Director – Clay Tatum, Screenplay – Clay Tatum & Whitmer Thomas, Producers – Kasandra Barusch, Mike Marasco, Clay Tatum & Whitmer Thomas, Photography – Joshua Hill, Music – Max Whipple, Visual Effects – Ryan Zumallen, Production Design – Whitney Weir. Production Company – Raw Media House/Lunar Studios/Jouse Productions.
Cast
Clay Tatum (Clay Tatum), Whitmer Thomas (Whit), Whitney Weir (Whitney), Robert Longstreet (Arnold), Budd Diaz (Budd), Teresa Lee (Belle), Anthony Oberbeck (Chucky), Chris Thayer & Anna Seregina (Cabin Couple), Tim White & Anna Cordell (Apartment Applicant Couple #2), Megan Gailey & C.J. Toledano (Apartment Applicant Couple #1)
Plot
Clay, a not very successful photographer living in Los Angeles, is left on his own for several days while his wife Whitney goes away. While scouting locations to take some photos, Clay encounters Whit, someone he knew from school in his hometown. They hang out and Clay invites Whit home before Whit reveals that he is a ghost and only Clay can see him. Whit wants to hang out but Clay does not know how to integrate him into his life once his wife returns. Whit at least proves of help with finances by getting Clay to win big at poker by invisibly lurking behind the other players and reporting what their hands are.
The Civil Dead is a film made by best friends Clay Tatum and Whitmer Thomas. The two grew up and went to school together in Gulf Shores, Alabama. They both moved to Los Angeles, looking for breaks performing as a musical duo and then a comedy act. Tatum directed a handful of short films and web series throughout the latter half of the 2010s with Whitmer co-writing and performing in these. The Civil Dead was their first feature film. Both co-write, co-produce and play the lead roles, while Tatum directs.
The Civil Dead was made for a budget of purportedly $30,000. It has the feel of a homemade film. Tatum, Whitmer and several others play characters that have the same name they do. There is the sense of the film having been shot with friends and girlfriends of the actors and all of the locations being their own homes and apartments.
What we end up with is a slacker film. Clay Tatum’s central character is a typical no-hoper of these types of films, while Whitmer Thomas’s ghost friend offers few clues more than that. The film’s pace is very unhurried and laidback – and at 104 minutes could probably have been trimmed back in a few places. The comedy comes with a deadpan nonchalance where you are not sure if you are meant to be laughing until after a scene has finished. That said, you look back afterwards and often find the absurdity of the situation funny.
(l to r) Best friends (and co-writers), the ghostly Whitmer Thomas and the corporeal Clay Tatum (also the film’s director)
The two performances come perfectly in note. The whole film is essentially the two characters playing off one another – the incorporeal Whitmer’s neediness for a friend and refusal to go away against Clay’s laidback attitude and trying to figure how to integrate the ghost into the rest of his life. This works well and the ending the film reaches comes with a nasty sting.
This is not a ghost film in the Hauntings sense. It is more the everyday ghosts we see in works like Ghost (1990) and The Invisible (2007) – people who are insubstantial and trying to deal with things but have no physicality in the world. If anything, the nearest comparison might be to the gently underrated British comedy Up There (2012). Or perhaps even more so the British comedy Ghosts (2019-23) about a couple who inherit a mansion where the wife discovers she can see the ghosts that inhabit it, only for them to prove a socially clueless bunch.
The Civil Dead should not be confused with John Hillcoat’s Ghosts … of the Civil Dead (1988), a brutal and harrowing near future prison drama that is almost the complete antithesis of this in terms of mood (although features no ghosts).
