Trailer
Plot summary
Beth Slocum dies from a venomous snake bite while hiking alone, leaving her boyfriend Zach Orfman and her parents Geenie and Maury to grieve. Zach keeps visiting the Slocums until they suddenly stop answering him. He goes to their house, sees Beth through a window, and is made to leave by his brother Kyle. That night Zach breaks in and finds that Beth has come back from the dead and that Geenie and Maury have been hiding her. They keep her indoors during the day and will not tell her that she died. Zach argues with Geenie and Maury about Beth. When he takes her to the park during the day, her face begins to blister.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Life After Beth (2014)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jeff Baena wrote the script in two weeks in 2003, as production wrapped on I Heart Huckabees, and called it Winged Life after a line in a William Blake poem.
- The film was nearly made a decade earlier at Fox Searchlight with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Zach. After that collapsed, Aubrey Plaza's agent, hunting for a part that would break her out of April Ludgate typecasting on Parks and Recreation, remembered the script; Plaza called it one of the best she had ever read.
- Life After Beth got made in a hurry because of a tax deadline. Baena's intended debut Joshy was postponed by Adam Pally, and the California Tax Credit granted for it required something to be shot in the state within 100 days, so the team filmed an extra scene and pressed on with this production.
- Garry Marshall's cameo came through a chain of old friendships: Baena reached him via Fred Roos, who had served with Marshall in the Korean War and was a friend of executive producer Francis Ford Coppola. It was one of Marshall's last acting roles.
- The budget came in at $2.4 million, kept deliberately small with few locations and barely any effects or stunts, and one of the few stunts there was cost Aubrey Plaza the muscles of her abdominal wall, which she tore.
- Baena made his characters Jewish for a reason rooted in his zombie rules: Jewish burial preparation involves no autopsy and no embalming, which he thought made the dead more likely to come back.
- Baena had read that smooth jazz can boost the immune system subliminally, so in the film his zombies are calmed by it, on the idea that creatures functioning at such a basic human level would respond to that genre.
- The digital footage looked too clean, so Baena and cinematographer Jay Hunter took discontinued 250 ASA Kodak film stock and overlaid it on the movie purely for its grain, adding extra grain in the later night scenes as the story comes apart.
