With zombie horror-comedy Queens of the Dead, writer/director Tina Romero, the daughter of George Romero, follows in her father’s footsteps with a delightfully campy horror feature — but she makes it gay. Yes, Tina Romero is doing zombie cinema her own way: letting drag queens, Katy O’Brian with a crossbow, and Margaret Cho with a blowtorch bash zombie brains.
The film is a silly, pulpy, romp in which a butch DJ host, femme interns, and a queer community full of drag queens of various levels of sass slay zombies while mocking the mainstays of modern society. In a Bushwick warehouse club called Yum, DJ and host Dre (Katy O’Brian) is about to throw a huge rager. The lineup of her drag queens includes a variety of personalities who are eager to perform: Sam (Jaquel Spivey), who is supposed to make a comeback as Samoncé after a previous show left her stage-frightened; Yasmine (Dominique Jackson), a uber-popular star headliner who blows them off briefly for an influencer event; Ginsey Tonic (Nina West), who is motherly and supportive; and Scrumptious (Tomas Matos), a drug dealer ready to take her turn to make her stage debut).
Unfortunately, a zombie outbreak breaks out in Brooklyn, upending the show. Now these queens and queers must band together to stop the bloodthirsty undead who may still have some digital brainrot in their system.
Prior to the film’s release, I hopped on a call with Romero, in which we chatted about how her nightlife DJ experience influenced her filmmaking, themes of chosen family, and the film’s DIY aesthetic.
Rendy: How did your experience as a DJ influence the story for the film?
Tina: I sort of honed my chops as a DJ in the queer nightlife scene, especially in my young twenties. It was not only a place where I was able to express myself musically; I also discovered my performance alter ego, who’s called DJ TRX. She wears a mask, sometimes a wig, and it’s a space where I felt completely safe to play with those types of expressions. It’s also a space where I’ve met some of my chosen family. People that I met on those dance floors are still very vital to my life today. It is a space where you are solving problems quickly with no money, and you are figuring out how to make it through creatively all the time. And it is also a space that’s not free of drama. And there’s many ways in which I’ve watched the queer community change behind that.
DJ booth parties that used to be very just “girls only” started to become more identity agnostic and welcome more and more queer people. The identities started to come together and party together. And that’s not without its bumps and its tensions, and we don’t always know how to be in the same room together. And so I was interested in exploring all of these things in Queens of the Dead.
And mostly though, I really wanted to tell a story about these scrappy ass DIY, strong as hell individuals who I wanted to see kick zombie ass. That’s really what I wanted to do. I wanted to see them stick together and make it out of this insane night. But I think also, being a DJ, I sometimes think of it as not unlike filmmaking in that you’re designing over the course of the evening — you’re making a vibe.
You have to take people on a journey, and you have to think about your BPMs and where you’re going to start and end the night and what climax are you working toward. And that’s not unlike filmmaking, especially when you get to post and you’re trying to figure out the musical journey and where you want your jumps to be and where you want to be your quiet moments. And it sort of feels like it feels akin to filmmaking in that way.
Rendy: What were some of the inspirations behind the drag names for your characters?
Tina: Oh my god.
Rendy: You can never half-ass a stage name.
Tina: Oh, that’s so funny. Well, Samoncé is actually, Sam Simone is named for my very best friend. His name is Sam, and he goes by Simone. When he’s in a certain mood, we call him Samoncé. And I often name characters in my scripts after people in my life. I don’t know why I do that, but I do that, I think because it’s like when I’m writing, I’m alone and I am thinking about somebody. And I liked Sam Simone because it wasn’t two separate names. The name Sam is incorporated in the drag name. And so I felt like that was perfect for this character. I feel that Sam and Samoncé’s journey is about self-integration and having the two parts coming together to become a strongest self. So I like that it wasn’t entirely separate names, if that makes sense.
And then for Ginsey Tonic, I don’t even, you know what, Rendy, I don’t even remember where that came from. She was named Ginsey Tonic from draft one.
We had another one in there. We had another queen in there that we actually had to write out weeks before we started prep because we were like, okay, we have one too many characters. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to lose them. But she was named Anna Rexia. And like you said, you got to have a good drag name. And I don’t remember the origin of Ginsey Tonic, but my nana, maybe this is it, my nana, her drink of choice was a gin-and-tonic. I think I was channeling my nana a little bit with Ginsey and thinking about her as the loving mama hen of the world and the matriarch and the house mother. So perhaps that’s where Ginsey Tonic came out of my subconscious.
Rendy: How was it creating all these mini set pieces within this fictional queer night club?
Tina: Oh, it wasn’t easy. I got to shout out my girlfriend right now, because my girlfriend was literally putting up flats, building sets off hours. She came to Patterson, New Jersey with her tools in the trunk of her car and really supported the art department. Again, we had $5 and some popsicle sticks for our art department budget. And so it’s a miracle that these sets got pulled off. And we shot in a building called the Art Factory, which is no longer a thing. Unfortunately, they shut down a week after we wrapped. But it’s an old warehouse that had sort of turned into a crazy wedding venue. They did six weddings a weekend. There were all these big rooms, but there was this very authentic grunge feel to it. It was actually dusty and there were bricks and walls that have been there forever.
But the challenge is that this movie takes place at night, and these warehouse walls had lots of windows, so we had to black out the whole thing. We had curtains hanging around everywhere to black it out so we could shoot day for night. And we had to get really creative with making this club space. And props to Holly Trotta, my production designer, she figured out how to do it on a shoestring. And I quite like the way that it turned out.
Rendy: One of my favorite aspects of the movie is the fact that it takes place in Bushwick, my elephant’s graveyard, and all the visual gags of the faux social scene now that’s so prominent there. Tell me about finding your satirical side of it all.
Tina: I really wanted to contrast the two parties going on. I was interested in all the things that could be going down on Saturday in Bushwick, down the street, two blocks away, you might have this brand party. And I have, as a DJ, done a lot of these parties that have all the money and all the budget. They can just do everything they want with the space. And then it’s so soulless. Everyone’s there working, but they’re just on their phones taking pictures of the product. And it’s like, ‘why am I even here?’ Nobody is dancing, nobody’s talking to each other.
And furthermore, there’s a sense that I feel more and more they’re hiring me because I’m queer. They’re hiring drag performers because it’s cool to be gay and there’s cache to it. And it’s not as simple as just saying, “Ooh, that’s gross,” because I want queer people to get paid. I want Yasmine to make her money and go to the influencer party, but at the end of the day, that’s not where she’s going to go. When the shit goes down, she’s going to run back to her safe space to her community. She’s going to go back home. And so, I was very interested in that.
Rendy: Tell me about how you got your cast together. They have such incredible chemistry.
Tina: I’m obsessed with every single one of them. I’m still pinching myself. This is a dream come true cast. I can’t even believe we got them all together. From the beginning, it was very important to me to cast this thing as authentically queer as possible. I wanted queer people in these roles. And that’s down to the extras too. I really wanted the bit, even the smaller bit roles I wanted, aside from my two Romero universe cameos, I really wanted every other speaking role to be. And so there’s a little bit of dancing that you have to do around that.
Even though this is an indie, sometimes on the upper levels, you have them asking about IMDB Star Meter, which is a super eye roll for me. I don’t think you need names to make a good movie, but people care about that. And so there was a little bit of dancing around that. I was writing letters to people years before I had any business doing so. I was writing letters before we had any money, before we had a green light, before we had a yellow light. And I got many, many nos, many nos. But then you would get one magical yes.
My first magical yes was Dominique Jackson, and the fact that she said yes to attach to this film, I think it really unlocked a lot of other yeses for me, because I think when you get a package and you have a script and you have a lookbook, and then you have a yes from Dominique Jackson, people will give it a little bit more of a look like, oh, let me read this.
If Dominique said yes to this, let me see what’s going on here with Katy. Katy and I connected long before she did Love Lies Bleeding and before Mission Impossible and Running Man. And I remember feeling like when Love Lies Bleeding was coming out, I was like, oh my God, Katy’s going to be way too famous to do this movie now. She’s not going to want to do it. So I wrote her another letter, and I’m so grateful that she stuck through with me, because she is the perfect Dre.
Rendy: She’s so charming.
Tina: Her comedy is so perfect and understated and wonderful. I feel like she and Jaquel really ground the story and their story arc with all of these big personalities swirling around them. So if it was all over the top, I don’t think it would work. But I think Katy and Jaquel being so grounded balances out the bigness of everybody around them.
So I was writing letters to wind it back a little bit, and we were assembling our crew. We didn’t have everybody in place, but we had a lot of the key components. Nina West was on my lookbook from the beginning, so I was so thrilled when I was actually able to get a word to her, and I wrote her a letter and she couldn’t do it because of timing. And then everything shifted, and she was able to do it. And that’s the thing is you get these yeses and then you actually get your green light, and then it becomes a whole nother puzzle of like, okay, well now is everybody still available? And is everybody still down to do it?
Rendy: Then you have Jack Haven, who was unrecognizable to me.
Tina: And so then there’s some last minute shifting that has to happen with the character of Kelsey. I had somebody else slotted to play Kelsey, and then they were no longer available.
And at the time, Jack was still going by their former name, and their name came up. And I was such a huge fan of them, but I wasn’t sure. It was also very important to me that Kelsey was a high femme young woman-loving lesbian. I really wanted to show that variety of queer people. And I wasn’t sure that Jack would want to do that because of their own personal gender journey.
And we got on a Zoom, and I was like, “listen, I really want Kelsey to be very girly. Are you okay with a miniskirt? Are you down to shave your legs?” And they were like, “yes, I would love to. I have an alter ego who’s a blonde Russian drag performer, and I’m just going to channel her.”
And wow, did they ever, and I am obsessed with Kelsey’s performance. I think Kelsey is more interesting because Jack Haven is an acting genius and really knows how to bring the right amount of weirdness to a character. I think Kelsey could have easily been a boring role, but Jack really made her sing. And I did love, love, love that. There’s a whole nother layer of drag in this movie because Jack Haven was in the makeup chair for three hours every morning getting that wig on.
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