Buckhead native Erin Áine has been acting since she was just a little kid.
She signed with her first agent when she was 11 years old and continued to book gigs all the way through her college years at Vanderbilt University. Now, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Kyle Valle, and, while she continues to act, has taken on a far larger role in the film industry.
“ZombieCON Vol. 1” is a zombie movie set in the world of cosplay, directed by Valle and written by Valle, Áine, and Manny Luke. The film stars Luke, Áine, Punkie Johnson, and Christian Casillas as a group of cosplayers who have to take on an apocalypse when a sudden plague turns every *sshole in the world into a zombie.
The film is currently streaming on VOD and celebrated its DVD release earlier this week. Rough Draft Atlanta recently spoke to Áine about her journey to Los Angeles and the making of the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I would love to hear how you got into this business and how you decided that you knew this was something that you wanted to do.
Erin Áine: Growing up in Atlanta, the industry was in no way what it is now. It was definitely getting started, but I hadn’t really heard anything about acting professionally in terms of something that I wanted to do. But I went to acting camp – followed my older sister there – and they had an audition for an agent night. I watched all these kids – I was sitting in the audience – one by one go up and perform monologues that were shown live on a screen. About 10 different agencies were there. Agents [were] watching them and were meeting with the kids deciding if they wanted to take them on afterward. I went home crying to my mom, and I said, “Mom, why didn’t you tell me I could do this? This has always been my dream!” And she was like, “You’ve never mentioned this.” [Laughs]
I went back the next week, and I auditioned for the agents. I ended up signing with a really great agency, and from there, I was auditioning, booking enough roles where my career was continually growing. All the way through college – even though I went to Vandy – I still was auditioning. It was the early days of self taping, so I would do it in my dorm room with a totally makeshift desk lamp, sometimes a cell phone propped up in a shoe, so I could get the right angle. I booked a lot of roles and continued with it all the way through moving to Los Angeles after college. At a certain point I was like, I am ready to take control of my own career. I started my own production company with my then boyfriend, now husband. The rest is kind of history.
You mentioned your production company. Can you talk a little bit about the impetus behind that?
Áine: I honestly have to give total credit to my husband Kyle [Valle] in terms of being like, yeah, we should do this! Let’s get going. Let’s create our own company. I would have been a little bit more timid, only knowing the acting side of the business so well.
It started small because we were saying, all right, let’s just get some equipment and we’ll film demo reels and edit together demo reels for people. Then it was self tapes, and then it moved to, okay, we can shoot some commercial work for people, and then it turned into we can do our own short films. We can create our own series. We created in 2015 a then-competitor, in our minds, to YouTube and Netflix, because streaming wasn’t really a thing. We had like, $10,000 – it was very ambitious! We did get like, nine series put together. Some of them had 30-minute episodes. It was actually pretty well done, considering our resources, but in no way were we able to compete or sustain it. After that, we decided it was time to do something big and impactful, and that was what led to, let’s make a feature film. Let’s make “ZombieCON.”
Big Squid Productions is our production company. It started with just Kyle and I, like I said, doing tiny, tiny little work and growing and learning and expanding and always investing in our own equipment, and teaching ourselves as we went. Neither of us went to film school, so it was very much learn as you go, trial by fire. Although it takes longer, I think it’s the best way to learn.
You’re deep into the acting part of it, but on “ZombieCON,” you’re a co-writer, you’re a producer. What was the most challenging part for you of making the transition from acting to taking on those other roles?
Áine: It was the magnitude of doing everything all at once. Before, Kyle would be yelling action and I could totally just completely transform into Claire and forget everything else. [But now], I was not only producing, I was second AD-ing. I was managing the script. I was wrangling together the cast who were arriving. I was in charge of crafty and paperwork. I wasn’t the only one wearing, like 1,000 hats on set. We had a tiny, tiny team. It was definitely balancing all of that, because you’re just watching little things slip by you, and you want to do your best in every regard. The show must go on? It’s a phrase for a reason, because you just got to do the best you can and keep going.
Where did the idea for this movie come from?
Áine: This was Kyle. We were on vacation, and we were actually visiting his brother’s house. And his brother, God love him, is the biggest movie prop collector of anyone that I know, maybe short of Kyle’s dad … We were walking around his house, and we’d been throwing ideas back and forth – Kyle, myself, and [co-writer and actor] Manny Luke – for a feature film. We thought horror for sure would be an accessible and easier genre to dive into. We knew that we wouldn’t be able to get starring name talent with any kind of budget we put together. Horror helps with that. So we had that together, and we already had a script, but it was called “Hack Job” – it was this whole other computer story. We were kind of pushing that to the side because it just didn’t seem right.
We’re on vacation, and we’re in his brother’s house. We’re looking around all the different props, and Kyle saw a Captain America shield on the wall, and the thought just hit him: I wonder what it would be like to kill a zombie with that shield? Then he’s like, well, what if a zombie apocalypse happened and you were stuck in this house – who would have these kinds of things? How would they defend themselves in an apocalypse? Cosplayers! I’m a cosplayer. I have these things. I could use a lot of my prop weapons. It just started snowballing from there, and kind of took a life of its own.
I recently watched another movie called “Queens of the Dead,” which is also a zombie movie that takes place within a sort of outsider community – in that case, the queer and drag community. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on why marginalized or outsider communities latch onto these types of genre stories?
Áine: I think that for one, you have to attack it from the zombie angle. I think what everyone loves about zombies is that they obviously were humans right before, but there’s absolutely no way, for most zombie movies, that you can in any way communicate with them, usually. There’s no way you can reason with them, unlike werewolves – when they’re a full werewolf, you can’t – or vampires. There’s that angle where they have their humanity just under the surface, and were a person just before they turned. I think that [is] kind of [outlandish], and yet it seems scarier, because it’s another human being right there in front of you wanting to eat you, versus an animal. I think it digs under your skin a little bit.
Being a little bit different than the typical monster, if you mash together [a zombie with] an outsider, it’s like a mash-up made in heaven. You’re already on the outskirts a little bit – you’re already viewed not as a part of the mainstream. So diving into a zombie apocalypse seems like, well, how can we make two things that seem wrong when you put them together, just be kind of right? Two kinds of fringes marrying into each other just makes sense.
Did you guys have any movie reference points for this? I’m sure there were some of the classics, like “Dawn of the Dead.” But were there any outside of the zombie purview?
Áine: We absolutely wanted to do our own take on the zombies. I mean, there’ve been so many incredible zombie movies, and they’ve taken it in so many different directions that we didn’t want to copy anything, and we also wanted to definitely establish and make our zombies or demonic entities – however you view them – different and put our own stamp on it. But just like with cosplay, and just with the amount of pop culture references that are in this movie, I think almost every main zombie movie slipped in influence-wise a little bit. “Shaun of the Dead” is the most ready comparison, especially with going to save mom and the amount of humor that’s in there. “Zombieland” as well.
There’s so many – there’s the classics, and then there’s the more humorous ones. I think we definitely had fun leaning into the chaos and the comedy versus taking it extremely seriously. With a plot that revolves around every *sshole turning into zombies, we can’t take it super seriously [laughs]. But at the same time with the acting and the writing, you’re grounding everything as much as you can in reality. That kind of juxtaposition is what makes it. I think we borrowed pop culture references throughout the movie kind of from everything, but we definitely wanted to put our own stamp on it right.
Speaking of *ssholes, I liked the idea of competing cosplay teams. I was wondering where that idea came from – I assume it’s not completely rooted in reality.
Áine: You need a big bad, right? And since we’re a cosplay team, what would be more fun than having the ultimate big bad, being another cosplay team, and a rivalry, and then rooting it – like I said before, always grounding in reality – rooting it in a friendship that went sideways, and exploring that within the almost over the top, “Bring it On” nature of [the movie]. The shenanigans, and the jealousy, and the copying, but at the heart of it, it’s just two friends, Rocket and Zander … and a broken friendship. It’s a lot of things unsaid and unresolved between two people, and a lot of hurt. The best villain is the one where you can see that underneath their evil is just lurking all this pain and hurt. Carlo Mendez, who plays Zander, just really emoted perfectly. He never seemed in any way like he was just all of a sudden this mean person and big bully and *sshole. He always had this slight look of pain and resentment in his eyes. I thought he killed the role.
Did you guys do your own stunts for this?
Áine: We all were our own stunt performers. Most of the scenes that had the biggest fights, like the very first zombie kill … we had a chance to do a little bit of choreographing and a little bit of rehearsing. But a lot of them, it was day-of, on the fly – okay, you’re gonna go here, you’re gonna go here. We’re gonna get close up here. You throw your weight this way, and Kyle would be like, “With the camera, I will make it look a lot more dramatic than it is.”
The best part too, is that we filmed almost the entire movie chronologically. So just like Rocket’s Rockets, it felt like we were living through the experience. The very first kill was the very first one we shot. So that fight, in all of its rawness and chaos, was the most raw and the most chaotic. We were learning as we went, and the blood splatter was hitting for the first time.
I won’t lie, there were definitely a couple scenes more than others, where we all were comparing bruises the next morning – wait, where did this one come from? Who got a little rough with me on this throw? [Laughs] Just doing our best. But when you’re in it, you’re giving it your all. None of us are trained stunt performers, so you end up with a couple bruises and a lot of laughs and thankfully, some really great footage.
I wanted to also talk a little bit about the DVD release, just because when I first heard that, I was honestly a little shocked. I feel like that’s not the norm for an independent project like this. How did that opportunity come about?
Áine:I have to throw total credit here to our North American distributor, Level 33 Entertainment. We were hopeful that we would have a DVD release, but that was in their hands. So we found out ourselves, I think it was after the VOD release that happened back in July. [We were] casually emailing them, and they were asking, “So for the DVD release in October, do you have any assets you want to throw in? Extended scenes, deleted scenes? Do you want to do a director or filmmaker commentary?” Kyle and I were like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Wait a sec! Are you kidding me?”
We were able to put in extended scenes, deleted scenes, and then Kyle and I and our daughter – our sixth month old – filmed a filmmaker commentary where we sat back on a couch, filmed ourselves, watching the entire thing. And it was so cathartic, because after 10 years, we could sit here and talk behind the scenes stories, the technical and the fun blooper-type aspects – we could talk for years about this movie. It was really cool to sit back and share it and record it. I haven’t even watched it back yet, so it’ll be a real treat when it gets released.
