The first film from Guy Pigden and Harley Neville featured midget zombies in graveyards. Fifteen years later their debut feature was born, with another on the way. I Survived a Zombie Holocaust is the tale of a horror movie in which the zombie extras turn into real-life zombies. Shot in Dunedin as part of the low-budget Escalator scheme, the horror comedy aims to pay tribute to classic zombie movies, while adding fresh twists. The result was given a multi-platform release after good reactions overseas, with viewers able to arrange a local cinema screening through website Tugg. 

Halloween is the time when monsters walk the streets, goblins tap on the door, vampires prefer jaffas to neck-biting, and everyone wants a lolly. It's also the day in 1961 that Peter Jackson was first unleashed upon the world. Few could have known Jackson would later add a menagerie of memorable ...

NZ filmmakers have long shown a knack for melding different flavours on film, and as this Spotlight collection demonstrates, that extends to mixing comedy with horror. Watch Michael Hurst battle mutants (Death Warmed Up), Anna Hutchison find zombie love (Rotting Hill), spiders getting comically o...

Peter Jackson has gone from shy fanboy to master of his craft; from Pukerua Bay to Wellywood. With six journeys into Middle-earth now behind him, he has few peers in the realm of large scale filmmaking. Led by early 'behind the scenes' docos this collection pays tribute to PJ's journey, from re-making King Kong in his backyard to err ... re-making King Kong in his backyard. 

This gleefully violent "zombie romcom" is another offering from Auckland's Media Design School, where 3D CGI students collaborate with their tutor, director James Cunningham, and industry veterans. Based on an idea from course grad Philip Magnussen, Rotting Hill sees two lovers — played by Anna Hutchison (Go Girls, The Cabin in the Woods) and Australian actor Jason Smith (Home and Away) — finding that "true love never dies" in a post-human future. The short has netted over one million views on Vimeo. Keep tissues handy: you may shed a tear ... or maybe an eyeball.

Little Bushman muso Warren Maxwell goes west in this edition of The Gravy, to meet a trio of artists creating work in the shadow of Mt Taranaki. Waru Wharehoka, an autistic painter, makes abstract works, is obsessed with weapons and zombies, and takes Maxwell on a paddle beneath New Plymouth. Assemblage artist Dale Copeland scavenges plane wrecks on the mountain and dead friend's teeth for her art. And photographer Fiona Clark discusses why she used colour film to snap her controversial 1975 drag queen images, and using a photo to help save the Waitara River.

Pre-dating Peter Jackson's arrival (Bad Taste) by three years, New Zealand's first horror movie sees Michael Hurst making his movie debut as he fights mutants (including Bruno Lawrence) on Waiheke Island. Hurst's character is out to avenge the mad scientist who forced him to kill his parents. A grand prize-winner at a French fantasy festival (with cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky on the jury), David Blyth's splatterfest marked the first of many horrors funded by the NZ Film Commission. It was also the first local showcase of the smoothly-flowing Steadicam camera.

In this first feature film from writer/director Greg Page, two urban bloke best friends take off on a surfing weekend. Their prospects of finding fun go down with the sun. Instead of enjoying surf and black sand, the boys find themselves lost in a rural nightmare, battling an inescapable curse and nocturnal field bogans. Page, known for his high energy music videos, wheel-spins city limits phobia into the Waikato heartland for a Kiwi twist on thriller genre thrills. Horrorview.com called it: "different and inventive enough to stand out from the crowd." 

After his mother gets infected by a bite from a deadly Sumatran rat monkey, Lionel (Almighty Johnson Tim Balme, in an award-winning performance) has to contend with a plague of the living dead while attempting to woo the love of his life. Peter Jackson had already been tagged with the title  ‘The Sultan of Splatter’ after his first two features, but this was the film that confirmed it. Armed with a decent budget, he takes a Flymo to fusty 1950s New Zealand and takes cinematic gore to a whole new extreme in the process.

This bawdy backblocks comedy follows the efforts of a couple of middle-aged siblings to adjust to life after the death of Mother (Dorothy McKegg). The brothers dim (Mark Hadlow, Sean Duffy) are lost without Mum's cooking and her advice on Judy Bailey’s attractiveness and getting too close to goats … until the hired help (Alison Bruce) arrives. The short film was the first production of Big House, a collaboration between director Mike Smith and editor John Gilbert. Invited to the revered Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival in 1999, it inspired a hit TV series of the same name.