Micah Khan directed more than 30 short films as he looked to break into making a feature, but it was his musical short “Meetcute on Danceworld” that caught the attention of The Weekly World News. When the beloved supermarket tabloid looked to make its own feature film debut with The Zombie Wedding, it turned to Khan because of his visual flair and talent for combining music, crowd scenes and narrative.
He had honed it over a lifetime of watching everything from blockbusters like Terminator 2 to nuanced stories like The Last Samurai to Bollywood song and-dance spectacles — as well as the films of M. Night Shyamalan and Sam Raimi, which fueled his fondness for genre.
When The Weekly World News presented him a story that combined romance, comedy, dance floor drama and zombies, he was more than ready.
You can listen to our full interview with Micah Khan on Apple or Spotify or here:
“Meetcute on Danceworld,” in which subtitles explain the meaning of every musical movement, had earned attention and praise from filmmakers as esteemed as Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff, who said it was “fresh, original and it kicks ass.”
The Zombie Wedding, based on one of the most popular of all the exclusives to inform checkout-aisle Weekly World News readers, is the story of a human bride (Deepti Menon) who decides to go forward with her wedding even after the groom (Donald Chang) becomes a zombie.
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The zombie and non-zombie sides of the aisle must come together as witnesses to a new kind of love. The stacked cast includes Cheri Oteri, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Vincent Pastore, Heather Matarazzo, Seth Gilliam, Ajay Naidu and the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz.
“We lovingly call it a zom-com because it’s a zombie romantic comedy,” Khan explains. “It’s very silly. It’s very campy. It’s it’s got big performances and a heart that is, for some reason, still beating, because everyone’s dead.”
Micah Khan on Mixing Camp and Visual Narrative in The Zombie Wedding
But for all the camp elements, Khan takes the filmmaking seriously. Shooting in 18 days across 35 locations, with 21 speaking roles in the last act of the movie, he juggled an ambitious schedule but still found time for his first love: visual storytelling.
As he details in the video above, Khan is closely attuned to how blocking, camera movement and framing can add subtext to a scene, cueing viewers to how the characters are relating to one another and the story.
It’s a fascination he has explored in a series of interviews for MovieMaker with directors including Spike Lee, Denis Villeneuve and Joe Wright.
“I think the thing I learned most on this movie is to adapt and listen to your crew, your cast,” Khan says. “Be prepared to pivot. You can come in with the best ideas on the planet. But then maybe you only have two hours to shoot all your coverage. … You don’t have the time to do the dolly move to a zoom to this shot to this shot.
“Something I learned from Joe Wright, actually, from doing interviews with Moviemaker Magazine, is how do you distill the visual theme down to one word? So for me, the word was connection. How was any person connecting with another person on screen?
“The bride and groom — how are they connecting? Not great. So they’re far away. Simple. The Weekly World News reporters, how are they connecting? There’s something in between them. OK, great. One’s in the foreground. One’s over here.
“That’s what motivates the framing and the blocking. It’s a super simple thing you can do to just improve your visual storytelling. Just distill it down to one word and figure out: How is any one person connecting on frame, right now? How are they connecting with characters? And then how are they connecting with the audience?”
In our full interview with Micah Khan, in the podcast above, we also talk about what he’s doing next — which may include a very large duck, or a foresr creature who is very familiar to the readers of The Weekly World News.
The Zombie Wedding is now available on video on demand from Freestyle Digital Media.
Main image: The Zombie Wedding, courtesy of Freestyle Digital Media and The Weekly World News.