To get an idea of the Canadian-sized budget Bruce McDonald had for his claustrophobic "zombie movie" Pontypool, it helps to know that he ostensibly paid for the movie rights with a Kinder Egg at the book's launch.

It's a favourite anecdote of author Tony Burgess, who ended up writing the script for the weird little movie, a radio-studio-eye view of a zombie-creating virus that travels from brain-to-brain via speech and kills much of Ontario.

But since, as Burgess puts it, all his five novels involve "millions of people killing millions of people," major surgery was in order -- millions of anything being pretty much out of the question in this homegrown film project.

There's much gore described (sufferers devour the mouths of other people, literally "eating their words"), but only a bit depicted.

Says McDonald, "We knew we couldn't compete in any way with our gore biting, because we had nowhere near the budget of a (George) Romero film. So why f-----'

bother? Wait until the next one when we have a bigger budget." (McDonald and Burgess squeezed a trilogy of scripts out of the novel Pontypool Changes Everything, and if Pontypool does any business at all, there will be at least a sequel).

But what really inspired the pair to turn the novel into something akin to an on-camera version of Orson Welles' radio play War of the Worlds, was a commission from CBC to write a radio play.

"It came out of CBC Radio asking for radio dramas. They went to Guy Maddin and Clement Virgo and other people, trying to mix the two tribes -- the film and radio tribes." Nothing came of the commission, except for a notion of how to finally film the book he'd been playing with for 12 years.

"We thought of War of the Worlds and the Pontypool language virus. And we realized it's kind of perfect, there's audio and there's radio and we could build around that theme with a very small box."

Pontypool stars Stephen McHattie, whom you'll see as the elder Nite Owl, Hollis Mason in the much-anticipated Watchmen this week (a movie that could admittedly outgross Pontypool by a factor of 1,000). He plays Grant Mazzy, a talk radio host at a station in smalltown Pontypool, Ontario, whose only in-studio company is his producer Sydney (McHattie's real-life wife Lisa Houle) and an intern named Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly).

A lonely repository for wire news and on-scene reports, Mazzy begins to create a verbal picture of a zombie epidemic for his listeners. But is he merely reporting a catastrophe secondhand, or contributing to it with his words? We see nothing of what's happening until the last act, when our word-infected zombies break into the studio, hungry for lips and cheeks.

McHattie -- a busy character actor who's often confused with Lance Henrikson -- first became friends with McDonald when he directed both McHattie and Houle in an episode of CBC's Emily of New Moon.

"Bruce sent me the book about 10 years ago, and he kept mentioning it every so often. Then suddenly there was a script," McHattie says.

"I don't know if Pontypool fits in exactly with other things I've done," says McDonald, who, the day after wrapping the film, was on to his better-paying "day job" directing episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation.

"A lot of things I've done have been based on books, so I guess this follows that. But this is scarier and weirder than most of what I've done."

As he puts it, after eight seasons Degrassi creator and producer Linda Schuyler "has unwittingly supported a number of projects of mine, including The Tracey Fragments," (his surreal, little-seen film starring a then-little-known actress named Ellen Page).

"Her Oscar nomination didn't do much for (Tracey Fragments') box office," McDonald says with a laugh of Page's turn in Juno.

"But I've never had anybody I've worked with go nova before.

"Maybe she'll finance a future film of ours. It's not a bad thing to have a relationship with one of the bigger young stars in the world right now."

Certainly she could cough up a Kinder Egg or two.

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