The director's chair: you can't sit there, woman

Much has been written about how women have been portrayed in horror films, and a good chunk of it suggests strong female characters have usually played second fiddle to the horny male adolescent fantasy.

There are many exceptions, of course. Perhaps most famously, there’s Alien (1979). And more recently, Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth (2007) made some noise for shaking up the genre.

But when it comes to celebrated directors...well, we can't do much but scratch our heads.

We went back and looked at the award winners from nine horror film festivals--both famous and not so famous--and couldn't find one woman whose work had been given the top prize for a feature film.

(for the record, the festivals we looked at were: Saturn Awards, New York City Horror Film Festival, Toronto After Dark Film Festival, Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards, Dark Carnival, Sacramento Horror Film Festival, Fright Night Film Festival, Screamfest LA, and Shriekfest).

Sixty six prizes awarded over the years and not one woman. That's a really bad batting average.

We did manage to find one woman with an award-winning film: Yfke Van Berckealer. And that was for a 37-minute short film (Zombie Love) at 2007's Zompire: The Undead Film Festival, which is held annually in Portland, Oregon.

To be fair, Hollywood hasn’t fared much better. Just three women have been nominated for a best director's Oscar award--but no winners.

Are we overlooking an award winner? Let us know.

A day without sunlight, but with some hot news!

Cold Hands daytripped it out to Bellmore for the long day of events that composed the closing Gala of the Long Island International Film Expo. We met some interesting people and were happy to see THE EATERS nominated in the Best Long Island Feature Category. The overall event could have used some serious tightening (we the audience sat in a dark theater for four hours on the most beautiful of summer afternoons- I kept thinking, if this were at a restaurant at the Nautical Mile, we could all be looking at boats, and seagulls, and longshoremen!) Anyhoo. We were happy to be recognized in a city that as treated us well.

In other super-exciting news, the treatment for our next feature has gotten us into the quarterfinals of the Ultimate Filmmaking Competition. There are still many hoops to jump through, but we are psyched to be in the running for the awesome cash prize.

THE EATERS have also gotten a shout out from women-in-horror site Pretty Scary. Thanks ladies! Check out the link here -
http://pretty-scary.net/content/katie-carman-and-elizabeth-lees-zombedy-eaters-trailer

More photos from our June 26th Premiere!

We just got our hands on some additional photos taken at our premiere June 26th. Many thanks to George McClosky of Perfect Photo!

Here's a shot of the crowd in the lobby area of Anthology. We had a packed house!

Another shot of the lobby:

Here's a great shot of the cast & crew (Liz, we lost you there behind Ed X!)

Making our little speech before the screening:

Here's a cool view from the audience (with a little help from Photoshop on the screen. Thanks George!):

May the "Eat Me!" banner always fly high.

This past Wednesday, Cold Hands got a little undead and took to the streets with the new, glorious Eater Banner. We descended upon the huge, outdoor screening of Evil Dead II at the McCarren Park Ballfields in Brooklyn stocked with our army of postcards and our corpse like grins.

Our deadness and our amazing banner at first received only curious looks from passersby, but soon, once it was realized that we would not actually bite, we were approached by many friendly zombie lovers.

Some of them had interesting things to say.

One chap, seeing Katie staggering in a zed-like fashion, an EATERS postcard in her outstretched hand, remarked "You're a zombie! Gimme THAT!" and snatched it away. Thank you, sir.

Another said "You shoulda had a bike messenger zombie in your movie." Sir, we Do have a bike messenger zombie in our movie. Report to the Anthology on August 4th!

Others wanted to quiz us on other zombie movies. One individual ate the postcard, proving... we're not sure. Another man offered to sell us a zombie survival guide. We pointed out our macabre appearances and shrugged ---A little too late for that, pal. But thanks anyway.

Most however, simply expressed enthusiasm for the walking dead, and amusement that the film was shot locally. The Eater Banner will no doubt be making many more appearances this summer, but we consider its inaugural flight to be a great success.

"EAT ME!" escapes to Long Island (International Film Expo, that is)

This past Tuesday, Eat Me! was screened for a crowd of hungry zombie fans at the Bellmore Movies, in Bellmore, Long Island. We amassed a seriously respectable crowd for a late Tuesday evening. There was a brief Question and Answer session with the filmmakers after the screening, in which the two inevitable questions were voiced:

What was the budget for "Eat Me!"?

Of course, an epic feature like "Eat Me!" that spans two boroughs and an extra COUNTY has a hefty price tag--- and that's not even counting the "Love" that was involved (love is so difficult to commodify that the world bank has given up trying to assign it a dollar amount). Because of these, and other accounting difficulties, the producers had to demure and shy away from revealing any actual figure. We can say however, that we did produce the film on a shoestring, and that that shoestring is now covered in fake blood.

Will there be an "Eat Me!II" ?

This is one of our favorite questions. Not only because we like to imagine that people ask it because they love the movie and want to see more of the characters (and eventually watch the surviving characters get eviscerated by eaters) but also because the potential sequel names are so very tempting. Here's a sampling ---
Still Eatin'
Hungry For More
Second Helpings
The Main Course
Save Your Fork, There's Pie!
Undigested
Are you gonna finish that?
If anybody can think of any more good ones, we'd love to hear em.

Please accept our apologies for the sporadic posting. It's been a busy week with our first festival premiere! We promise to update you very soon with all the latest news.

Stay Tuned!

Greetings!!

Lots of fun news to share. Our premiere last Friday went really well, and the film had a great reception. We hope the trend continues into next week when we have our 1st Festival Screening!
Don't forget: Tuesday, July 14th at 9:30pm at the Bellmore Theaters, THE EATERS will be screening with a few other shorts films as part of the Long Island International Film Expo. $1 of every ticket purchased will go to the North Shore Animal League, which is awesome.

Because we're taking part in this amazing festival, we've gotten mentioned in a few newspapers. The first and most exciting being The New York Times. We also were mentioned today as a film of interest in Newsday.

We hope you're all doing well and enjoying your summer!