Even now, several years after Colin Blunstone first saw filmmaker Robert Schwartzman’s new documentary about the Zombies, the singer says it still never quite feels like the story on the screen is his life.

“I knew it was about us,” Blunstone says. “But actually watching it on a film screen, it’s a bit dreamlike, like it was very interesting experience. Which it was.

“At the end of it, you have to remind yourself that that actually was you and your friends,” he says of “Hung Up on a Dream: The Zombies Documentary,” which reaches theaters today. “It is quite a strange experience, but overall, I think, very enjoyable.”

Strange but enjoyable is also a sharp summation of the Zombies’ entire career.

In 1962, Blunstone, keyboardist Rod Argent, drummer Hugh Grundy, guitarist Paul Atkinson and bassist Chris White had found each other and formed the Zombies. Two years later, they followed their British Invasion peers into America, scoring a hit with “She’s Not There,” which topped the Cash Box Top 100 and reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and playing shows across the States on an all-star package tour.

Disappointed by the lack of follow-up success, the Zombies called it quits by the end of 1967, several months before the album “Odessey and Oracle” was released, and nearly two years before that album’s “Time of the Season” became a posthumous No. 1 hit. Years after that, “Odessey and Oracle” is now recognized as one of the great rock records.

The Zombies scattered in different directions. Argent formed a band with White and achieved moderate success with the No. 5 single “Hold Your Head Up.” Atkinson moved to Los Angeles and became a record executive. Grundy left music for many years, working at times as a limousine driver.

Blunstone, who hadn’t wanted to end the Zombies, eventually took a job in the burglary department of a British insurance company before launching his solo career under the pseudonym of Neil MacArthur — the thinking then was that the Zombies were a failure, a connection to keep quiet — before reverting to his own name in the decades that followed.

“There are, in all careers, uncomfortable moments,” says the 79-year-old singer. “And there certainly were uncomfortable moments in the Zombies’ career.

“But, you know, it’s a long time ago now, and all the edges have been knocked off any hurt that was apparent at the time,” he says. “I enjoyed making the film, or my contribution to making the film.

“I enjoyed watching the film far more than I thought I would,” Blunstone continues, “I thought it’d be much more challenging to watch a film about our lives. I actually sort of really enjoyed it as a member of the audience.

“I wanted to know what happened next.”

Filmmaker and musician

Before Schwartzman became a filmmaker, he formed the rock band Rooney. And before that, he was a music-obsessed kid growing up in Los Angeles.

“I was listening to a lot of music from the ’60s,” he says on a recent video call with Blunstone to talk about “Hung Up on a Dream.” “British Invasion, girl groups, Brill Building songwriters, bubblegum music. Just like an early-days-of-pop-music fan. Just music that was pleasant and fun to listen to, but sophisticated pop.”

When he discovered the Zombies, their music hit that sweet spot, and Schwartzman fell hard for the band.

“Musically, it just resonated,” he says. “It was just the curveballs musically and Colin’s vocal performances. The energy, the attitude, the style. It just had a different thing to it.”

Let’s catch you up a little here.

Though the Zombies thought they’d failed so thoroughly that Blunstone took to using an alias — even to cover the Zombies’ own “She’s Not There” — the band’s reputation slowly grew through the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s. Even so, when Blunstone and Argent began touring together in 2000, playing Zombies songs alongside their other tunes, they did so under their own names, not as the Zombies, Blunstone says.

In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine placed “Odessey and Oracle” at No. 83 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and somewhere in there, Blunstone and Argent switched back to the Zombies name. In 2004, the five members of the classic lineup reunited for a benefit at the House of Blues in West Hollywood, the final performance for Atkinson, who died not long after.

The four surviving members reunited in 2015, touring to play “Odessey and Oracle” in full, then in 2019, the Zombies were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

“I started my band Rooney in high school,” Schwartzman says. “I’m writing songs and performing them, and built up enough of a following that I was able to put an album out and tour for a long time.

“So I had my own musical path and saw some of the similarities of being a teenager in a band, getting signed,” he says.

All of Schwartzman’s experience, film and music, helped convince the Zombies he could and should tell their story for the screen, Blunstone says.

Unbreakable bonds

In the film, Blunstone, Argent, Grundy and White are interviewed singly or in different combinations. At one point they return together to the Abbey Road studio where they recorded “Odessey and Oracle,” sharing memories of how they used a Mellotron left there by the Beatles, who’d just made “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and marveling at what they’d also made there.

At times, you can almost sense an old disagreement or hurt feeling for how things turned out, but it’s clear throughout the film how deep their bonds remain.

“I do see Rod quite a lot,” Blunstone says. “Until very recently, we were a touring band. You probably know he hasn’t been very well, and he’s not going to tour anymore. But even so, he lives less than an hour from where I live, so I still see him all the time.

“I don’t see the others as much,” he says. “Hugh lives in Menorca, just off the Spanish coast, and Chris lives in the West Country, but somewhere away from where I am.

“But I think the friendships you make during your formative years, in your teens, maybe into your 20s, very often they stay with you for a lifetime, and this is a prime example of that.

“We went through so much together,” Blunstone says. “Certainly discovering so much about music, but traveling the world as well, sometimes in quite a pressured environment. You never forget those relationships, and that certainly has been the case with us.”

Those kinds of emotional ties resonated for Schwartzman, too, as he filmed interviews and pored over archival material during the making of the movie.

“For me, the discovery in the documentary really goes back to the emotional hooks,” he says. “I’m drawn in, and I’m hooked, by the music and my feeling of connection. But at the end, you have to step outside of that and objectively make a film that tells a story for people to watch.

“When a band breaks up, you hear so many horror stories,” Schwartzman says. “The bond they have feels unbreakable.”

You never know

Earlier, Blunstone mentioned he’d learned things he didn’t know about the band and the other members while watching the film. Not so much a specific thing as a general feeling, he adds now.

“When the four surviving Zombies do an interview together, everyone remembers things very differently,” he says. “It just really intrigues me. I’m certain about the order that things happened, but the others are equally certain.”

He points to a pivotal moment early in the Zombies’ career when they won a battle of the bands in the Hertfordshire region of England, taking home a prize of 250 pounds and a Decca recording contract.

“Some people remember a Decca executive coming to the dressing room and offering us a deal after we’d won the competition,” Blunstone says. “I don’t remember it that way at all.”

In the same way, each of the Zombies would likely have their own opinions on the legacy of the band or, like Blunstone, no clear sense.

“I’m not sure I do understand the place of the Zombies,” he says when asked. “I think you can like them or you can maybe not like them, but it does seem to be a unique career path full of mystery and surprises.

“I thought when the band finished in 1967 that was it,” Blunstone says. “How can you explain ‘Odessey and Oracle’ being named by Rolling Stone one of the top 100 albums of all time 50 years later? How can you explain us being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019?

“I was just amazed at the interest there was in the Zombies, in the Zombies repertoire,” he says of the discovery not quite 25 years ago that there was a deep thirst for this music. “And it’s still, to me, a little bit of a mystery how this all came about.”