Volunteer zombies from 'The Dead Next Door' Our final five horrific questions feature - our Halloween edition - features one of my favorite horror directors, J.R. Bookwalter . And not just because I was an extra in his most notable film, the cult classic The Dead Next Door . In many ways, Bookwalter helped pave the way for independent filmmakers like Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith. The Akron-native dove into independent filmmaking in the late 1980s, shoring up funding, securing locations and writing his own personal guerilla filmmaking manual because, for the most part, no one else had done it yet. (Well, except maybe for Pittsburgh’s George Romero, an icon in independent horror filmmaking and one of Bookwalter’s idols. Oh, and Detroit’s Sam Raimi, who was coming off a hit with his independent horror movie The Evil Dead II and was instrumental in getting The Dead Next Door up off the ground.) After The Dead Next Door became a cult hit across the globe, Bookwal...
Championing films made in and filmmakers from the Midwest