Calgary Hotel Shoots Promotional Video Featuring Zombies

The Blackfoot Inn has been a landmark Hotel in Calgary, Alberta Canada since 1972. The Hotel has recently undergone renovations to its rooms and outdoor pool area. To showcase the improvements to the pool area they shot a short promotional video:

The video was met with some derision on the internet . This led to a re-shoot of the video using zombies the second time around. I spoke with Simon Trafford, the Social Media Manager for the Hotel.

Buy Zombie: So what was your response to the reaction to the ad? Why do you think there were negative connotations?

Simon Trafford: It was negative really because it was such an over the top cheesy video. I mean the initial intention wasn’t even for it to get a reaction at all. Then something happened and it went viral.

Buy Zombies: Why Zombies?

Simon Trafford: Well, what happened was, it went viral in a number of places, one in particular was the website reddit . So what I did was I went on reddit.com and asked the question, “if this video is so bad what would you do to make a better video”? A bunch of people responded, we got a great response there. It turns out the one most voted for, the winning response was, “film the exact same video, but replace the humans with zombies”, and that’s what we’re doing.

I showed up at the Hotel the night of the shoot, took pictures, and had a great time. There were about 20 zombie extras. When filming was done I was asked to judge a best male and female zombie contest in my capacity as proprietor of http://zombiemovieguide.blogspot.ca/z. The prize was tickets to the Second Annual Calgary Horror Con http://horror-con.ca/. Everyone involved had a great time, and here is the finished product.