The microbudget comedy-horror has the kind of hype around it that money can’t buy, but how did it come to be? Alex Casey charts the origin story of The Weed Eaters.

They say that pork is the closest comparison to human flesh, and when I say they I mean the team behind The Weed Eaters. The new local horror-comedy film explores what happens when an ancient strain of weed unlocks rampant cannibalism, seeing the traditional New Year’s barbecue swapped for all manner of unmentionable viscera. But what might come as a surprise, art director (and producer and star) Annabel Kean reveals, is that most of it was pretty delicious. “I tried to cook the pork up really nicely and do these big roasts,” she explains. 

As for the brains? “They were just your classic raspberry coulis on a vanilla panna cotta.”

It’s a fittingly tasty bit of trivia for a movie which, despite being made on a microbudget, looks a million bucks and now has the kind of hype around it that money can’t buy. Premiering in Whānau Mārama last year, The Weed Eaters was met with rave reviews, including The Spinoff’s Madeleine Chapman declaring it “the most fun I’ve had at the movies in a long time”. With the creators just finishing a nationwide tour of special screenings, and the film now out in cinemas everywhere, here’s how four buds (sorry) made the dopest (and again) local film in years. 

‘We wanted to make a first pancake’

The Weed Eaters was born out of a delicate blend of vexation and ambition, director Callum Devlin explains. “We all had this shared frustration with the pace of our careers, as well as this shared belief that, if we wanted to make a movie, we could just go out and do it.” The four-person team (Kean and Devlin of Sports Team, Alice May Connolly and Finnius Teppett of Horse Bite) all had years of experience in writing, acting and production, but Devlin feared traditional funding routes would “eat many years of our lives” before they could make a movie.

“There was a feeling that there was no middle ground between being DIY music video and short filmmakers to being big budget, big crew filmmakers,” adds Kean. “We wanted less pressure, we wanted to be able to do a first pancake and have the freedom to learn, to make mistakes, and also to make something weird.” With Devlin also in the band Hans Puckett and Sports Team having made a bunch of music videos, they preferred to embrace the ethos of the local alternative music scene – “give it a go, build a band, and let your own freak out.”

In that spirit, the team went on their first tour. They screen printed secondhand T-shirts emblazoned with ‘Untitled Sports Team Horror Film’ and sold them at fundraising screenings around the country, where audiences were treated to an evening of strange short films and copious amounts of microwave popcorn. They also launched a Boosted campaign in the hopes of raising $15,000 – just enough to cover rent, food and petrol for a 21-day shoot. Without even revealing what the top secret horror film was about, they ended up with over $19,000 donated. 

“It was just enough money to hit go,” says Devlin. “So we did.” 

‘How has this movie not been made?’

Crucially, they also had a great premise. The team had permission to live and shoot at Kean’s parents’ property in North Canterbury – “a very privileged position” Kean is quick to acknowledge – and mulled over how the location could lend itself to horror. “We started imagining a group of friends who go out to the wops and find a strain of weed that turns you into a cannibal,” says Devlin. “The idea of very extreme munchies felt so obvious that it was almost hack, and I was like ‘we have to do this immediately, how has this movie not been made?’” 

Over a few weeks in late 2023, they sat in a barn in North Canterbury (the very same room used as the central location in the movie) and worked out the story. At night, they would watch a range of New Zealand and Australian films, including The Castle, Next of Kin, Mr Wrong, and Scarfies. “We had to watch Scarfies to make sure that we didn’t accidentally copy the film,” laughs Kean. “That film is so, so frightening,” adds Devlin. “I couldn’t handle the second half of it. It’s about uni students torturing a man in the basement. It’s really, really dark.” 

The story was then handed to Teppett, who got to work on the first script. “That was done just before Christmas, and Calum was like, ‘great, we’ll start shooting in a couple of weeks!’” he recalls. “‘I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, it’s just the first draft!’” Nonetheless, the shoot started January 8, 2024, with only half a finished shooting script. “We were working on the second half while we were shooting the first half, which was quite fun,” says Teppett. “It was very much just finding our way as we went,” adds Devlin. “We were running in the dark, basically.”

‘We’d get the onions out to make our eyes red’

The shoot often had just six people on set, with everyone slipping into different roles over the course of a day. When Kean wasn’t on camera as Charlie, she’d be racing back to home base to find a camera lens, cooking up a roast pork, or mixing buckets of fake blood. Connolly, who also plays Jules, says that health and safety “wasn’t really a thing” and hair and makeup was kept simple. “We put lip liner on our eyes and we’d get the onions out to make our eyes red and irritated,” she says. “Except it didn’t always work for me, because I was wearing contacts.”

As for acting various degrees of stoned, there was plenty of lived experience to draw from. “As an actor, you just have to do your research,” says Connolly. “Basically, we just got stoned and we talked about what it was like.” They also established a metric to differentiate the effects of the different weed that appears in the movie. “We had a series of physical things that would happen to our bodies when we smoke the cannibal weed, like a cold metal rod goes up your spine, and then it trickles into your head, and then it is like a demon awakens inside of you.”

Chilling stuff, but still not as scary as what Devlin says was his most terrifying day on set. The film features a complicated chase sequence in the forest which sees one character end up in a tree, and nobody had any idea how to shoot it. “I woke up with dread in the bottom of my stomach,” says Devlin. “But we just worked out the first shot, and then figured it out one at a time. It was the closest it ever got to making movies as a 12-year-old in the backyard.” For Teppett, whose character is the lucky one up the tree, it also had shades of childhood nostalgia. 

“Everyone was like, ‘are you sure? You don’t have to do this’,” he laughs. “But I was just like ‘are you kidding me? I haven’t climbed a tree in ages’.”  

‘I would get stoned and watch what I’d cut’

After a snappy 21-day shoot, the post-production period yawned well over a year. Everyone headed back to Auckland to get jobs again, which included Devlin and Kean working in the Taskmaster NZ art department by day, and trying to cram in editing at night. “It was hard when you were scrubbing duck shit off the Taskmaster docks, knowing you have this immovable festival deadline,” says Devlin. “Whenever I got time I would go and hide in my dark cave, finish a scene, export it, and then I would get stoned and watch what I’d cut to road test it.” 

The first cut of the movie was over twice as long as the final duration. “That was my fault,” says Devlin. “I did think it was a Western when we were shooting it, so everything was very drawn out with big pauses.” Over the edit process, several buzzy sequences ended up on the cutting room floor, including a puppeteered possum and the appearance of a “big breasted animated worm” voiced by comedian Guy Montgomery. “That cut actually came quite late in the process,” laughs Devlin. “A lot of very prestigious film festivals have seen the version with the double D worm.” 

Through a chance meeting in a shared Uber home from the Big Screen Symposium, The Weed Eaters team connected with producer Gemma Gracewood, who in turn introduced them to the Australian production company Causeway Films (Talk to Me, Bring Her Back). “They then gave us money to finish the post production properly – the ADR and the colour grade and all of the various requirements for a film we never knew existed,” says Kean. “It felt too good to be true at the time,” adds Devlin. “But it also, weirdly, felt like it was part of the plan all along.” 

‘Start before you’re ready’ 

The Weed Eaters had its world premiere at Auckland’s Civic Theatre during Whānau Mārama last year. “It was nuts,” says Teppett. “We blew the top off the Civic. One of the things about that screening was that it had been a year and a half since we’d shot it, and by then the jokes weren’t funny to us and we’d forgotten that we were even making a comedy.” Devlin recorded the crowd response as a voice memo on his phone. “It was just so exciting to hear these constant crashing waves of laughter over the whole film. We weren’t sure people would laugh at all.” 

From there, The Weed Eaters travelled to various international film festivals including FrightFest in the UK, and most recently traversed the country on a special “Big Forking Tour of New Zealand”. It was another trick stolen from the world of live music. “The best part about being in a band is that you get to go on tour and meet the weird people that like the weird thing that you make,” says Devlin. “It’s always very exciting to meet your fellow freaks.”

With The Weed Eaters now out nationwide, the makers hope that people see it in theatres for the “whole fizzing comedy cinema experience”. Beyond that, they also hope the film’s origin story encourages others to take a big swing. “I think it has arrived at just the right time where a lot of people are feeling like, ‘how do I cut through?’,” says Connolly. “This is a reminder that you can do it yourself.” Teppett’s advice is to start before you’re ready. “Put a date in the diary and hit it – making anything is more important than making an amazing perfect thing.”

And just like a bunch of 30-somethings indulging in cannibal weed, the team are very much going back for another big bite very soon. “We have a rule that if something’s really hard, we’ve got to do it at least twice,” says Devlin. “Because what’s the point of going through all that if you’re not going to be able to have another go when it’s slightly easier?” They are now in development on a new top secret “pretty weird and pretty genre-y” film, this time with Teppett directing and writing, and are hoping to start shooting later this year. 

“Again, wildly ambitious,” says Teppett. “But why not?” 

The Weed Eaters is in cinemas nationwide now.