Cornwall Goes to the Movies - Zombies !

As I was saying on Monday, Cornwall is a great place to shoot a movie.  Stunning scenery, lots of quaint villages that can be transformed to earlier eras.  But I admit to being a little surprised when I learned that last year's Brad Pitt zombie movie World War Z was partly filmed in Falmouth.  Zombies in general seem to be a more natural feature of gritty urban centers or of mist shrouded grave yards. Falmouth is just too.....cute for the apocalypse.

But the answer once again was the ships.

Here is a scene from World War Z.

This supposedly shows a helicopter coming in to land on the "U.N. Command Ship U.S.S. Argus". When we were taking a ferry across Falmouth harbor I spotted this:

You are seeing it from the other side in this shot, but it is indeed the Argus.  But the R.F.A. Argus. This is a converted container ship that is now a Royal Navy Auxiliary Ship.  It served in the Falklands War in an aviation support role and was converted by the time of the Gulf War to a Primary Casualty Receiving Ship.  It is based in Falmouth and now has a complete hospital suite with ICU, CT scan capacity and so forth.

The makers of World War Z were initially hoping to use an aircraft carrier but when one could not be made available for the filming schedule switched over to the Argus with general satisfaction.

Although there was a local call for extras it does not sound as if there were a lot of actual zombie scenes filmed in Falmouth.  But that does not seem to have dampened the enthusiasm of some, on our recent visit I snapped a picture of this converted Land Rover:

I am not a fan of zombie flicks.  They creep me out.  And it seems as if the genre has more or less run its course, as if there are no new creative avenues for the living dead to shamble down.  A few recent movies have actually tried to show the Dead in a sympathetic light, as if they were perhaps just misunderstood. Well, maybe.  I hope the Zombie Apocalypse never actually comes to Cornwall, but if moaning corpses start staggering through the picturesque cobbled streets I suppose they might simply be looking for this frozen entree that I saw in local markets....