Gore gore girl

Filmmaker Shannon Lark is living the scream.

By Cheryl Eddy

SHANNON LARK KNOWS zombies. And as a filmmaker, performer, and founder of the Chainsaw Mafia Horror Film Festival, she's well prepared to sound off on the raging "slow vs. running" debate.

"I think it's natural for zombies to evolve," the 23-year-old says. "But the lack of slowness has caused horror films to change direction. Like in Night of the Living Dead, with the slow zombies, there was all that anticipation that the zombies were gonna get there. But the fast zombies, they're just there. So it's lacking that suspense."

Lark's own foray into walking-dead cinema, her short film Whatever Happened to the Zombie Killers?, owes as much to the "Thriller" video as it does to Romero. Gory, gleeful mayhem is Lark's preferred milieu; she loves it so much it bleeds into just about every aspect of her life.

Raised in Alamogordo, N.M., – the site of the first atomic bomb test – Lark was drawn to the macabre at an early age after watching a particularly gruesome ballet rendition of Romeo and Juliet. When she moved to the Bay Area, in 2001, her affection for films like The Shining and Dead Alive led her to work at Berkeley's Reel Video. She pursued acting, appearing in plays with companies, like the Primitive Screwheads, whose macabre tastes meshed with hers. Also, "I started going to every single horror movie audition that I could," she says. "Whenever I got the parts, I would hang out on set, talking to the director and the crew people."

The self-taught artist parlayed her skills into a second job – at the Parkway Theater, producing and directing commercials for local businesses – and began making her own films. Her first, Babies for Breakfast, joshes cannibalism; her second, Marburg, stars Lark as a woman who agonizingly succumbs to an Ebola-like virus. She plans to shoot her first feature, Indignation (a spin on Rosemary's Baby, "with a lot more action"), early next year.

At the moment, Lark is knee-deep in severed limbs and squirting jugulars, preparing for her second Chainsaw Mafia Film Festival. Held at the Parkway (where Lark, in one of her few nonhorror-exclusive gigs, also hosts the Reel Video Cult Freakout series), the event highlights independent short films and trailers from the Bay Area and beyond. Last year's edition was a sold-out success; this year, under the theme "Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter," Lark is expanding to include a performance by her zombie dance troupe, the Living Dead Girlz; artwork displays; and ample networking opportunities for like-minded fiendish types.

"Vomit bags are given out to every person who walks in the door, full of information from participating artists," she explains. The objective is to facilitate link-ups between, say, a special-effects artist and a director in need of some realistic-looking eyeballs. The idea builds off Lark's Web site, thechainsawmafia.com, named for her production company and set up as a Craigslist-like message board for moviemakers and fans. Lark plans to revamp the site in the next few months, attract more listings, and inspire more creative interactions, with a focus on local productions.

"There's already so much interest in the horror genre here – I think that it just needs to be organized better," she says, adding that she doesn't feel the tug of SoCal. "I think that you can create beautiful, inspiring art, whatever kind of artist you are, and you don't have to be in the place where it's advocated the most."

Not surprisingly, Lark is less hyped on mainstream horror. "I think that Hollywood is producing a lot of crap," she says, pointing to the recent wave of remakes. "But I think that every time a film is made by an independent filmmaker, it takes just a little bit of power away from the mainstream studios."

Lark is definitely down with gore, but she looks for more than just a played-out slasher story (or sucky vampire tale) when curating for the fest. "I look at the technical aspects, but really I just mostly focus on the story. Even if the film is really horrible, I'm just really glad that it was made, that people are creating something together," she says. Personally, she prefers "psychological horror, something that could possibly really happen" – like her Marburg, which plays off fears of an unstoppable disease epidemic.

Lark's Chainsaw Mafia dreams run big. In January she plans to launch the fest as an every-other-month Parkway event, pairing short indie films with classics ("like Zombie or Cannibal Holocaust"). She also hopes to host a indie horror-focused television show that mixes interviews, clips, shorts, and feature films. She's on board to program 48 hours of continuous screenings at the May 2006 World Horror Convention in San Francisco. And this week alone, besides the Chainsaw Mafia fest, Lark's set to star (and splatter) in the Primitive Screwheads' latest production, Re-Animator of the Dead. The Screwheads – who enjoyed a fruitful alliance with another local horror fest, Another Hole in the Head, when they performed Evil Dead: Live to a packed house earlier this year – are definitely Lark's kind of folk; they're renowned for literally spraying the audience with carnage.

As for the budding scream queen, Lark admits that her work gives her nightmares sometimes (though she looks forward to them). But she wouldn't be caught dead (though perhaps undead?) in a romantic comedy. "If I'm experiencing brain damage, or going nuts, or running from a vicious killer, I think it's just so much more fun."

'The Chainsaw Mafia Horror Film Festival' runs Thurs/20, 9:15 p.m., Parkway Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. $6. www.picturepubpizza.com.

'Re-Animator of the Dead' runs Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m. (also Sat., 2 p.m.), through Oct. 30, Off-Market Theatre, 965 Mission, SF. $20-$24. www.primitivescrewheads.com.