As far as gems of movie history go, Canada can lay claim to quite a few, and they’re not quiet about them either. Widely considered the first Canadian “gore” movie,Corpse Eatersrarely gets the attention it deserves. It’s almost forgotten by people who take delight in referencingBlack Christmas,Grave Encounters, orThe Changelingwhenever the words Canada and film are mentioned together. And they’ll never let you forget aboutDavid Cronenberg,either.Corpse Eaters,while not often mentioned,still stands out because of writer/directorLawrence Zazelenchuk’sdogged pursuit of film-making gloryand the tragic ending (for both Zazelenchuk and the blood-spattered story.)
For film buffs, this weird littleCanuxploitationzombie-festshould definitely be on your list of must-watch movies(and it’s still available on YouTube, lucky for you.) There are many reasons to skip this piece of history, including the cast of non-actors, far too many unwarranted close-ups of anything and everything, and the fact that it’s a clear rip-off ofChildren Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things(1972.) The acting is stilted and the camera work occasionally borders on nightmarish, yet there’s something about this poorly lit passion project that still appeals to B-movie buffs and completionists. Try thinking of it as a high school media project with a budget, made by someone who was madly in love with the genre and ostensiblyfighting some demons of his own.
How ‘Corpse Eaters’ Came to Be
In Sudbury’s art community, you might find a handful of people who remember the film, but there isn’t much information on the internet. Thankfully,lovers of Canadian horrorcan go old-school style and do their research with an actual book.Caelum Vatnsdal’s 2004 book,They Came From Within: A History of Canadian Horror Cinema,provides some interesting facts about the movie’s background. According to Vatnsdal, around 1965, Lawrence Zazelenchuk made his first film,Attack of the Brain Demon,and it earned him enough money to buy the Highway 69 Drive-In in his hometown of Sudbury, Ontario. There’s little record of it or his second film,The Mummy’s Rampage, as they’ve likely both been lost to the ravages of time.
By 1974, Zazelenchuk had saved about $36,000 and figured it was time to get started on his life’s work —writing and producing what is considered Canada’s first gore movie. He wasn’t interested in directing and eventually hiredKlaus Vetter. Zazelenchuk’s dream was to cast the patriarch of theprolific acting family,John Carradine, in the lead role. Unfortunately, with the limited budget, the cast was limited to high school friends with little to no experience, or even much talent. It’s rumored, according to Vatnsdal, that Zazelenchuk even convinced a handful of transient men to fill in as background zombies.
10 Must-Watch Obscure B-Movies for Every Film Lover
Ever heard of ‘Birdemic’?
The film enjoyed a fairly decent run, playing at the drive-in over a few months. Part of the appeal wasn’t just the novelty of zombie movies at the time, but more than likely the fact thateverything in the film was local,meaning that everyone in town probably came out to see it.Zazelenchuk’s parents' bedroom stood in for the funeral director’s office and the Sudbury Memorial Hospital allowed him to film at night, with the caveat that everything had to be done quietly to not disturb the real patients, writes Vatnsdal. Greater Sudbury had already been a mining town for a century and was dotted with numerous mini-ghost towns that used to support the mines; Zazelenchuk took advantage of this and filmed nearly everything else in Happy Valley, a now-razed mining community, which had been vacated a few months prior, as mentioned in aSudbury.comarticle in 2021.
Not to speak ill of the dead, but any mention of the man also brings up his fondness for drinking; this is according to Vatnsdal’s book, as well as any other mention of the story online. This heartbreaking and private detail only seems notable once you’ve viewed the movie and paid some attention to the mortician’s storyline. On the surface, the greasy gentleman just seems to have a dark sense of humor. Thinking about it in context, however, andcomparing it to Zazelenchuk’s own life, the subtext seems much clearer— the nihilistic rantings of a teenage boy obsessed with death, trying to dampen it with alcohol. Of the two storylines, the mortician’s suddenly becomes far more tragic.
What it Lacks in Plot, ‘Corpse Eaters’ Makes Up for With Gore
Like any decent B-movie,Corpse Eaterscontained a gimmick, the exploitation of fear in particular. In 1974, zombies (and even horror movies) weren’t super common and audiences were still pretty easy to scare. Taking a cue fromWilliam Castle, the ’50s king of horror marketing, Zazelenchuk employed similar methods inCorpse Eaters; at the beginning of the movie, a voice-over warns that the “test audience” suggested incorporating warnings for viewers who might not be able to stomach an upcoming scene. This included a loud alarm and footage of a middle-aged patron covering his mouth, presumably to quell the retching.
The movie is gory, certainly. In fact, it really does hit all thoseB-movie sweet spotslike cheesy dialog, topless ladies (but also covered in Molson Canadian — Sudbury has always been a beer town), low-budget make-up effects, and buckets of blood. Zazelenchuk brought the gore by using pig livers, sausages, and all the sheep’s eyeballs he could get his mitts on. Ontario censors cut it down to a mere 57 minutes and removed a lot of the bloodiest parts, including a particularly nasty bit with a face being removed with a meat cleaver, according to Vatnsdal. Even so, Zazelenchuk managed to fill the movie with so much gore thatwhat was left behind by the censors is still wildly blood-spattered.
‘Corpse Eaters’ is More Than Just Cheap Thrills
On first viewing, it might just seem like ateenage boy’s dream of what a horror movie should be.The blood, an occasional topless woman, and a weird dream sequencethrown in as an exposition dump are just one half of the story. Zazelenchuk wove two stories together; the first is about four teenagers summoning the corpse-eating undead, but the second story goes deeper than that. The movie begins with the funeral director taking in the first infected body, thought to be mauled by a bear (another very Sudbury trope.) Not only is he a drunk, he also reveals himself to have very little empathy for the dead. Maybe it’s time to retire or, more likely, he’s just not a great guy.
After checking in on the embalming, he takes a rye-soaked cruise through the cemetery while joking about the deceased. This dead-eyed depiction of the callous, drunk mortician has an unfortunate connection to Zazenelchuk himself. Thewould-be horror mogul saw his dreams dashedwhen he sold the North American rights to a New York distribution company for $5000, only for them to use it as atax write-off and shelve it permanently. With no hope ofCorpse Eatersever seeing the big screen again, Vatnsdal writes that Zazelenchuk used the money to buy a motel in Florida and drank himself to death over the next 5 years. If you’re wondering how the mortician fared in the end, things didn’t go smoothly for him either. Waking from a drunken stupor, he stumbles downstairs and interrupts the cannibal orgy of corpse-eaters and goes mad. The movie ends with him laughing hysterically as he’s beingdragged off to the Sudbury Mental Hospital.
