How The Return Of The Living Dead thumbs its nose at traditional zombie lore
Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: Warm Bodies has us thinking about horror-comedies.
The Return Of The Living Dead (1985)
John Russo co-wrote the original Night Of The Living Dead movie with George Romero, and retained the rights to the “living dead” title, which he used in his 1977 novel Return Of The Living Dead (set a decade after the zombie plague of the original film), intending to create his own franchise. Russo got his wish, though not exactly in the way he intended. The Return Of The Living Dead project fell into the hands of Dan O’Bannon, a sci-fi/horror writer whose twisted sense of humor—first widely seen in his collaboration with John Carpenter on the wacky outer-space creature-feature Dark Star—had already made him a favorite among genre fans. O’Bannon’s The Return Of The Living Dead did spawn a string of sequels, and did hold on to Russo’s idea of a story existing in the same universe as the original Night; but the characters in O’Bannon’s movie dismiss Romero’s film as a fictionalized cover-up of a government conspiracy. And that’s not the only way The Return Of The Living Dead thumbs its nose at zombie lore.
