A ZOMBIE movie is finally hitting the big screen after ten years of hard work.

Undead apocalypse film Darkest Day will be premiered at The Duke of York’s cinema in Brighton on Monday.

It follows a decade’s worth of work by a group of dedicated filmmakers and volunteers on a shoestring budget.

Filmmaker Dan Rickard started the project as a 19-year-old university student and originally intended for the movie to just to be a short.

Now 29, he said the film eventually grew into a feature and they mostly “made it up as went along” as their ideas came to life.

He thanked everyone who volunteered, saying it would not be “half the film it is” without them.

Mr Rickard, who now lives in Peacehaven, said: “When we finished it I felt a bit numb.

“It took over my life as I was working on it and then when we finished it as a filmmaker you have to come to terms with the fact it is just a movie.”

He added: “It was just amazing to see all the hard work everyone put in and then to see it all come together and pay off was incredible really.

“It was made by a bunch of friends at weekends and it was a massive collaborative project everyone was invested in.

“We did not have any money and the budget at the end was probably under £1,000 – it was just lots of hard work and perseverance.”

The film follows the character Dan after he wakes up on Brighton beach with no memory of the past few days.

He discovers the city is in ruins and ravaged by a horde of zombies – taking shelter with a small group of survivors.

But Dan discovers he is being hunted by the army for his involvement in the outbreak.

Mr Rickard said the idea for the film originally started out with his own desire to see “apocalyptic Brighton” portrayed on film.

The film’s production took over The Argus front page in 2010 when the horde of zombies overran Stanmer Park.

Then Argus reporter Tim Ridgway donned zombie makeup as he acted as an extra in the scene. Tickets for the premiere of Darkest Day are still available for £10 and the April 27 showing starts at 9pm.

The film will see a limited theatrical run starting on May 1 and will come out on DVD on May 25.

Background

The first “zombie” film is often cited as 1932’s White Zombie, which featured Dracula star Bela Lugosi.

But the first to feature the modern flesh-eating version was George A Romero’s 1969 picture Night Of The Living Dead.

The word zombie was coined in 1929 by writer William Seabrook in his book The Magic Island, which details his time travelling in Haiti – when discussing the resurrection of a dead man he used the term ‘zombie’.

The highest grossing zombie film of all time is 2013’s World War Z, which made $66,411,834 in its opening weekend and $202,359,711 lifetime gross.

Zombie walks are held across the world, with hundreds of made-up zombies shambling and groaning through the streets, with a popular event staged in Brighton over the years. Academic researchers use theoretical zombie plagues to model how people deal with disease conditions in defined populations.