They always said Canadians were laid back, but this is ridiculous. We’ve become the true land of the dead this summer, as zombie films continue to surface across the country.

In Vancouver, Andrew Currie’s feature Fido is in production, while Carl Bessai’s Severed is seeking a distribution partner. CJ Hutchinson’s Denizens of the Dead is posting in Winnipeg, and Elza Kephart’s Montreal-shot Graveyard Alive: A Zombie Nurse in Love is looking to grow an audience through midnight screenings in Toronto.

These films follow in the shuffling footsteps of the Toronto-shot Resident Evil films, the 2004 remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and Romero’s latest, Land of the Dead, currently in theaters. A zombie-laden videogame adaptation of Silent Hill, from producer Don Carmody, who also produced Resident Evil: Apocalypse, recently wrapped just outside of Toronto as well.

‘They pick Toronto because it’s cheaper,’ says Jeff Campbell, VFX supervisor at Toronto’s Spin Productions. Spin worked closely with Romero on Land of the Dead, and even convinced the filmmaker to rely on digital technologies to achieve the desired FX for his film. Originally contracted for 67 FX shots, Spin says it ended up turning out about 300, in addition to the titles sequences. Toronto’s Switch VFX was responsible for about 125 shots as well.

‘They wanted to make a movie that looked like a $40-million film, but they only had $16 million,’ says Colin Davies, a Spin partner and the on-set VFX producer for LOTD. ‘They had to come to a place where the talent exists, and we know how to stretch a dollar to make the film look a lot bigger than it really should have.’

After its first three weeks in theaters, Land of the Dead has scared up close to US$17 million at the North American box office, while the Dawn of the Dead remake brought in about US$60 million last year.

But are these movies contributing to an overkill of the brain-eating dead? Colin Geddes, programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness series, has already seen several zombies from Canada, Ireland and Argentina for TIFF consideration this year.

‘There has been a glut of zombie movies lately and, personally, I think the bottom is going to fall out on the zombie market,’ says Geddes. ‘Everyone is making a zombie movie.’

Case in point is the zombie feature Severed from Bessai, the Vancouver artiste better known for his character-driven dramas, such as the quiet 2003 effort Emile, starring Sir Ian McKellen. Bessai is hopeful Severed will be picked up and placed in cinemas.

‘We’ve had offers from lots of companies who want to take it out on DVD, which is a no-brainer on a movie like this, but we want it to go commercial,’ he says. ‘It’s the one film I’ve made that could actually last for a month in the theaters.’

Severed, now completed, has an environmental theme – victims turn into zombies after being infected by genetically modified trees, grown for logging purposes. He admits the shoot was a lot of fun. Once dismissive of the genre, Bessai is now a fan of the creative ways filmmakers can hide social themes behind mayhem and entrails. Since 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, the pioneering Romero and his followers have been weaving socio-political messages into mass annihilation.

‘At its best, the genre is a way to create discussion and dialogue about the way things affect society,’ says Bessai. ‘There is an audience that loves to see the gore, but at a higher level there’s an audience who loves to be entertained while you give them something to chew on – no pun intended.’

Currie (Mile Zero), who is currently shooting the $11 million satire Fido in Vancouver with Anagram Pictures, penned the first draft of his script about a boy and his pet zombie in 1994. Now Fido has an international distribution deal with Lions Gate, a cast that includes Billy Connolly, Carrie-Anne Moss and Tim Blake Nelson, and is the only recent zombie flick to win backing from Telefilm Canada. Currie feels this has more to do with the script than the zombie factor, and hopes that by not emphasizing gore, Fido will appeal to a wider audience.

‘The audience that is really important to me is the thinkers – people looking for social satire and something really different,’ says Currie. ‘Zombies are used as metaphors a lot in movies and Fido is really about xenophobia, fear of the other and fear as a way of controlling the masses.’

But Fido does have the ‘zombie factor,’ and therefore falls in line with Telefilm’s initiative to back more English-language genre films.

Winnipeg’s Hutchinson (the zombie short Evening of the Flesheaters) of Das Zombies Production, however, is in it for the gory entertainment value. As the director of Denizens of the Dead, a mock-doc set in a post-zombie-apocalypse world – currently in post – he feels the genre is a way to satisfy cheaply the bloodlust in most zombie fans – and filmmakers. Denizens is Hutchinson’s first feature and he hopes it will receive a theatrical run.

‘I’ve heard and read lots of speculation about the deeper meanings of films that I’m pretty confident are all about the blood,’ he says, admitting he, too, is guilty of sneaking socially themed content into work. ‘I tend to think of it as outsider art.’

Canada has a rich history of doing horror. In addition to servicing the occasional Hollywood gore-story, homegrown shockers have included the classic and soon-to-be-remade Black Christmas, early Cronenberg work like Scanners, and Ginger Snaps. The recent box-office success of zombie films seems to have given Canadian filmmakers and distributors the confidence to push ahead with their own contributions to zombie lore as well.

Kephart’s Montreal-shot Graveyard Alive: A Zombie Nurse in Love is being positioned as a potential cult hit by distributor Reaction Releasing, in conjunction with Geddes’ Ultra 8 Pictures.

The film – a mix of German expressionism and 1950s-style B-movies, according to Kephart – is about a lonely nurse (played by Anne Day-Jones) who is bitten by a zombie patient and becomes a doctor-chasing vixen, in a cross-breeding of the zombie/vampire myths.

An award winner at Slamdance for cinematography, and best film winner at the Rhode Island Horror Film Festival, Reaction’s Paul Barkin hopes Graveyard will find its audiences after dark at Toronto’s Royal Theatre, where it is playing throughout July.

Barkin feels the genre continues to be so popular because the films can be shaped any number of ways, Kephart’s film being a prime example.

‘What sets this apart is that it plays with the genre and successfully crosses into others, like B-movies and soap operas and romance. It makes it much different,’ says Barkin.

But even when the well dries up and the zombies go away for a while, the cycle will begin again with another horror subgenre. Perhaps it will be a rebirth of possessed-car films, or evil leprechauns will rear their ugly heads once more. But when this day of the dead ends, it will not mean a hiatus for horror, says Geddes.

‘Horror films always seem to die out and then suddenly they’re big again,’ he says. ‘What people don’t realize is that horror films have always been big and always will be.’