DAWN OF THE McDEAD

Ed king, a genial 35-year-old with rounded edges, is wearing a back-to-front baseball cap and a crisp, new Exorcist T-shirt. The pale, red-haired Conor McMahon, though much quieter, punctuates our conversation with a persistent, partly inhaled heh-heh laugh. I hope they won't take this the wrong way, but King and McMahon look exactly as you would expect the producer and director of "Ireland's First Horror Film" to look. Donald Clarke meets the unhinged duo behind Ireland's first splatter epic

That picture is Dead Meat. Following the attempts of a young woman to evade the zombies who, infected by a hitherto unimaginable strain of Mad Cow Disease, have begun chewing up Co Leitrim, McMahon's delightfully unhinged shocker is certainly a departure for the Irish Film Industry.

But can it really, as Ed claims, be our first-ever horror film? "Yes. We have an Irish distributor, Irish money, Irish crew," he says. "The films that have been made before have had American money, American directors. Saying they're Irish is like saying X is a Czech film because it was made in Prague."

King goes on to acknowledge the friendly competition between his picture and Stephen Bradley's upcoming Boy Eats Girl for the title of first Irish blood-fest. But, until that Samantha Mumba vehicle reaches us, Dead Meat stands alone. King has already sold the film to 10 foreign territories and believes it's the first Irish movie to secure a distribution deal in Japan.

As life-long horror fans, the boys are understandably proud of their achievement. McMahon, now 25 years-old, grew up in Glasnevin and began experimenting with video cameras at an early age.

"I was always looking for new ways to kill people," he says. "I made all kinds of films, but the horror films that I made always got the best response when I brought them into school. I made other things, like a version of Othello, but I managed to get horror into that too. Eventually I put together a trilogy - Day of the Wolfman, Maniac and Night of the Vampire - and that eventually won a prize at the Fresh Festival in Limerick."

McMahon first came to the nation's attention in 2001, when Brain- eater, his superb graduation film from Dún Laoghaire Film School, developed a minor cult following. Starring the preternaturally cadaverous Ned Dennehy, Braineater, whose plot is neatly summarised in the title, was funny, vile and very well made. Excerpts were screened on RTÉ's The Blizzard of Odd and fans of the undead began to take note.

King, meanwhile, whose interest in the horror genre was kindled by John Carpenter's Halloween, had become the director of the successful Horrorthon Festival every Halloween. King was keen to expand into production. "I was in the middle of programming 2001 and Conor gave me Braineater, and I had always been looking for the right director to actually make horror films. I thought it was brilliantly made; he really delivered the groceries."

Working with Horrorthon co-director Michael Griffin, the two boys began developing a feature. At first they toyed with an expanded version of Braineater. "But I wanted a lot more deaths in a feature, and so a zombie picture made more sense," McMahon says.

Dead Meat ended up being the first film completed under the Irish Film Board's Microbudget initiative, which provides funds for projects budgeted at or under €100,000. Money was, accordingly, extremely tight - "You're not allowed yogurts", McMahon says, recalling a constant on-set refrain. Nonetheless, the thrifty King didn't dip into his contingency funds until post-production. There must, however, have been disasters along the way.

"No. Not really. Well there was this problem with the cottage," King says.

In Dead Meat, Helene (Marian Araujo) flees to a remote cottage with burly gravedigger Desmond (David Muyllaert). After furious battles with the infected - during which an eyeball is sucked out by a Hoover - they join the hurley-wielding Cathal (Eoin Whelan, reprising his role in Braineater) and make their way to a remote castle.

So, what was the problem with the cottage? "It was really freaky at night," King says, his voice dropping an octave. "Stuff began coming out of the ground: some strange, reddish goo."

"Yeah, and the castle we shot in was haunted," McMahon adds. "At night the sound man began to hear strange noises in his cans. It was very strange, so we went and looked it up and it turned out that the castle was haunted by two ghosts and there was a hanging tree out the back."

Oh, come on! They are making this up so they'll have something to say on the DVD commentary. "No no," McMahon says. "There was another cottage we were using and we came back at night and a fire had been lit, though nobody was there."

"We can take you there and show you," King says. "There was all kinds of stuff. Some sausages just vanished from this plate of food, but the plate was untouched. And, another night, we looked out and there was a fox or a wolf there at the door."

A wolf? Keep in mind that these boys are from the city. "There were just these two eyes looking at us. It was bad enough with this bubbly stuff coming through the floor without that."

Given what a day's work on Brain-eater entailed, it is hardly surprising that the film-makers found their imaginations going to unusual places of an evening.

"One day we went out and bought maggots, because you need maggots in a zombie film," King says. "And we put them in the fridge overnight. So when we released them they were starving and just sped out of the carton. We had to shoot really, really quickly. We didn't know what to do then, so we Hoovered them up and then when we put the Hoover up to the actor's eye all these maggots came out. Ha ha!"

You don't get that sort of anecdote on a Merchant-Ivory film.

Dead Meat opens at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin on December 10th