Credit: Dangerous Minds / Vertigo Releasing

Poor Zac Efron really can’t catch a break, can he? No matter how many spectacular performances he puts in as a serious leading man (and he can, check out The Iron Claw for proof), there’s a part of our conscience that will never truly separate him from his breakout movie role.

The ghost of Troy Bolton hangs heavy over the poor lad, and if I want to be mean about it, he kinda deserves it. I was there. High School Musical was godawful and ever-present. However, something we can be thankful to the soul-crushing Disney TV movie for is the fact that it inspired one of the most joyous cult movies of the 2010s.

One of the poor souls who actually watched Erin’s breakout movie was a young filmmaker called Ryan McHenry, who was so taken by the picture that he thought ‘the one way you could make this better is if Zac Efron was eaten by zombies’.

Then, a lightbulb went off over his head. Shaun of the Dead had shown you could take the tropes of a zombie picture and use them to create a romantic comedy that worked just as well as both genres – McHenry thought, why not try that with a musical, and he put together the short film Zombie Musical in 2011, which showed that McHenry was onto something here, so much so that the short film won a BAFTA, and a full-length version of the film was commissioned by Black Camel Pictures.

Unfortunately, this is where the story takes a genuinely sad turn, as in 2013, McHenry was diagnosed with Osteosarcoma, and while at first, he was able to fight off the illness, entering remission and returning to work on the film, in 2015, the cancer returned, and this time, the prognosis was terminal, meaining that McHenry would not live to see his passion project through to fruition, and he passed away in May 2015, leaving his grief-stricken collaborators determined more than ever to finish the film and honour his memory, so that’s exactly what they did.

How was Anna and the Apocalypse finished?

Taking over from McHenry as the writer and director were Alan McDonald and John McPhail, respectively. McDonald had been part of the picture since 2013, hired by Black Camel to assist McHenry with turning the script of the short into a full-length screenplay. However, McPhail was a completely new arrival. This, combined with the rest of the production grieving McHenry’s loss, gave the first draft of the film a much darker, cynical tone than the original short.

One that, after sitting with the draft for a few months, the filmmakers realised could not be the finished project. Not just because it wasn’t McHenry’s vision for the piece, but because it would do a disservice to the characters. Speaking to The Telegraph, McDonald said: “For all the fact that Anna and the Apocalypse is a coming of age high school zombie musical, it’s also about a girl who has lost her mum, who’s had a massive fight with her dad, and then the world ends.”

That was something they could relate to, in a strange way, and he elaborated on that in the same interview. He said, “She feels like her future’s been taken away from her, and there’s a strange underlying parallel, I guess, in the story that we were always telling and what ultimately became Ryan’s story. Finding a way for us all to rediscover the joy of it was what I think kept us on target and ultimately created the movie that we’ve made now.”

For all the blood, guts and tears (Anna and the Apocalypse doesn’t hold back on the heartstrings), joy is at the heart of the movie. Joy and the belief that no matter what the world can throw at you, there is always hope of a better tomorrow – the finished article was one that everyone involved in the production agreed that McHenry would have been proud of, which is the most that anyone could ask for from a film that came from such a dark place.

So, if you’re looking for something new to throw on this Christmas, try out Anna and the Apocalypse!