It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Savageland is a 2015 mockumentary about a zombie outbreak in the small, practically off the grid, town of Sangre de Cristo on the US-Mexico border. On the night of June 2, 2011, all 57 residents of the town are brutally murdered and dismembered, with the only survivor being Francisco Salazar (Noe Montes), an illegal immigrant and amateur photographer. Local law enforcement conveniently pins the slaughter on him and he is sent to prison and eventually executed. However, Salazar took pictures of the entire night’s events and it is through these images we discover the truth about what happened, spurring on the creation of this True Crime documentary.
The film was written and directed by Phil Guidry, Simon Herbert, and David Whelan and is the sole directing credit for each of them. Guidry has a career in writing and producing sports television, Whelan is also a sports television producer, and Herbert has no film or television credits beyond Savageland. That’s kind of stunning to me, as Savageland is an extremely good horror film and I’d be happy to see more work from any of them.
The documentary format is a fantastic way to approach what is essentially a found-footage film and Savageland captures the look and feel of any ID Discovery true crime show. The performances are very naturalistic and believable as people are interviewed about what they know about the massacre and the loved ones that they’ve lost. The professional talking head interviews are likewise exactly what one would expect from one of these shows. The way the film is shot allows for quick cuts of crime scene-style footage, which allows the first-time directors to not have to devote a lot of attention to the gore effects, just the aftermath. And it’s very effective.
If you just caught this after it had started with no foreknowledge, I think it would trick viewers into believing something terrible had actually happened. It doesn’t hurt that a real-life author, Lawrence C. Ross Jr. appears as himself, discussing the fictional book his character wrote about the incident and Salazar’s case. The rest of the cast are relatively unknowns, adding credence to their performances as victims and/or blatantly racist assholes.
Oddly enough, one of the characters, a veteran wartime photographer, was very familiar to me but I couldn’t place him, and after a quick look at IMDB, it turns out that he was comics legend Len Wein, the co-creator of Swamp Thing, The Human Target and most of the new X-Men characters that debuted back in 1975, including Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus! He worked on just about every single comic series that Marvel and DC produced (this is not an exaggeration, either) and was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2008. He passed away in 2017.
What really makes this film stand out is the way Salazar’s photography is interspersed with the interviews and interrogation videos. The pictures are grainy and blurred, capturing the feel of shots taken while running for one’s life, and create eerie flashes of violence and death that, again, save the filmmakers from having to worry about believability or extensive make-up effects. The flashes reflecting from the monster’s eyes do wonders for making the threat feel real.
Savageland comes in with a tight 82-minute runtime and never gets slow or boring, despite the documentary format. It even does a good job of leaving some mystery at the end, when it is reported that a group of racists decided to desecrate Salazar’s grave after his lethal injection execution, only to find the grave empty. The lead-up to this news is set up by a number of shots lingering on the bandaged bite wound on Salazar’s hand in his interview. There are also reports of other mysterious deaths and disappearances hundreds of miles north of Sangre de Cristo, as well as some video footage of an attack. And was that undead Salazar captured on film?
It’s excellent work all around, and more people need to get their eyes on this film. It’s streaming for free on YouTube, so there’s really no excuse to miss it. It does a very good job of telling a unique story with a nice helping of social commentary that doesn’t overpower the narrative.