True story, beneath Washington Square, an urban park in Philadelphia, lie buried the bodies of hundreds of enslaved people. What if, one night, they all came back as zombies, but they only ate white people?

Director Biography - David Dylan Thomas

David Dylan Thomas is a celebrated speaker, filmmaker, author, and podcaster. He’s been making shorts and features since high school in the early ‘90’s in genres as varied as documentary, action, comedy, drama, and horror. He also hosts the Black horror podcast, The White Meat Podcast and gives lectures on the history of Black horror. As the founder and CEO of David Dylan Thomas, LLC he offers workshops and presentations on inclusivity and the role of bias in decision-making. He just finished shooting White Meat: Appetizer, after a successful Kickstarter campaign and an Independence Public Media Fund grant award and a Scribe grant award. He is the author of Design for Cognitive Bias and the host of The Cognitive Bias Podcast.

Director Statement

I define my community first and foremost as horror fans. Horror fans are very often folks who feel marginalized and find comfort and visibility in stories at the edges of (or beyond) human experience. So in a larger sense my community is the disenfranchised and threatened in an America that has, among other things, never really dealt with the legacy of slavery.

That idea is at the core of White Meat. At a time when our history is being actively suppressed, it is critical to remind people, even in a fantastical way, about what has happened and how it still impacts us today.

So the intended impact for my community is to remind (or in some cases inform) people of this history, and to get them to dig and to understand what's going on now in the context of what went on before.

Also, I want people to have a good time with a horror/comedy that hearkens back to Black horror films of the past. White Meat: Appetizer taps into a rich history of Black horror cinema created by Black people for Black people that hit its first real peak in the 1970s wave of so-called “Blaxploitation” films that, in spite of trafficking in stereotypes, centered Black lives in a way cinema had failed to up until then.