Apocalyptic infection flicks rarely show the initial chaos of their respective outbreaks. In fact, most zombie movies tend to skip over the downfall of civilization entirely, focusing on what happens after society has already collapsed. And even when these stories dare to take place during the immediate aftermath of a global crisis, most filmmakers (like George A. Romero in his seminal Night of the Living Dead) prefer to place their main characters in isolated locations where they’re only shown brief snippets of how the rest of the world is dealing with the calamity.
Obviously, there’s a simple explanation for this. Large scale stories need large scale production budgets and few studios are willing to bet that amount of money on a gory genre flick. Even World War Z had to be tragically neutered in order to justify its blockbuster financing, and indie filmmakers can’t exactly pay out of pocket to afford the special effects necessary to convey a global disaster.
Fortunately, there are exceptions to every rule, and every now and then ambitious filmmakers attempt to tackle large stories despite a lack of resources, with some of them succeeding precisely because of their down-to-earth approach to the downfall of civilization. One of my personal favorites of these low budget apocalypses is Jim Mickle’s tragically underseen Mulberry Street, a unique little infection movie from 2006 that revamps a familiar premise to make a statement about gentrification in New York.
While he’s now mostly known for his work on Stakeland and the Netflix comic-book adaptation Sweet Tooth, Mickle was once a freelancing film student who found himself working on amateur productions until he met future collaborator Nick Damici. Hitting it off with the writer/actor due to their shared love of genre movies, the duo decided to team up for a minimalist zombie film that would harken back to the manic energy and social commentary of Romero’s early work. As the scope of the project grew and the team accrued more investors, the proposed story changed into something more original.
Starring an ensemble cast comprised of the inhabitants of a downtown Manhattan apartment building, Mulberry Street tells the story of a mysterious rat-derived plague that begins to infect New Yorkers over the course of a fateful summer day. The film shifts between perspectives as these unsuspecting citizens go about their business and slowly uncover an infestation more deadly than anything the Big Apple has ever seen, with the infected slowly turning into rodent-like creatures with a taste for human flesh.
Shot over three weeks on a miniscule budget of $60,000 and featuring a cast made up of friends and relatives of the production team, Mulberry Street is certainly no Army of the Dead when it comes to production value. There are no action-packed helicopter shots or complex animatronics to be found here (and a modern low-end cell phone could probably shoot in higher quality), but the haphazard nature of this ambitious production is partly responsible for its success.
New York City might be a recurring staple of disaster cinema, but it’s public knowledge that actually filming there is something of a nightmare. Due to the complications surrounding permits for large crews and handling expensive equipment in one of the busiest places on earth, studios generally prefer to dress up Canadian locations or even build artificial sets instead of travelling to the city that never sleeps. However, in Mulberry Street’s case, the lo-fi nature of the production meant that they could actually afford to show how a zombie-like outbreak might affect locals, taking advantage of guerrilla filmmaking techniques and minimalist equipment much like Danny Boyle did in 28 Days Later.
The characters themselves are also quintessential New Yorkers, with the film boasting a diverse cast of believable human beings just trying to get by as their home is swallowed up by ravenous real estate developers and (eventually) rat zombies. From Ron Brice’s feisty and flamboyant neighbor to Bo Corre’s struggling single mom, seeing how these wildly different people react to such a horrific crisis is undoubtedly fascinating, and all of the casualties feel appropriately tragic.
While the film is refreshingly short, it still dares to take its time when developing these characters without losing sight of the story’s apocalyptic thrills. Sure, some viewers might be put off by the story’s focus on slow-building dread instead of immediate frights, but you’ve got to hand it to a filmmaker that can make the neighborhood itself an essential character of his horror movie – especially when it’s populated by memorable bit players like Antone Pagán and even fellow New-York-based genre filmmaker Larry Fessenden!
They’re in the walls…
In fact, part of this attention to idiosyncratic detail comes from Nick Damici basing several of the film’s characters on real New Yorkers that he knew from when he lived in Hell’s Kitchen. This also includes Damici’s own performance as Clutch, the de facto protagonist of the picture who wants to reunite with his veteran daughter as she returns to an unrecognizable city. Horror hounds will probably notice quite a few similarities between Clutch and Damici’s future tough guy characters in films like Stakeland and Late Phases, making the experience even more rewarding for genre veterans.
While it’s understandable that some audiences might be put off by the film’s grimy photography, I’d argue that the grungy urban visuals have aged surprisingly well, making the experience feel like a lo-fi time capsule evoking post-9/11 paranoia. While the aforementioned 28 Days Later covered a lot of the same ground, Mulberry Street’s call-backs to one of New York’s darkest days hit even harder due to the film’s depiction of these events during the course of a single day and night.
The muddy visuals also enhance the picture’s cheap effects, making the infected feel that much more menacing since you can’t really make out the seams behind their eerie make up. It actually takes quite a while for you to see a completely transformed rat zombie (though I imagine the infection would get even worse as time goes on), and while I appreciate how their final design is clearly inspired by Nosferatu, I’m glad that Mickle decided to keep these inhuman hordes relegated to the shadows. A rat-borne zombie plague may sound silly on paper, but the film’s realistic execution and serious tone make it so that audiences feel just as scared as our main characters when the shit hits the proverbial fan – a rare feeling in non-Romero zombie movies.
It might not reach the same emotional heights as Danny Boyle’s opus and it’s not quite as elegant in its social commentary as George Romero’s classics, but I’d argue that Mulberry Street is still one of the best and most human of the 2000s’ zombie revival movement. After all, it’s not every day that a filmmaker proves you can simulate a city-wide apocalypse on a budget without sacrificing story or characters.
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