Having interviewed J.R. Bookwalter, we were able to get our hands on half a dozen behind the scenes images from his ‘80s low budget zombie flick The Dead Next Door. Shot for a mere $125,000 on Super-8 and produced by cult filmmaker Sam Raimi (under the alias The Master Cylinder), The Dead Next Door has often been considered something of a guilty pleasure amongst zombie fans.
“I was only nineteen-years-old, so I probably shouldn’t have been prepared at all given my lack of life experience! But surprisingly, by and large, the cast and crew met the challenges head-on and an awful lot of people devoted an entire summer to the bulk of the shoot in 1986,” Bookwalter explained to us in our interview, in which we covered the making of the movie in detail. “I wrote the first draft of the script in August, 1985 and the movie wasn’t completed until the spring of 1989… so it was almost four years! And yes, there were plenty of times where I wished I had never started it, especially when money ran dry and I had to go off and shoot weddings or music videos for local bands to keep our little office open and keep the dream alive, so to speak.”
All images courtesy of J.R. Bookwalter.
Read our exclusive interview with J.R. Bookwalter.