The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  It must have hurt a little, especially for a guy who virtually never watched horror movies. Classic Hollywood cinema was what he loved, films like Olivier’s Richard III, Wyler’s Ben-Hur, and whatever was queued up next on Turner Classic Movies. Though it sounds counterintuitive, horror fans would do well to celebrate the distance George kept from the genre—his films stand out for precisely that reason. Capital-H Horror was very rarely his primary concern. What shook him up was rooted in daily life.

  Nowhere was that clearer than in The Living Dead.

  * * *

  The novel reboots the zombie crisis to Day One. George did that before with Diary of the Dead, a through line he continued with his final and most underrated film, Survival of the Dead. Though he’d intended to make more movies, you can’t complain that Survival’s last image is the final picture George ever put on film. It synopsizes his Dead cycle with savage efficiency: two dead, old, white men, standing across from each other at the sunset of humanity, pulling impotent triggers on emptied guns.

  Chris and Suzanne gave me plenty of pages of George’s novel, but surprises were yet in store. On February 14, 2018, the project was made public in Entertainment Weekly. The story was picked up all over, including on the AV Club. I don’t recall the last time I’d read internet comment boards. But for whatever reason (George would have scolded me), I scrolled down to read them.

  There I found a comment from the user TTTWLAM, who wrote, “Around the year 2000, Romero had a website where he sold an each-chapter-is-a-few-bucks story The Death of Death. It was supposed to be his ‘definitive’ take on how Night of the Living Dead played out on a global scale [but] he quit by about Chapter 3.”

  I knew a whole lot about George Romero, but this was news to me. I searched the net. I searched it harder. I asked fellow Romero fanatics if they’d ever heard of it. I consulted Homepage of the Dead, a fan resource that’s been around since 1997. Nothing. Finally I turned to the internet archive project the Wayback Machine to see if I could find artifacts of George’s short-lived website. Lo and behold, there it was, in an imperfect but semi-navigable state.

  Eventually, I hit upon a page that made me gasp. A mocked-up book cover proclaimed The Death of Death, along with the tagline “Hell is upon us.” Elsewhere on the site, in a post dated July 21, 2000, George wrote, “My zombie films focused on small groups of people dealing with their immediate problems. The Death of Death will be an original novel with much wider scope.… I let it all hang out here, guys, without a thought for budget or propriety.… It will be available for downloading, one chapter at a time.”

  Exciting stuff, but it had been a subscription-based offer. You sent your money, and pages showed up in your in-box. I wasn’t going to find actual pages on the site. What I did find, however, was plenty of evidence that George, avowed technophobe, had been briefly excited by the prospect of the internet. “There’s no ‘Middle-Man’ anymore,” he wrote. “It’s just you and me.” He even spoke of offering his next zombie film exclusively on the web.

  Having been through the Hollywood grinder (talk about “Hell is upon us”), who could blame him for what in hindsight looks like heedless optimism? Around 2000, there was a feeling the independent film world was on the brink of a paradigm shift that would allow directors to bring their work directly to the people. It didn’t happen, for lots of reasons. Chris Roe recounted to me how the site’s chat rooms got nasty—of course they did—and George pulled the plug. It was one more heartbreak: his hopes lifted by a new democratic ideal only to see it ruined by familiar, ugly behaviors. Exactly the sort of thing he made movies about.

  I discussed the mystery of The Death of Death with Suz. She believed she might know someone who might have a copy: longtime fan and filmmaker Christian Stavrakis (who sculpted the bust of George installed in Monroeville Mall, Dawn’s filming location). A few days later, I received an email from Suz, subject line: “Death of Death.pdf.” I was gobsmacked by the contents. TTTWLAM was right: George had only written two chapters. But those two chapters equaled over one hundred pages.

  Written fifteen years before the bulk of The Living Dead, they revealed George making a trial run at a similar concept. (These pages also proved his fixation with names like Charles, Charlie, Charlene, and Chuck.) While the Death of Death pages lacked the structure of The Living Dead pages, they were brasher and darker. Some of it had no place inside The Living Dead, no matter how much I adored them. (Case in point: a bonkers sequence in which a woman is rescued from ritual genital mutilation only for her rescuer to crash their getaway jeep and be thrown into a river, whereupon he turns zombie and starts after her, only to be suddenly ripped apart by hippopotamuses.) Other sections, however, could be meshed into the work, especially if I tweaked this, adjusted that, merged Character B into Character A, and so forth.

  As a grace note, the old website featured a short story by George, “Outpost #5,” which had been lost to time. Written from a zombie’s POV, it lays out, clearer than anything before, the underlying facts about zombies—how they use their senses, to what extent they have feelings, and so on. This story, combined with careful readings of the Dead films, helped me to create a master profile of a Romero zombie I referenced throughout writing. Suz granted me permission to use both The Death of Death and “Outpost #5,” and I was off to the races.

  The surprises still weren’t over. Months later, Chris called with a discovery: he’d turned up a nine-page letter George had written, describing where he’d intended to take various plot threads. At this point, I was four hundred pages into the novel. This new information was, to say the least, a pain in the ass. Nevertheless, I was thrilled. The bits of synchronicity were startling. Both George and I had independently plotted the news anchor character as ending his career the same way, and we’d both invented a heroic fighter pilot named Jenny. On the other hand, a couple of things he planned I put the kibosh on, including two apparently minor characters he’d envisioned as having “many frightening adventures.” I’d already killed them off, and they stayed dead. Sorry, George.

  Suz was adamant that George anticipated the book having a pessimistic ending. However, he ends the nine-page letter with this: “It might even be possible that some people could survive the plague.” What, I wondered, did he mean by “survive”? As in, “not get eaten by zombies”? Or as in “survive past the plague’s end”? I like to imagine the act of writing a novel was so liberating that George, the pessimist who let Ben get shot in Night, might yield to the same pinch of optimism that made him, at the last second, deviate from his own screenplay and let Fran and Peter live at the end of Dawn.

  The result of this constant trickle of new material was a collaboration process more typical than I could have anticipated. It was like George was still hard at work in Toronto, typing in his usual spot on the sofa, CNN playing in front of him, Suz buzzing about, their birds squawking, and every now and then he’d send me some new pages. Like any effective collaboration, it was part jubilation and part fistfight, and we came out the other side like John Wayne and Victor McLaglen in The Quiet Man, bruised and drunk, but with arms slung over each other’s shoulders.

  One thing was certain: he intended the novel to be epic, a real doorstop, a conversation starter as well as stopper. I had a big job in front of me, and as much groundwork as he’d laid, there was plenty I’d have to do on my own. To begin with, I needed to come to grips with where George was heading with the zombies; he left a half-finished picture. That meant establishing a firm timeline of the Dead films, which isn’t as simple as it sounds.

  * * *

  First, obviously, I rewatched all the films. If you ignore the decade shifts (as George did) and focus on how long after the zombie uprising each film takes place, here is the chronological order that emerges.

  Night of the Living Dead (1968).

  Diary of the Dead (2007). This occurs more or less simultaneously with Night, though I’d give Night the edge based on various pieces of contextual evidence.
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  Survival of the Dead (2009). In this sequel to Diary, a title informs us we are six days after the dead walk.

  Dawn of the Dead (1979). The best clue offered by the film is the one-legged priest who remarks, “Many have died last week on these streets.” More telling is the 1978 novelization of Dawn, credited to George A. Romero and Susanna Sparrow, which firmly places the events at three weeks after Night.

  Land of the Dead (2005). According to George’s commentary on the Survival Blu-ray, Land takes place “three years or so” after the plague begins.

  Day of the Dead (1985). The original script begins with a title reading, “Five years … since the dead first walked.”

  So that’s 1968, 2007, 2009, 1979, 2005, 1985. Clear as mud? For the purposes of The Living Dead, George’s movies had established what to expect in the first five years after the plague begins. The novel’s brief second act hurtles through this time frame, since the movies cover it well enough. He had some thoughts on the years after that, but a significant chunk of the conception of Years Six through Fifteen was up to me. My two best sources of study were Day (the final film in the timeline, and the film originally intended to conclude the series) and Survival (George’s last film).

  The two films might be the series’ most tonally divergent. Day is nearly as cynical as Night, except for an epilogue so sunny it makes you wonder if it’s supposed to be a dream. (George is cagey: “It doesn’t really matter,” he said in a 2000 interview with Quarterly Review of Film and Video.) Meanwhile, Survival is a hopeful film, showing zombies adhering to harmless behaviors and being compelled to quit attacking us.

  With this framework in mind, I had a long meeting in Toronto with Suz to discuss subjects that might help me carry on in George’s spirit. We spoke about George’s overall impressions of the novel, his thoughts on zombies in general, his opinions on religion and technology (startlingly similar), his dream projects, and his greatest fears. Most affectingly—and with apologies to Suz for making her cry—we spoke of his death, which came a quick three months after his diagnosis.

  “I intend to keep [the chapters] coming until I’m diagnosed as terminal, at which point I’ll, real quick, whip up an ending,” George wrote on his old site. You can hear his fiendish cackle, even as you wince at the bitter taste. The day did come when he was diagnosed as terminal. At that moment, according to Suz, all business ceased. He wanted to be present with his loved ones, hard stop. Although Suz isn’t absolutely sure, it’s likely he passed while listening to the soundtrack of The Quiet Man—probably his favorite film after The Tales of Hoffmann.

  Suz told me “Luis” was her name for George when he was being difficult. After learning that, I realized the relationship of Luis and Charlene in The Living Dead somewhat mirrored that of George and Suz. I have tried to honor that as best I could.

  * * *

  I watched the movies yet again, with their commentary tracks. I read the original screenplays, as well as earlier drafts where they were available. I read, listened to, or viewed every interview with George I could find. I read critical and scholarly analyses of his work. Most of all, I did some long, hard thinking on such wide-open questions as, “What does it all mean?” I have talked of little else for the past couple of years. For those who know me, I apologize.

  My choices were guided by my own interpretation of George’s inclinations. For starters, it’s common knowledge George regretted Night’s implication that the radiation-charged Venus probe produced the zombies. He worked to scrub our memory of it over the next five Dead films, and that effort guided me here. Naturally, characters in The Living Dead would speculate on the cause of the zombie plague, but any conclusions would extend only to the philosophical. No Venus probe, no government bioweapon gone wild, none of that. As George asserted in his original novel manuscript, “No one ever would, ever could, figure out why.”

  Romero purists might scoff at the idea of zombie animals, but this, too, began with George. On his commentary track for Land of the Dead, he speaks of a zombie rat scene cut for budgetary purposes and adds, “It’s a topic I might have to visit.” In a May 28, 2010, interview in Vulture, George mentions the zombie rats again, saying, “I’m thinking about it.” Land’s shooting script bears this out, portraying the characters of Riley, Slack, and Charlie (what did I say about George and the name Charlie?) being attacked at the J&L Drawbridge: “SKREEEEEEEE! ZOMBIE RATS crawl up onto the roadbed. DOZENS.”

  He wasn’t only thinking of rats. Just prior to Land’s release, DC Comics put out the six-issue comic book Toe Tags (subtitle: The Death of Death, if you can believe it), a wonderfully illustrated but not-great tale written by George and featuring zombie chimps.

  What did George’s zombie rats and zombie chimps have in common? What I realized, and let Etta Hoffmann realize in the novel, was neither were attacking other rats and chimps. I think George knew what he was up to. Here’s a bit of dialogue from Dawn of the Dead: “Cannibalism in the true sense of the word implies an intraspecies activity.… These creatures … prey on humans … they do not prey on each other.”

  Once you accept the gradual zombification of animals, it’s only logical that Earth would redevelop Edenic qualities. Day’s final scene points the way by showing its protagonists happy, on a tropical isle unspoiled by humans. Humongo Bongo is George’s bluntest take on the Eden concept, depicting a lush world cyclically ruined by exploiters. All this is reflected in The Living Dead’s penultimate scene.

  Regarding the novel’s final scene, I have only one comment, regarding the last sentence. A somewhat obscure fact is that Night, Dawn, and Day were all loosely based on what George describes as “a little short story” he wrote, “an allegorical thing” entitled “Anubis.” (An earlier title of Night of the Living Dead was Night of Anubis.) Written by George when he was roughly in his midtwenties, the story has been lost. But in a November 8, 2013, interview with BFI, George revealed the story’s final three words, as he remembered them. In a nod to this genre-spawning short story, these are the words I used to conclude The Living Dead.

  Slowtown is my own idea (though Nishimura’s “All these streets are yours. Except Slowtown” is a nod to 2010: The Year We Make Contact, another Eden story). Slowtown has a history. Around 1996, while still in college, I wrote a screenplay that was an homage to Night. Youngsters, lend an ear: in ye olde 1990s, zombies were persona non grata. It had been a decade since Day (generally considered a failure at the time). Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later wouldn’t come along for six more years, and it would be another eight until the premiere of AMC’s The Walking Dead. As is surely becoming obvious, my obsession followed no trends. I toyed with the script for a decade, and though I never produced it, I’d always believed its final act cut to the heart of something. After reading what George had written of The Living Dead, I saw how my idea could be reworked to bring closure to George’s premise. The concept had to do with old age.

  What I didn’t know back then was George had directed an entire movie about old age. It was called The Amusement Park. Written by Wally Cook and produced in 1973 for $34,320 by Communications Pittsburgh at the behest of the Lutheran Society, the fifty-minute dramatic film was intended to highlight the deleterious effects of ageism. With George as the director for hire, boy, did it ever. The finished film was successfully screened at community centers, but because it was an industrial project, it faded into obscurity. Lucky for me, I hadn’t forgotten the film’s mention in The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead, Tony Williams’s compulsory 2003 scholarly text. I asked Suz about the film, and she revealed, to my shock, that it had been found. Even more shocking, she let me see it.

  If you’re a Romero fan, you might recall what happened next. The Amusement Park had been produced as an industrial, but I found it exciting and unnerving. It had all the stamps of a George Romero film. I started a Twitter thread about it, the story blew up, and suddenly, I was fielding press and distributor queries. I forwarded them all to Suz, who
, just three days before I finished writing this page, premiered the restored film at the Romero Lives! tribute in Pittsburgh. What mattered in terms of The Living Dead was that I had fifty minutes’ worth of visceral, unexpected insight into George’s thoughts on old age, hospice, end-of-life care, and more.

  I set the old-age section of the novel in Toronto. The Romero faithful may wonder why I callously renounced George’s longtime Pittsburgh home. The reasons are simple. George used a Pittsburgh backdrop for Night, Dawn, Land, and Diary, but not Day or Survival—which, as you recall, are the two “final” chapters in the series. Pittsburgh had its due, especially with Land, which gave it a proper send-off. It’s also worthy to note that the Dawn of the Dead novelization reveals our survivors’ ultimate goal: reaching Canada.

  Additionally, as much as we fans love Pittsburgh, we also have to accept George’s new home of Toronto. Evidence suggests he loved it with all his heart. He loved being with Suz, he loved the local film crews, and it was there he wanted to be buried. Although Toronto works as a setting in other ways too (it certainly brings clarity to certain political notions), these were the main reasons I set the novel’s would-be utopia in what, for George, was nearly that.

  * * *

  Finally, whenever in doubt, I defaulted to the inspirational text upon which we began. Over the two years of writing the book, I kept a piece of paper taped to my computer so I would never forget what The Tales of Hoffmann had to tell me. It’s no coincidence both Hoffmann and The Living Dead have three acts. It’s no coincidence the crick-crack sound I attribute to old zombies is found in the chorus of one of Hoffmann’s songs. I could go on and on with what you might call Easter eggs but I hope are more like nudges to dig deeper. Only if you’re so inclined, of course. Offenbach completed Hoffmann in 1880; it’ll still be there when you’re ready.