Flirting With the Bizarre: Isaac Ezban Unleashes Párvulos: Children of the Apocalypse

Lost in the woods: Mateo Ortega Casillas, Leonardo Cervantes, and Farid Escalante Correa in Párvulos: Children of the Apocalypse, the new family zombie drama from Issac Ezban (Image Courtesy of Firebook Entertainment)

If there’s defining streak to the films of Isaac Ezban, it’s the terror of claustrophobia. He laughs. “I really like locking people in a place and something really fucked up happens to them.”

In his latest movie, Párvulos: Children of the Apocalypse, the protagonists are three young brothers, trapped in a forest cabin by a zombie plague. “I like to create worlds and get into them,” Ezban says. “I've made five movies, and none of them have taken place in a city, in cafes and restaurants. I'm always like, ‘Where's a bus station in the sixties?’”

That was the setting for his 2015 film The Similars, which he called "a tribute to Twilight Zone episodes.” However, his penchant for sealed bottle stories isn't some kind of a short cut. "A lot of newcomer filmmakers believe that if you make a movie in one location it's going to be easier. It's actually the opposite. It might be easier, budgetwise or productionwise, but in terms of doing something like Carpenter did in The Thing, or what Romero did in Night of the Living Dead, or what Tarantino did in The Hateful Eight or Reservoir Dogs, it needs a full mastery to maintain the tension and to tell a story visually in one location. But we filmmakers believe, 'Oh, it's going to be easy, it's only one location.' If you don’t have change of locations and the passing of time and the change of costumes to help you tell the story, it’s all just you and the camera."

In Párvulos (which premiered at Fantastic Fest and is in cinemas now), the setting may be the wilderness, but those pressures of isolation are still there because, well, it’s the end of the world. The three boys (Mateo Ortega Casillas, Leonardo Cervantes, and Farid Escalante Correa) only have each other, what’s in the house, and what they can forage from the surrounding woods. However, their filial dynamic is very much based on Ezban’s own experience (sans flesh-eating zombies, of course) of being the oldest of three brothers.

Ezban makes it clear that the three brothers aren’t exact analogs of his own family, even if they are undoubtedly informed by them. He admits to seeing himself as the least physical of his siblings, and in an early draft the eldest boy, Salvador (Correa), was actually in a wheelchair. At that point in the writing “he was more of a mastermind,” Ezban said. However, this was when the realities of the woodland location kicked in, and he credited his co-writer, Ricardo Aguado-Fentanes, with helping make the script filmable and grounded. “There’s stuff that you write in a script and go, ‘Oh, it’s easy, they’ll take their stuff in a cart’ and then you have an actual cart made of wood in the woods, and they’re tripping. It was insane, and we would have died with a wheelchair.”

“What would happen when a loved one, a dear one, gets infected?” Isaac Ezban on finding a new approach to zombies in Párvulos: Children of the Apocalypse. (Image courtesy of Firebook Entertainment)

Párvulos is more about the brothers than it is about the undead, such is how Salvador navigates puberty with his needy siblings seemingly never out of the house. “Sexual awakening still happens at the end of the world,” Ezban says. Those moments could be played for laughs, and while there’s often a comedic element to his films, they’re definitely not comedies. Instead, he says, “In all my movies I like flirting with the bizarre. … When you play with that fine line, it becomes either disturbing or funny, depending on the audience.”

“Zombie movies normally talk about the same things,” Ezban observes. “Even The Walking Dead or even The Last of Us, they’re usually about what happens in a zombie invasion, how they invade cities and homes. They almost never talk about, what for me is the most interesting thing, is what would happen when a loved one, a dear one, gets infected. Would you take care of this person? Would you kill this person? Would you store this person in the basement?”

Ezban admits to being inspired by the end of Shaun of the Dead. That film plays that idea as a comedy moment, with Shaun (Simon Pegg) playing video games with his zombified best fried, Ed (Nick Frost). “I wanted to take that beat and turn it into a full movie,” he says, and in doing so Párvulos joined that small subgenre of domestic zombie movies. “There’s some movies like Cargo, where he has to deliver the child before he gets transformed, like Maggie, where the father sees the writing on the wall, but I feel like those movies go a little under the radar. …. So, for big Romero zombie fans, I’m giving something new to the universe. Like zombies doing Christmas.”

However, the toughest audience for this movie may not be zombie fans, but Ezban’s actual brothers. Fortunately, they both liked it, and when they saw that he had dedicated Párvulos to them, “One of them even cried,” the filmmaker said. However, he was still a little worried about that dedication, and it took his supportive siblings to calm him down. “I asked them ‘Do you guys think that, when people see it’s dedicated to my brothers they'll think that we had a weird childhood and crazy parents’ and my brothers were like, ‘No, they’re just going to think you’re connected to us.’”

Párvulos: Children of the Apocalypse is in theatres now. Find showtimes here.