Lamb Chops, thanks Luv

'Of course there's also the sheep-shagging jokes New Zealanders can never quite escape when you travel abroad. Yeah, we went there in the film ' how could we not'' Director Jonathon King tells us about the making of his horror flick, Black Sheep.

Inspired by Peter Jackson's grand tradition of Kiwi splatter using physical effects, Writer and Director Jonathon King's collaborated with Richard Taylor and the team here at Weta Workshop. Devising everything from conceptual art to buckets of gore, sculpted body parts and sophisticated prosthetic makeup, the crew came together to build King's distinctive vision of Kiwi bucolic bliss turned monstrously on its head.

King says his inspiration came from a midnight screening of 'The Evil Dead'. 'A packed house screamed, cheered and stomped their feet through 85 mins of mayhem', he remembers. '[The film] is an extraordinary collective experience and a huge source of inspiration to me. Finding out it was made by a bunch of college dropouts on 16mm over two torturous years was even more inspiration, as was Peter Jackson's 'Bad Taste', with its own amazing DIY story ' made in my home town!

'As it turned out, BLACK SHEEP wasn't made like this, but the kind of film that it is, owes much to those formative experiences. I'd been writing for some time when two things came together in my head: horror film ' and sheep. It all flowed from there!

'Much of the humour in the film comes from the unlikely nature of sheep themselves and New Zealanders' attitude toward them. They have a reputation for silliness and we've co-opted their woolly character into countless tourist souvenirs. Of course there's also the sheep-shagging jokes New Zealanders can never quite escape when you travel abroad. Yeah, we went there in the film ' how could we not'

'Black Sheep also plays on the anxieties of the organic age and the carnivore guilt ' where does the Sunday roast come from' The horrors of the meat industry are New Zealand's dirty little secret ' (but, hey ' I like a lamb chop as much as, if not more than, the next person!).

'We were privileged to have the support of Richard Taylor and Weta Workshop from early in the film's development. They were key to making our sheep into monsters ' and to making sheep do in the film what they won't do in real life. Being a lifelong movie geek, to find myself in the workshop that's produced all their amazing work as we built sheep, creepy-crawly creatures, incredible prosthetic make-ups and piles of rubber gore for Black Sheep, was beyond cool!

'I also felt strongly that this film should be grounded in the world of practical, physical effects rather than CGI. I think that there's a suspension of disbelief and a drawing into the experience that you get from physical effects that you just can't get from CGI and, from the start, physical effects really felt the way we had to go.

'Making Black Sheep was the most incredible experience of my life. It was challenging, exhausting, thrilling, hilarious and moving ' all in the coldest and wettest March for 50 years! For audiences at home and around the world to now be seeing the film is a dream come true.'