The Visitors Tours Europe

After its premiere at Dark Mofo in June, Lawrence English recently completed a European tour of The Visitors, an homage to Night of the Living Dead that he and have been working on throughout this year. The film screened at the iconic Gartenbaukino in Vienna, and the FONOMO festival in Poland.

The initial concept was pretty simple: take a small segment of the film (about 30 seconds) and slow it down a hundred times.

It turns out you can’t really do that. At least not very well. When you slow down everything, some shots feel a hundred times slower, while some feel a thousand times. Some frames just don’t have enough visual information to be slowed down that much. And hard cuts don’t work at all. So we needed to be selective, effectively recutting, tweaking and reframing Romeo’s masterpiece so paradoxically it feels more true to the original, except that every shot has been altered in some way. The end result is a film that feels like it’s a sequences of Night of the Living Dead rolling at glacial speed.

Don’t worry if you missed it, Lawrence will be performing the piece again in 2018.