think it’s actually really cool.”

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Contact the writer at 476-1602