Opening Bite: The Horror of Ambition Outpacing Talent
Every so often, a horror filmmaker decides, “You know what zombies need? More brooding, more philosophy, more diary entries!” Enter Andrew Parkinson’s I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain, a film so determined to be profound it forgets to be entertaining. Released in 1998 by Fangoria Films (yes, that Fangoria, proving even horror magazines make bad investments), this 79-minute slog tries to reinvent the zombie genre through grit, monologues, and bleak realism.
Unfortunately, what it actually reinvents is insomnia.
One Man, One Camera, Too Many Hats
Andrew Parkinson wrote, directed, produced, edited, and even composed the music. That’s not a red flag—it’s a flare gun fired directly into your eyeballs. When a single person takes on every creative role, the results are either visionary (Eraserhead) or cinematic taxidermy. I, Zombie falls into the latter: stiff, lifeless, and mounted on the wall of “good intentions.”
The cinematography is grimy, the editing is choppy, and the score is the kind of droning dirge you’d expect from a guy who found his keyboard’s “haunting” setting. Instead of creating atmosphere, it sounds like a goth teenager experimenting with GarageBand.
Plot: Or, The Never-Ending Diary of a Rotting Nerd
The “story” follows Mark (Giles Aspen), a moss-collecting academic whose idea of a hot date is carrying field equipment into the woods. After getting bitten by a woman with skin conditions that scream “stay away,” he begins slowly transforming into a zombie. Unlike other zombie films, where infection leads to chaos and gore, Parkinson decides to chronicle every tedious step of Mark’s decline through voiceover journals, logbooks, and digital recordings.
We watch him agonize over his wound, wander around decrepit apartments, and stalk victims with all the urgency of someone deciding what to microwave for dinner. Yes, there are occasional bursts of violence—chloroform, chest-eating, and body disposal—but they’re buried under mountains of narration about feelings. This isn’t Night of the Living Dead.This is Zombies of Our Lives.
Mark: The World’s Least Interesting Cannibal
Let’s be clear: Giles Aspen does his best. He performs his own stunts, which in this case means staggering around alleys like a drunk on stilts. His Mark is supposed to be tragic, sympathetic, and terrifying—a man trapped between life and death. Instead, he comes off like a grad student who lost his thesis and decided to snack on pedestrians to cope.
His relationship with Sarah (Ellen Softley) is supposed to ground him emotionally, but she ditches him for another man faster than you can say “necrotic tissue.” Honestly, who can blame her? Mark spends more time narrating into his recorder than actually communicating with humans. It’s hard to maintain romance when your boyfriend smells like a compost heap.
The Kills: Low Budget, Lower Impact
Zombie movies live or die on their gore. Fangoria’s name on the box suggests buckets of blood, intestines used as jump ropes, maybe a creative dismemberment or two. Instead, I, Zombie delivers death scenes that feel like practice drills.
Mark chloroforms people with the enthusiasm of a janitor clocking overtime. When he finally eats someone, it’s shot so clumsily you’d think he was rooting around for spare change in their ribcage. The special effects are rubbery and uninspired—meat slapped on bones, smeared ketchup, the occasional gnawed torso. This is horror stripped of fun, reduced to homework-level misery.
Pacing: Slow Decay in Real Time
The film’s greatest sin isn’t its budget, its effects, or even its acting. It’s the pacing. Zombies are supposed to shuffle, not the script. I, Zombie stretches 79 minutes into an endurance test that feels twice as long.
The first 20 minutes: Mark gets bitten and sulks.
The next 30 minutes: Mark journals about how bad he feels, eats someone, journals again.
The final act: Mark limps around, hallucinates, journals, and chloroforms himself to death.
That’s not a spoiler—it’s a mercy.
Production Woes: Pain Onscreen and Off
The film took four years to make, which is about three and a half years longer than anyone asked for. Shot in 18 months, rewritten, reshot, and post-produced until Parkinson probably wanted to zombify himself, the whole process sounds like an extended exercise in masochism. Relationships were strained, money was non-existent, and even travel expenses couldn’t be covered. The result looks exactly like what it was: a passion project gasping for breath.
The Mockumentary Style: Grave Mistake
The film occasionally adopts a “mockumentary” approach, with Sarah reflecting on Mark in the past tense. This framing device could have given the film depth—if anything of interest actually happened. Instead, it just highlights how little there is to say about him. “He was my boyfriend, he went into the woods, now he eats people.” Thanks, Sarah. That’s the entire plot. You could’ve saved us 79 minutes.
Dark Humor: Accidentally Supplied by the Film Itself
Though Parkinson wasn’t aiming for comedy, the film generates unintentional laughs. Mark attaching a metal rod to his broken ankle like a discount Robocop. Mark chloroforming his ex so he can “look at her one last time,” which plays less tragic and more like “creepy uncle at Christmas.” Mark’s endless self-narration, which sounds like a rejected This American Life segment titled “My Life as a Zombie.”
The title promises chronicles of pain. What we get are chronicles of tedium.
Legacy: Fangoria’s Shame, The Asylum’s Warm-Up
Distributed by Fangoria Films and The Asylum, I, Zombie occupies a bizarre place in horror history. Fangoria’s stamp of approval misled gorehounds into thinking they were renting a blood-soaked gem. Instead, they got a slow-burn art project gone wrong. As for The Asylum, this feels like their early test run: before they gave us Sharknado, they dipped their toes into the shallow end of undead mediocrity.
Today, the film is remembered only by horror completists, zombie scholars, and people who accidentally bought it in a bargain bin for $1.99.
Final Rotting Verdict
I, Zombie wanted to be profound, gritty, and devastating. Instead, it’s a 16mm lecture on how to bore your audience while pretending to reinvent horror. Zombies don’t need philosophy—they need impact. They need atmosphere. They need a reason to keep the audience awake.
Andrew Parkinson’s all-in-one-man-band approach turns what could have been a serviceable short film into a feature-length endurance trial. It’s the kind of movie that makes you wish the zombie apocalypse would start, if only to end the screening early.
Verdict: If you’re looking for pain, I, Zombie delivers—but only in the form of cinematic suffering. Watch at your own risk, and maybe bring chloroform, because you’ll want to knock yourself out long before the credits roll.
