Ruling over it all from the deepest part of the bunker is a self-styled dictator who lives in lavish style with his cronies and sycophants. The scientists are training the zombies to perform simple human functions - using human flesh taken from the aboveground residents as rewards - and handing them over to the military, who are shaping the ghouls into an army of the living dead. The lower classes live above ground in decrepit housing, while cadres of scientists and military personnel live in an underground bunker. His original script for Day of the Dead was massive - with various drafts running anywhere from 122 to 204 pages - and takes place several years after the conclusion of Dawn, with the human race almost completely displaced by the reanimated dead.Ī group of human refugees find their way to a tropical island - after battling both roving bands of humans and zombies - where they discover that a new civilization is rising. Romero turned his attention to Day of the Dead after the success of 1982’s Creepshow, his collaborative homage with Stephen King to the EC horror comics of their youth.

I don’t know what this is, but it’s not what we expected.’ That’s why it sort of came and went, except for some people that held it and saw it for what it really was meant to be.” “When it first came out, the audience was like, ‘What the hell is this?’” says Lori Cardille, the Pittsburgh-based actress who starred as the film’s lead, scientist Sarah Bowman. Romero set out to make Day of the Dead - the third chapter in a trilogy that included the wildly popular and groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1979) - he envisioned it as an epic conclusion to the story that he first began telling back in Pittsburgh in the late 1960s with a crew of friends and co-workers and a budget of just $114,000.īut the movie that Romero ended up making was not the one he started out with - and even though many were perhaps initially disappointed with Day of the Dead, it’s been re-evaluated over the years by fans, critics, and even by the late Romero himself, who wound up calling it his favorite of the original trilogy.

Choke by Kaye George