Award-winning writer/director/producer George A. Romero basically invented the modern zombie film with his 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. In addition to spawning a whole sub-genre of "apocalypse zombie" horror, NOTLD became a franchise with five theatrical sequels and a comic book series and has been placed on the National Film Registry as a movie that is "historically, culturally or aesthetically important."
In Simon West Productions' Night of the Living Dead: Origins, co-writer/director Zebediah de Soto says that he aims to use 3-D CGI to add in all of the bloody details that he feels are missing from other Romero films.
"I want to see a helicopter clipping its propeller on a building and careening into a crowd of people. Zombies going through the streets. A thousand people tearing each other apart, zombies tearing them apart, total chaos.
"One of the first horror films I owned was Night of the Living Dead, it made a huge impression on me. There are all of these interesting little back stories in terms of the other characters, but we only got to follow Barbara in the original. They were always describing these really big scenes, like Ben says a truck is chased down by a horde of zombies. I always wished I could have seen that."
De Soto says Origins is not a prequel, but more an expansion of the universe that Romero created.
"I loved Romero's movie and there are so many people out there raping it to death, I didn't want to be next in line to the gang bang. But I really wanted to do something that was a little creative but an homage to what he was doing. I want to see a zombie...[with effects] done on a level no one has ever seen before like Spider-Man or The Hulk. Those effects applied to a zombie film."
Night of the Living Dead: Origins is currently in production with an expected 2010 release.
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Check out the Night of the Living Dead comic books from Avatar for even more zombie mayhem!
