Irish suburban life will never look the same after Stephen Bradley's zombie flick, boy eats girl, hits the big screen this weekend. Director Stephen Bradley tells Michael Dwyer about his mission to bring the undead to Dublin

The allegedly leafy Dublin suburbs are overrun with zombies in Boy Eats Girl, Stephen Bradley's succinctly titled second feature as a director after the dark and touching 1998 drama Sweety Barrett. Surprisingly, his new film marks one of the few ventures into the horror genre - along with the recent Dead Meat and the notorious Rawhead Rex - from the country that produced Bram Stoker.

"You would think that ghost stories and horror movies would be our milieu," says Bradley, "and more likely to be accepted as a genre coming out of Ireland than thrillers, for example."

The tone of the movie is distinctly tongue-in-cheek, but not in the knowing manner of the Scream and Scary Movie franchises that leave one's ribs sore from being nudged. "I think that formula has been done to death, if you'll forgive the pun," Bradley says. "It was time to go back to when the characters believe they're in the story and the actors are playing it straight, and the comedy comes out of that rather than a look down the lens. That was a definite decision we made."

Bradley is amused but unperturbed that his film goes on release simultaneously with Land of the Dead, the new zombie picture from horror veteran George A Romero. "I quite like the idea that they're going out on the same day," he says. "Hopefully, everyone who goes to one will go and see the other."

The screenplay for Boy Eats Girl is by Dead Bodies writer Derek Landy, and, according to the production notes, was written in just two days, which, I suggest, may not necessarily be a good thing. "I think that's Derek with tongue firmly in cheek," Bradley says with a shrug. "They had been developing it for two-and-a-half years before I first read it in 2003, and then we did some more work with Derek on it for another six months. So it went through the usual long, drawn-out four years of development, which is standard."

Then there were the usual pressures of time and finance that are standard for low-budget independent productions. It helped, Bradley says, that his film was "top heavy with really good producers" - led by Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe from the Dublin-based company Element Films. "It was an incredibly organised shoot. What was difficult was shooting it in 30 days with quite a lot of action sequences in it. We were lucky with a lot of stuff, particularly our Grand Guignol sequence at the end, which worked on the first take and that saved us hours and hours."

Halfway through the shoot, Bradley and his team packed up in Dublin and set up camp on the Isle of Man for the second half, which sounds like a nuisance, but was a financial imperative. "We had no choice," he says. "One of the rules of the Isle of Man Film Commission is that you shoot at least half the film there, so we shot there for three weeks. It was actually an interesting dynamic, in that it energised the production at the halfway stage, I felt.

"It's just a 20-minute plane journey, so it was just like moving to any other location over a weekend. I found it a great place to work, but I imagine it was a bit harder for any of the cast and crew who had some spare time there."

Following the film's launch in the market at Cannes in May - it has been sold to distributors in the UK, France, Germany, Australia and New Zealand - it was set for its world premiere at Galway Film Fleadh in July. However, when it was submitted to the film censor, John Kelleher, he took issue with an early scene in which the lovelorn 17-year-old protagonist, Nathan, accidentally hangs himself. Sensitive to the alarming rate of suicide among young Irish males, the censor requested that scene should be cut before issuing the film with a certificate. As is their right, the producers took the movie to the film appeals board.

"I genuinely was surprised," Bradley says. "There are various contentious issues in the film - the scary stuff, the sexual innuendo - and as I was in post-production I was sounding out our audience. I went to a secondary school and did a two-week session in conjunction with one of the teachers. I gave the class the script, teased out the various issues and then showed them a rough cut of the film. And we had done some test screenings with the core audience for the film, the 16-26 age group, and again teased out the issues, making sure that they realised that what happened in that scene categorically was not a suicide attempt.

"That was really clear to all of them and nobody, including the teachers, brought it up as an issue until John Kelleher did. Obviously, it's a dark moment in the film, when it changes from comedy into horror, but it quickly goes back into comedy-horror. I've always regarded the film as a raucous teenage comedy first and foremost, and I believe the film appeals board saw it as such. As far as I can gather, it received the film with the overall sense of fun that is the tone of the film. You need those dark moments in a genre film like this."

Cutting the scene would have been difficult, he says, in that it is crucial to the narrative. "If it had to be cut, we would have been looking at rewrites and re-shoots, which would have cost a lot of money and delayed the release into next year when a lot of other horror movies would have caught up with us. So there were a few sleepless nights there. We cancelled the Galway screening out of deference to the appeals board process."

Was Bradley surprised that the board passed the film uncut with a liberal 15A certificate? "I suppose that reflects how the film appeals board felt about the overall tone of the film. It's categorically an accidental death in the film, and then it goes right back into the comedy."

For the film's special effects, Bradley enlisted a virtuoso of the genre, Bob Keen, whose many credits include Aliens, Hellraiser and Candyman. "I wanted to go back to the good old-fashioned blood and guts from the days before digital effects and Bob was perfect for that. Bob said we used more blood than any film he'd ever worked on before. I took that as a badge of honour."

Casting the film involved a protracted audition process, Bradley says. "Samantha Mumba came on board at an early stage, and to be fair to her, she did an audition back in September 2003. That definitely helped a lot. It gave it publicity and that extra push it needed, and really made it a serious project for financiers.

"There was a possibility that we might need to make some of the characters English for financing reasons, so I looked at a lot of English actors for the Nathan role. When David Leon walked in the door, I felt he was right for the part. I though his accent would be an issue, but he had just spent four months working on Alexander playing Colin Farrell's page boy or something and speaking in an Irish accent."

Nathan's mother is played by comedian Deirdre O'Kane, who happens to be married to Bradley, and he says he was rather apprehensive about asking her to play the mother of a 17-year-old. "She was diplomatically taken aback," he says, "but delighted to do it at the same time. Obviously, I was not going to go through an audition process with my wife, because that would definitely lead to marital breakdown. When Ed Guiney and I discussed casting, he said that Deirdre should play that part, but when we went to London to meet financiers, I had to go through the rather excruciating experience of talking about the cast and having to say: 'Well, actually, she's my wife.' At least I was able to tell them that Ed wanted to cast her, and one of them said afterwards that most people wouldn't even tell them."

As Boy Eats Girl goes out in cinemas today, Bradley is busy editing a comedy-documentary he shot during the Lions tour of New Zealand, and featuring Hector Ó hEochagain and Risteard Cooper. "As soon as the Brian O'Driscoll injury happened, that gave us our story,"he says. "It's on TV3 on October 31st, which is the anniversary of Munster beating the All-Blacks and the week before the All-Blacks return here to play Ireland. It's kind of like Aprés Match meets Hector with rugby."