Dawna Of The Dead

Corpsy climbs in the coffin with Dawna Of The Dead writer/director Laume Conroy

Corpsy: So, Laume, I saw Dawna of The Dead at the New Beverly Theater and the audience was hooting and hollering all the way through. It’s definitely a popcorn and pot movie. Congrats! You have created a great blend of grindhouse with extreme violence and XXX sex. Is this your homage to grindhouse films?  And which grindhouse films inspired you?

LC: I do love grindhouse films; the problem is that nowadays “grindhouse” has become a buzzword or a genre. The real grindhouses were actually movie theatres. Throughout the 70s, rows of storefront theatres lined 42nd street in New York, and they called them “grind houses” or “scratchhouses,” because they would literally grind up the prints. Sometimes the projection booth was a piece of plywood put up to divide the room – now that’s the real deal. The theatres would run double, and sometimes triple, features and I guess a lot of their clientele were bums ... uh ... I mean homeless people, because it was cheaper to sleep in a grindhouse theatre than get a room. But where else could you see a kung fu movie one week, a horror movie the following week and XXX porno the week after that? Sure, we had drive-ins out here but it wasn’t quite the same. The grindhouse movies, or movies of the 70s always took it to the edge and beyond, they frequently mixed extreme sex and extreme violence, like 99 Women and Thriller: A Cruel Picture. It’s funny to think that almost forty years ago we could make movies that are more extreme than what we can make now, so with this in mind ... Dawna had to go as far as it could. My goal was to make the most extreme movie possible.

Read the rest of this interview with killer art posters and photos, in our print magazine. Click here to order now.