Ok…In the third installment of George Romeos zombie series, it’s pretty much established that the entire world is overrun by the living dead. Any humans who remain are on a small island somewhere or deep in the mountains.
So…what happens next?
-Do the zombies just lumber around chanting “brains” until the bodies decompose?
-Do they build their own zombie civilization?
Any thoughts?
Romero’s zombies don’t chant “brains!.” I think that comes from “Return of the Evil Dead.”
Their isn’t, as far as I know, a canonical answer to your question. You could get a copy of the “Book of the Dead” from Amazon.com. It is a collection of short stories by various famous authors set in Romero’s zombie infested world. Several possibilities are addressed.
My personal guess is that the zombies would gradually decompose. Lots of zombies still trapped in their tombs could possibly provide excitement for centuries to come. Figure that the corpse in a typical American-style burial will last for centuries (I used to work in a mortuary). Every time there is flooding and a cemetery washes out, you get some number of “new” zombies released. Same-same as above ground crypts deteriorate…which they will do relatively quickly since they require constant maintenance. So, though it may take a long time, the zombies will just eventually all rot to nonexistance.
Afternoon of the Dead.
Stray dogs, hyenas, vultures, buzzards & flies will clean up the problem in a hurry, zombies or not.
Or, say, after Day of the Dead comes Long Lazy Summer Afternoon Of The Dead–Zombies engage in wacky hi-jinx while picnicking down by the Old Swimming Hole. Watch Eyeless Bob do a double sommersault off the diving board to impress Rotting Suzy the Dead Cheerleader, & surface with no arms! Big laffs!
The buried dead are a non issue. According to NOTLD and Dawn of the Dead it is only the bodies of the recent dead that were reanimated, also those that were above ground, that is why there were no zombies poping up out the ground as there were in Return of the Living dead (Not Evil) and the Thriller video.
Next step Twilight of the Dead!
As for the ones wandering aimlessly they are still slowly decomposing but much more slowly due to whatever it is that has reanimated them.
They do not require food or water so likely they’ll slowly rot and the world will be safe for what’s left of the living, so long as they make sure they properly dispose of the new dead.
May take decades though.
The zombies won’t create any kind of civilization. Day of the Dead hinted at the fact that zombies can remember to do menial tasks and the like, but I don’t think that would set up for anything big to come about, like thinking zombies or cities of zombies.
All of Romero’s movies end on a rather dark note, and hint that, aside from a few decent people, the survivors of whatever’s going on are doomed. Those that are able to control their more violent instincts may survive for a while, but the rejected marriage proposal in Dawn leaves me to believe he feels that even those people will be unable to re-establish the human race as a dominant force on the planet. Unless scientists can figure out a way to stop the virus or whatever it is that’s causing the epidemic, humanity is doomed to die out. The zombies currently walking around will kill whoever they find, and those who manage to stay hidden, will eventually do something stupid, and die out.
Kinda bleak, but that’s the big terror of Romero’s movies.
George Romero’s original script for Day Of The Dead (which went unfilmed, having to be revised drastically for budget considerations) actually noted the end of the zombie plague. The survivors have reached an island with the dead body of a friend, and are about to plug a hole in his head to keep him from re-animating when one character says something like “Stop. Let’s just wait.”
The last scene of the script has them watching over the corpse on a moonlit beach and wondering how long they’ll have to wait, because a few days have passed already and he should have been zombified by that point.
This was preceded earlier in the script by some hokey religious talk: “One day, there will be a man who dies and refuses to come back. Then the plague will end, and that man will become the first saint of the new world” or something like that.
So Romero evidently planned (at one point, anyway) on ending the zombie problem. My guess is that when Day Of The Dead had to undergo a massive, mutilating re-write, he decided to keep his options open for a fourth film where he could end the series in style.
His latest script, Dead Reckoning , reportedly has survivors walled up in a fortress city where life goes on in parody of previous times…people sitting at sidewalk cafes protected by barbed wire fences, trade goes on with other fortress cities for wine and luxuries, etc. He’s said many times that a fourth film would have the zombies reduced to the level of mere annoyance…people have learned to keep them out of their areas, and are intent on ignoring them.
Interestingly, he’s repeatedly used the issue of the homeless in America as a metaphor for how the zombies would be depicted in the fourth film.
That all ties into the next sequel, Night of the Living Dogs.
“Animals that eat zombies will get up and kill! The flies that eat what’s left will buzz around…and kill!”
And of course they’re all enjoying ice cold Iron City beer.
As I remember from my Encyclopedia of Monsters the original plot outline for Day of the Dead involved a massive final confrontation of SWAT trained zombies vs. the “feral” zombies, but couldn’t be produced because of budget restraints.
'Would have been cool, though.
Well, predicting future events in the Romeroverse is somewhat complicated by the fact that little is known about why or how the dead have started to rise. In Night it is suggested tentatively that radiation from a space probe is to blame, but this is never really elaborated on. However, even if we assume that the revivication of the dead is a persistent effect, as the latter two films indicate, one might still reasonably conclude that humanity would eventually recover from the shock sufficiently to fend off the demise of the species.
This would be aided by the fact that Romero’s zombies seem to have no particular edge on living humans except when in overwhelming numbers. They’re slower than humans, and I guess that the real reason for the collapse of society was not so much due to their direct effects as from the panic and religious upheaval their emergence engendered. Nothing says, “It’s the End Times” like dead folks roaming the streets. Then too, I would suspect that the average “lifespan” (for want of a better term) of a zombie is fairly limited. Mother Nature would probably take care of most of them within a year.
Though civilization would surely be dealt a significant setback, the areas that quickly adapted to the threat (such as western Pennsylvania, for example) would emerge as the new centers of national power. As the cities of the Eastern Seaboard descend into anarchy, Pittsburgh would become the new capital of post-zombie North America. “Chilly Billy” Cardille would of course be installed as acting President for the duration of the crisis.
Anyone curious about the original script for Day of the Dead can find it here. Go to Films—>Day of the Dead---->Original Script.
Ah, that’s the original ORIGINAL script…lol.
Romero originally wrote a 200-plus page script that was budgeted to come in at 7 million bucks.
When the financiers said “no go”, he made an attempt to retain the same storyline but scale it down in size. The result was the “original” 104 page script, which is the one that people refer to constantly (also the one available on the above link).
It was still too expensive though, so he junked the whole storyline and wrote a new one, retaining most of the characters and a few of the ideas (like Bub having good knowledge of pistols, etc.) This is what wound up being filmed.
The epic 200-page draft, which reportedly did contain that massive climax you mention, has never been circulated. Romero stated on his web board awhile back that it was only seen by 5 people before it was stashed away, unlike the 104 page rewrite, which was given to the actors and crewpeople before it was junked and the final script written.
Also on the subject of original/unfilmed scripts…
Two Romero-authored unfinished story treatments for DAWN OF THE DEAD exist, but have never surfaced to the public.
One featured a man and his pregnant wife living in the air conditioner shafts above the stores in the mall, basically living a animalistic hunter-gatherer lifestyle, hiding from both the zombies and the U.S. Army, who are using the mall’s freezers to store human flesh that they feed to the zombies in order to keep them in line. Romero said it was “too depressing” and too far along in the story sequence of the trilogy, so he left it unfinished.
Another featured “psychic zombies” (!) and didn’t even take place at the mall at all.
Would be nice to get these on the upcoming DVD boxset, but I doubt it.
Except, didn’t the dead outnumber the living by 400,000 to 1 by Day of the Dead?
Well, the Consul was dead, so I guess we can assume Hugh and Yvonne hooked up…
Wait, this was about Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, right?
Well, admittedly this is where a minimal amount of planning and forethought on the part of the living would be necessary. In this case, common sense would perhaps suggest that people try to avoid situations where they have to fight off all 400,000 zombies at once. Not, one would think, too difficult a task; yet it has to be said that this seemingly simple principle is rather egregiously ignored by the characters in Day of the Dead, who appear to have access to a secure, easily defensible military installation from which to wait out the Apocalypse. So what’s the first thing they do? They fill up the basement with a million zombies. Now, I don’t care how urgent your anti-zombie research may be, it’s a safe bet that you’re not going to go through that many at once. The same sort of flawed logic is on display in Dawn of the Dead, where the survivors decide to hole up in a shopping mall. An ideal, situation, it would seem, except for the minor detail that all the zombies are driven by instinct to get into the mall. Add in a marauding band of bikers to knock the doors down, and you’re history. Why not move into some place that neither zombies or bikers are likely to be attracted to, like a salt factory or an independent bookstore?
Maybe this deserves it’s own thread, so if it turns into a hijack, I appologize, but has anyone seen Children of the Dead? I remember reading an article on it in Fangoria a long while back, and it claimed that the movie was supposed to be another sequel to Romero’s Deat movies. The reference to one of Romero’s earlier scripts involving “psychic” zombies reminded me, because apparently, there was a zombie king who had psychic powers or something. Was this anything like a continuation of Day of the Dead, or just some crappy crap crap crap movie trying to build off of the legacy?
(also, another aside: I just watched the “Official” trailer for The House of the Dead…this man does NOT understand the concept of zombies, and this film needs to be destroyed before anyone can see it!)
Can anyone point me tosome info on this? I’ve never added these to my DVD collection, and would love to pick up a boxset version.
-j