Just over a week ago, "Handling the Undead" had its premiere at the American film festival Sundance. It is now being shown at the Gothenburg Film Festival and director Thea Hvistendahl and actor Renate Reinsve ("The World's Worst Man") are visiting.

The film is almost entirely without dialogue – Renate Reinsve, who has one of the main roles, barely says a handful of words during the course of the film.

- It was very liberating, especially considering how heavy the material is. To just be in it - still, she says.

Meditative zombies

The film, like the book, revolves around three families affected by death. A particularly hot and electric night seems to upset something in the universe and the dead are resurrected.

- It's a poetic meditative zombie film. I wanted the audience to be able to understand what it would be like, says director Thea Hvistendahl.

So the scary rabbit scene was done

The reviews the film has received since its US premiere have been overwhelmingly positive. Several draw attention to a particularly unpleasant scene with a rabbit.

"The most unpleasant thing about the film is not the ambulatory corpses so much as a hard-to-watch animal cruelty scene. (...) What is it with Scandinavians and their desire to traumatize the audience?”, writes the Hollywood Reporter's critic, for example.

Thea Hvistendahl says that the scene is largely the same as in the book, but the difficulty was finding a suitable screeching sound for the rabbit.

See part of the scene and hear how it was made in the clip below. Warning for unpleasant images.

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That's how the creators of "Management of the Undead" made the rabbit scream. Photo: Andreas Idén / From "Handling the undead"