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

Written by John Edward Betancourt 

Building a New World 

The year was 2002, and the landscape of the horror genre was a vastly different place. A market once ruled by the living dead was now a place where slasher films and splatter flicks reigned supreme. But something magical happened in '02, the dead came back to life. Resident Evil and 28 Days Later were released that same year and both films were well received by audiences and the box office alike and the success of those films paved the way for the domination that the living dead enjoy in pop culture to this day. But more importantly, they also set the stage for George A. Romero to return to the genre and make the next entry in his iconic Dead series in 2005; Land of the Dead. 

Following the release of Day of the Dead, Romero continue to work as a director, releasing a few films here and there over the years, but the dead were always on his mind. Somewhere along the way he had toyed with the notion of putting together the script for another film in the series, but despite his tinkering with a draft here and there...nothing idea wise quite jelled just yet. George wanted a film that was perfectly poignant to the times. One that truly reflected America and its society to a tee, and it wasn't until the early 00's that he finally found his angle and the opportunity to tell his tale when Universal pictures green-lit the production of Land.  It turned out the post 9/11 era of America would serve well to build this particular story, giving us a look at a disillusioned society shell shocked by the events of the end of the world.

But the commentary on where we were as a people in America at that point in time was going to be the easy part of telling the story, Romero's real challenge was to build a world that showed that while mankind had survived the end times in some form or fashion society as a whole had taken a step back to get by, reverting to a more feudal state to keep things simple and in order to accomplish this, he dusted off the original script for Day of the Dead to give new life to ideas that were in essence, long forgotten. The first resurrected concept that George re purposed for Land of the Dead was Gasparilla's Island. It was no longer practical or necessary to set this next film on a tropical island, so Romero did the next best thing...he created an urban one. By setting the film in Pittsburgh once again, George was able to use the city's natural setting of being surrounded by rivers to isolate the downtown area from the rest of the surrounding metro area with the construction of fences and barriers and raising up all the drawbridges.

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In doing this, Pittsburgh had truly become an island unto itself, giving mankind a place where they could safely live away from the roaming hordes of walking corpses meandering about the countryside and once that part of this new world was put together, it was time to enhance this reimagined island a little further. One fascinating concept that George presented in the original script for Day was the return of the caste system on Gasparilla's Island. The former governor of Florida lived in a wonderfully comfortable place on the island where he was able to eat, drink and be psycho while the people he "saved" from a fate worse than death lived in nothing more than a filthy hovel where it essentially became a game of survival of the fittest. That extreme and disturbing concept in the film was in essence toned down for Land, but the core of it still remained. Kaufman (the new iteration of Gasparilla and a classier one at that) and his rich cronies would enjoy the high life in a high rise while the rest of the people of Pittsburgh would simply get by in whatever housing Kaufman left for them. It was a stunning new way to portray the have and have nots and oddly enough, this enhanced thematic concept is still relevant to this day.  

While it seems as though that should be enough to get a story going, George was in no way done borrowing from his old script, the living dead were going to get a facelift as well. The notion to make them smarter was always an evolutionary standard for Romero, but he saw a way to enhance that concept with another one from the original Day script...the notion of an army of the living dead. Obviously by isolating mankind it was no longer practical to train the dead to use weapons and fight as they were able to do in that distant draft of the screenplay. Instead Romero let evolution do all the work and allowed the dead to organize on their own. These advanced creatures could communicate and proved to be quite the lethal force when all was said and done and this next step for the Romero zombie was a disturbing one to say the least, truly going above and beyond anything that was featured in that original script since these beings embodied the age old Romero notion of 'they're us.'

Regardless, the heavy borrowing that George performed from that alternate version of Day of the Dead paid off in spades. He had a powerful villain coming to life in Kaufman. A world that made sense and fit with the times and he was even able to explore the horrors of putting together an army of the dead and take it one step further. Yet, despite laying down the framework for an incredible new entry in the series, Romero wasn't quite done yet. There were still a bevy of rich characters waiting for him in that old script that he could bring to life, and of course there was still one big question remaining, would all of this work when all was said and done. That's where we will pick up tomorrow in the final part of this series, with an in depth look at what characters survived and evolved from the old script and how all of these elements finally came together on screen in Land of the Dead. ​Until then.

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