[1] Graduate in the Faculty of Political and Economic Sciences of Madrid, and after practicing for a short period as an economist, he decides to present himself to the newly inaugurated I.I.E.C.
In those days the students Jose Gutierrez Maesso, Luis Garcia Berlanga, Florentino Soria and Eduardo Ducay were also part of the school.
And as Luis Garcia Berlanga said many times: "Burial of an Official in Spring was the first film of dark humor cinema era in Spain".
During this time, he wrote and directed several plays: Camerino Sin Biombo (1959), Autopsia de María Magdalena (1960), Las arañas travel by night (1961), Pensión Rosita (1962) and Ginebra for Dinner (1962).
[2] This portion of his filmography was not exempt from personal difficulties, and for some of these low budget films he came to be regarded as the Spanish Ed Wood.
He shot one in 24 hours with 12 cameras, entitled The Return of the Vampires (1972) with Simon Andreu that never received a commercial premiere until 1985, due once again to the Francoist censorship in Spain, (it was later released as The Mystery of Cynthia Baird).
Zabalza as a filmmaker certainly fell into oblivion, but in recent years he has lived a renewed recognition with the publication of the book José María Zabalza: Cinema, Bohemia and Survival (2011) by Gurutz Albisu, and the documentary film about his cinema and his life, Director Z: el vendedor de ilusiones by Oskar Tejedor, which premiered at the Festival Internacional de Cine Sitges.