How the Original Script for ‘Day of the Dead’ Helped Create ‘Land of the Dead’: Part I

Written by John Edward Betancourt

Laying the Foundation

There was a time in horror history, when George A. Romero's Day of the Dead was considered an outright failure. Released in 1985 to mediocre fanfare, both fans and critics alike simply did not embrace the film, and for many years it was regarded as the weakest of the original Dead Trilogy. But time has a way of changing things and as the years have progressed, Day was essentially rediscovered by old fans and new fans alike and it now holds its weight as one of the finest films in the franchise. 

This newfound love for the film continues to spread, to the point where even a new book about the making of the motion picture hit the shelves a little while back as well. Yet, despite the fact that this movie has finally found a home in the hearts of the fans, few of us truly realize that Day of the Dead's lasting impact extends far beyond its legacy as a rediscovered masterpiece, it also happens to be a motion picture that inadvertently managed to influence a large chunk of the franchise's future...all by way of an original screenplay that was never produced, and over the next few days we are going to chronicle just how that script, helped give life to the next film in the series...Land of the Dead. 

But in order to fully understand how all of this came together, we'll need to take a trip down memory lane and head back to 1979, after the release of Dawn of the Dead. The film was enjoying incredible success at the time and because of said success, George A. Romero was able to secure a three-picture deal with the company that helped Dawn make it into so many theaters without an MPAA rating, United Film Distribution Company. This fantastic deal gave Romero some incredible creative license and during this time he gave life to a sweeping tale about nobility and dedication to a dream with Knightriders, and he and Stephen King were able to partner up and bring back the comic books that influenced them as children in Creepshow. These two motion pictures essentially gave Romero a break from the living dead similar to the one he took between Night and Dawn, allowing for a proper idea for the next entry in the series to percolate and with the three picture deal coming to an end...he set out to write what would have been a grand finale to the series in Day of the Dead.

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This script was quite unlike any other that George A. Romero had written to date simply because of its power and scope, this was a movie designed to top Dawn in every single way with a unique and creative story the zombie genre had never seen. This alternate story took place on an island off the coast of Florida, where the former Governor of the state created a safe heaven/paradise for survivors of the end times...or so it would seem. Gasparilla's Island was nothing short of a nightmare in this draft, where the caste system of old returned in force and Gasparilla himself ruled the people he saved with an iron fist so that all lived in fear of the man. But to top it all off, the crazy governor turned despot commissioned some radical ideas; allowing for the scientists on the island and the military to work together to train the living dead to be soldiers, and well...it's simply a magnificent script. We won't spend a ton of time on the details of this screenplay, only the parts that apply to Land of the Dead. After all, taking the time to break this magnum opus down would be a series of its own and well...in the end it was never meant to be.  

For despite the fact that it could have been the definitive zombie motion picture, there was conflict to be had. The projected budget for this iteration of Day was coming in at around $7 million, which would have been at the time, an incredible budget for any horror film and UFDC had their reservations. For starters, Romero wanted this film to be released in the same way Dawn hit theaters, without a rating; something UFDC wasn't keen on at that asking price and well...Knightriders and Creepshow didn't quite deliver at the box office as UFDC hoped they would and eventually, both sides agreed to a pared down version of this screenplay, to be filmed with a budget of $3.5 million and the rest as they say is history. 

Day of the Dead would be released to tough reviews and a box office return less than its predecessor and well, in many ways this marked the decline of the zombie genre for many years. The slasher genre was going strong and the dead were quietly buried for almost twenty years and well...sometimes things happen for a reason. This gave George Romero plenty of time to let the next entry in the series cook in his mind and at the dawn of a new century, with zombies suddenly popular again, Romero was ready to return to the genre he created with a script in hand that was not only reflective of the times, but filled to the brim with concepts, ideas and updated characters from a script that was never supposed to see the light of day and it seems only appropriate that Romero would allow the best parts of this unused story to return to life at a later date and that's where we will pick up next time, with a look at what elements from the original script survived to build a new world for a new story. Until then.

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