One night while reading John 20, I got the shivers from the description of Mary approaching the empty tomb early on the morning of the Third Day, "when it was yet dark." It's a creepy moment. Lying there on my bed in the Brooklyn Street house, I flashed on the image of Jesus lurching out of the cave like a Romero zombie. I thought it was hilarious, and told my girlfriend (now wife) that I had this great idea for a story. She thought it was horrible.

I pushed the idea aside, thinking it was just too perverse. But Zombie Christ haunted me. I realized that it could be great in the form of a low-budget horror movie. I imagined it being shot in eastern Oregon, which is desert, and costing about two hundred bucks to make. After all, I knew a bunch of talented, energetic performers (Linn Brooklyn, Meyer Harrison, Seth Bateman, etc.) who would work for free, and my friend Ron Walker had the equipment and the filmmaking know-how. Amazingly, when I related the idea to my friends they all wanted to be involved.

I wrote the script in seven hours, investing the project with a momentum that carried through to the editing process. One day we had an innocent dramatic reading of the script in the living room, and the next thing I knew the pre-production was in full swing. The movie was cast and a rehearsal schedule set. We even enlisted one half of Portland's infamous underground filmmaking duo the Hall Brothers (Fight Dub I – III), as a fight choreographer, if only briefly. (None of the fights in the film reflect on their talents.)

The movie was scripted with the idea of Linn Brooklyn in the lead role of Mary Magdalene. My wife knew this as soon as she got to page eight of the 22 page script where it says, "Mary evades [the zombie] by doing a back flip." Linn is a professional performer whose work includes a lot of acrobatics, tumbling, circus-skills stuff, as well as acting. Meyer Harrison and Thomas Patrick worked in the same company as Linn. I was good friends with Meyer, who suggested TP. I called him in Maryland where he was conducting some family business, and he readily agreed to take on the eponymous role and keep for another month or so his long Jesusy hair.

Dan Coleman, who was originally scheduled to play Chief, recommended Cape Kiwanda in Pacific City, Oregon as the place to find a cave. I couldn't find suitable caves in eastern Oregon, so I checked it out. The cave looked good, but it was right on the ocean!

The big weekend arrived with me feeling confident and excited. My fears were that we would be asked by a park ranger to show our non-existent permit to film, or that the locals would catch wind of what this movie was about and lynch us, or that the managers of the private campground in which we were staying would take offense at the blasphemy and kick us out, or that one of the performers would get hurt. None of that happened. Of course not. It never comes from the direction you expect.

My wife Beth and I arrived at the campground and got set up and spent a few hours scouting final locations and taking some establishing footage. I was in possession of Ron's older Hi-8 video camera, which has a black and white viewfinder. The very first bit of tape I shot on the production actually made it into the movie: it's a POV shot as Mary and Simon Peter approach the Disciple's Camp. The bushes I was pushing through were laden with these dry black seed-pods that made a great, creepy rustling sound.

Thomas Patrick was one of the first performers to arrive. I met him with pleasure and we did some shots of Jesus looking beatific. The campground was overrun by rabbits, and Thomas approached one and fed it a carrot -- a nice Jesusy moment that we used in the final cut. I was feeling great. We'd barely started and I'd already gotten some wonderful footage. The weather was beautiful. The Oregon coast in general and Cape Kiwanda in particular are gorgeous. The other performers arrived in small groups and began setting up their tents. Beth ran an inventory and found that we hadn't left any important props back in Portland. About the only thing we'd forgotten to bring was the pint bottle of whiskey promised to Thomas for post-liver-eating-scene mouth washing. Thomas is a vegetarian and was not looking forward to having to bite into raw calf's liver. Having forgotten the whiskey, I was happy we'd decided not to use real cow's brain for the brain-eating scene. Cauliflower would suffice.

So we headed down to the beach and shot what we could of the Zombie Christ emerging from the cave. The light was fading so we didn't get everything we needed. Ron, applying creative problem solving, did a few shots using an infra-red light and the camera's NightVision mode. Later that night, we shot the two Campfire Scenes. Somehow we were so busy and I felt so rushed that I never went to Ron's van to review the tape on a portable TV. After all, you could easily review the footage in-camera. The only problem was that the older camera I was using had a black-and-white viewfinder. Didn't matter, I told myself, I could imagine it in color.

We shot for twelve or more hours the next day, pushing furiously through something like 18 pages of script. By the end of the day we could only afford to do one take per shot. I knew that some of the performers had to leave mid-day tomorrow, so we simply couldn't afford the luxury of second takes unless the first was obviously unusable. The performers were not crazy about this -- and who can blame them? Thomas Patrick dubbed me "One-Shot Johnny." Personally, I felt exactly like Ed Wood. Each first take was "perfect!" I wasn't crazy about the situation, but there was no choice because there was no time. Although I wasn't thinking of it then, now I wonder what difference those three hours we lost on Friday would have made on Saturday.

Most of Saturday we spent at the Disciple's Camp, which was actually the Pet Area of the private campground. Although the campground was nearly full, the only time anyone came back there while we were filming was on Friday during Mary Running. A couple of teenaged kids asked us what the movie was about, I told them, "Easter Sunday" and they fled as if from the Zombie Christ itself.

At the end of the day the bloody actors had to stand in line with a bunch of campers and surfers to shower off the make-up and Karo gore. Some people asked them why they were made-up, they just said, "horror movie" and left it at that.

Throughout the weekend I kept in mind a distinction defined by Meyer Harrison. On Friday night Meyer advised me to focus on "the process, not the product." I hesitated for a moment after he said that. One response that flitted through the mind was, "Screw you, pal. This is all about the movie. MY MOVIE! It's going to make me rich and famous and then you won't be giving me any of this hippie shit about process or product! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!" This villainous thought was probably produced by the same part of my mind that created the Zombie Christ. The impulse passed and I took Meyer's advice. All these people volunteering their time and their considerable talents should have a good time and not fear the wrath of some megalomaniacal first time movie director. For God's sake, did I want to become Sam Raimi? Well, actually, yes.

Process not product, process not product. This was my mantra as I watched Friday slip away. I continued the mental chant on Saturday as we did just one take of so many shots. Sunday morning Ron and many of the performers and crew folk went home, leaving me and Beth with Meyer, Thomas, Linn, and Seth. We shot the Recrucifixion and then Walking-in-the-Desert stuff that later was very useful. Meyer Harrison did the historic last shot of the movie, which is of Mary and Simon running along the top of a dune.

There being no rest for the wicked, Beth and I didn't stop with the shooting on Sunday. Monday evening we started editing the video at Ron's place. The most thrilling moment of the whole process occurred that night as I saw the first scene come together. Movie magic! It's enthralling. All those shots coming together to tell a story. Wow! Then came the worst part of the process, when I discovered that every inch of tape I'd shot on the old camera had mysteriously been recorded as black & white and with no sound.

As Simon Peter might say, "Fuck a duck."

We discovered this disaster late on Monday and so I went home discouraged and wondering how we could possibly overcome this hurdle. The best way to overcome it, it turned out, was to ignore it. We put together the rough-cut over the next two days by simply cutting from color to b&w as necessitated by what shots we had. Whenever possible we inserted crude sounds by recording them directly onto the VHS master. I'm not sure I've ever worked as intensely as I did on editing Zombie Christ with Ron and Beth. I loved every minute of it.

On Thursday we showed the rough cut to the cast and crew at the house in south-east Portland that I shared with Linn and Beth. It went over well. Then Beth and I went to Europe and I didn't get to work on the movie for almost a year.