As Buyzombie.com pointed out last week ‘David Moody Announces ISOLATION and gives no details’. It’s time to start putting that right. As we get deeper into production over the next few weeks and months, we’ll be telling you more about what we’re planning.

Today I wanted to answer a question a number of people have already asked: Is ISOLATION an AUTUMN movie?

The short answer is no, not really, but there’s no denying that the feel and focus of the film is being heavily influenced by the AUTUMN books. There’s nowhere that’s more clear than in the ‘Rules of the Dead’.

Every zombie story has to have them – a set of parameters which defines the viciousness, the motives and the actions of the dead, and which ultimately affects how the survivors react and adapt to being surrounded by thousands of walking corpses. In most similar tales, the rules are fairly standard:

• The zombies want to eat people (usually their brains);
• The infection can be spread to the living through bites and scratches etc.;
• There’s usually some identifiable cause of the dead rising (a crashed satellite, a mutated virus, Voodoo etc. etc.).

The dead in ISOLATION will share major similarities to those of the AUTUMN books, and here’s how:

• There will be no flesh eating!
• Everyone will either be dead or immune within the first ten minutes of the film – the infection will not be communicable;
• The cause of the outbreak will not be known (more to the point, it won’t matter).

So why take this approach? As we indicated in our first post on this site, ISOLATION is the story of the survivors of the zombie apocalypse, not the zombies themselves. Following the AUTUMN rules means we can tell a story that’s free of the clichés of the genre. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about… a survivor gets bitten but hides it from all the others until, at the worst possible moment, he or she ‘turns’ and becomes a zombie and immediately starts chowing down on the rest of the group. You know it’s going to happen, and that kind of formulaic approach immediately strips the story of any tension or surprise.

And why won’t we be explaining what’s caused the dead to rise? I’ll talk more about that in another post shortly. In the meantime, if you want to learn more about AUTUMN, visit www.lastoftheliving.net.

What are your thoughts? Please let us know, either with a comment here, an email, or on Twitter or Facebook.