Adam saw the zombies first, |warns zombies are still hungry

Well, filmmaker MR Chalermchatri “Adam” Yukol has put a swath of them to good use backing out of a corner involving his forthcoming movie horror “Phi Ha Ayothaya”. Due for release in May, it’s “inspired by” the endlessly popular zombie films that have eaten Hollywood’s brain. Adam’s version has zombies, but they’re eating brains in Ayutthaya back when it was the capital of Siam around, in this case, 200 years ago.

Zombies don’t care – they’ll eat brains anywhere – but the problem is that students at King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang also made a zombie movie, “Phi Ha Rattanakosin”, and in that one they’re chewing on heads in old Rattanakosin about 100 years ago. 

So is Adam a plagiarist?

He told the regular news media that wasn’t the case, but evidently didn’t feel he’d mounted a good enough defence. On January 19 he fired up Twitter to address the doubters, sharing the “proof” of his case in 140 characters or less. Some people refused to believe him and reckoned he’d invented his so-called “evidence”.

So Adam went to Pantip.com and laid it out at length – full conversations among its principals, a chat with movie critics, even early drafts of the script. The jury’s decision can only be that Adam was clearly working on this project long before the student film came out. The chat sites in turn offered testimony that he’s been going on about his monster movie for ages. Movie blogger Jediyuth said on Pantip that he knew Adam was working on it when the student movie appeared and fretted that Adam would abandon his plans as a result. 

“I’m not a fool to risk copying someone else’s work,” Adam says. “Okay, if I had known that a student would make a film called ‘Phi Ha Rattanakosin’ and that it would draw 150,000 viewers and the director would be interviewed on TV, would I still do the same thing? I’d have to have a very thick skin to do that. And I’d be risking jail for copying his work!”

Adam says he put a lot of research into his movie, learning, for example, that a plague engulfed Ayutthaya during its heyday. He also studied the zombie classics “Night of the Living Dead” and “Evil Dead” as well as the vampire comedy “From Dusk till Dawn” and the Thai ghost movie “Nang Nak”, among other headcheesy thrillers. 

Having won over the judges and jury, he seems relieved that he doesn’t have to keep hammering home his innocence.

“People on the social media know that I talk openly to everyone and reply to all the questions,” he says. So none of that time spent filling up the social networks was wasted after all. 

There was, however, one lingering quibble. Someone commented on the Facebook page of Sahamongkol Film, the studio financing his picture, that “Phi Ha Ayothaya” might lead people to believe there really were zombies in the ancient capital. 

“If that’s the case,” Adam smirks, “it means the world must have ended in 2012, because there was a movie saying it did. Japan would have been destroyed by Godzilla, President Lincoln must have been a vampire at night and humans would have co-existed with Looney Tunes characters.”