For Zelda Williams, Daughter of Robin, a Goth Zombie Comedy Is Cathartic

Zelda Williams never intended a teenage zombie rom-com to be her feature filmmaking debut. For one thing, the project, “Lisa Frankenstein,” was a big concept to sell, a high-camp period piece set in the fuchsia-and-teal ’80s. There was grief, violence and a floofy-haired love interest who was — not to put too fine a point on it — not only mute but dead.

For another thing, Williams, 34, the only daughter of Robin Williams, the Oscar-winning comic superstar, worried that making her first big step out with a comedy would inevitably draw the wrong kind of attention.“It’s the one thing I thought people are going to be particularly mean to me about,” she said.

But the script for “Lisa Frankenstein” came courtesy of Diablo Cody, who found one-liners, and an Oscar, in adolescent trauma with “Juno,” and who also wrote the feminist teen horror flick “Jennifer’s Body,” lately hailed as a cult classic.

Some of the themes in “Lisa Frankenstein” resonated with Williams’s own life, as a person who experienced shock waves of anguish after her father’s sudden death in 2014. Plus, the film came wrapped in a pastiche of references from ’80s and ’90s movies she loved, like “Heathers,” “Weird Science,” “Beetlejuice” and “Death Becomes Her.” Williams was sold on it immediately, and of all the projects she was considering, it was the first to get greenlit.

So she tucked away her trepidation, drew up her storyboards and shot list, and showed up on location in New Orleans, where she promptly got Covid and had to spend the first week directing from inside a van.