If you’ve ever watched Night of the Living Dead and thought, “This is terrifying… but what if the undead also demanded to speak to the manager?” just know that Kendall York is way ahead of you. In Night of the Living Karens, York keeps the bones of George A. Romero’s 1968 classic intact, then gleefully Frankenstein’s new voice-over dialogue onto the zombie attacks, turning the horde into a mob of modern-day Karens fueled by entitlement and zero self-awareness. Inspired by the redub chaos of What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, and the lovingly snarky spirit of Mystery Science Theater 3000, York’s 95-minute horror remix is both a tribute and a prank that somehow still respects the original while poking today’s culture right in the eyeball. We had a chance to speak with York about Night of the Living Karens.
What is your background? What inspired you to get into filmmaking?
Kendall York: Ever since I could remember I always loved movies I became a filmmaker after watching the behind the scenes on my vhs tapes of Indiana Jones and Star Wars when I was 6 then took some classes on filmmaking in high school and college never finished and my real traning was at 48 Springfield of the ozarks 48 hour film festival when I was 19 then I did my first feature film at 23 bad fans inspired by the Death Star debate in clerks and then I did movie goers witch you have possible review on when I was 30 I’m currently 31 because of working on that film I meet Ron and hired him to do the voice work for Night of the Living Karens.
What was the inspiration for Night of the Living Karens?
Working at a hospital cafeteria almost every night at my day job I deal with “Karens” and after watching the tv show Cinema Toast and Full Moon Features, Corona Zombies, I thought it would be funny to redub Night of the Living Dead with Karen voices I wanted to experiment with a cheap and quick way to make a feature kind of like Roger corman did with Little Shop of Horrors and some inspiration from George Lucas special edition of the Star Wars Trilogy were it’s the exact same movie just with little or big differences and my reasoning for having the same jokes over and over is Karen’s tend the say the same thing over and over.
What are you working on now?
I’m currently working on the pre-production of a father-daughter road trip movie, but most importantly, I’m on my way to get a laserdisc of the original, unaltered Star Wars.
Night of the Living Karens can be streamed on YouTube.
