June 2021

War of the Worlds was one of a handful of science fiction projects that Romero undertook in the post-Dawn era, of which Copperhead received the greatest part of his attention and energy. For Romero, science fiction was not just a lateral move into other brands of creature features, but a leap into higher budgets and narrative ambition. It was in this period that he conceived of Day of the Dead on an epic scale, and in which he worked with Stephen King on plans for a full-scale adaptation of The Stand. Among those projects was his first collaboration with a Latent Image partner in a decade, Rudolph J. Ricci’s Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Moon, a goofy musical parodying alien invasion movies. There was a project written for the stage (though the scope seems better suited for film than the stage) transmuting Tales of Hoffman into a space opera. That project, Hoffman: Through the Mansions of the Moon, would also have been a musical, with Romero’s frequent collaborator John Harrison writing the music.

Romero wrote a full script of War of the Worlds in 1986, as his plans for Pet Sematary were falling apart and he had not yet begun working on Monkey Shines. There was interest from Paramount, which placed the film on their release schedule in 1987. But in 1987 Star Trek: The Next Generation was a surprise hit, and the studio decided to capitalize on the trend by cancelling Romero's project and instead producing an ongoing television show that debuted in 1988. Romero got far enough in production for there to be designs for alien machinery and for the setting, and for there to be draft revisions. It would have been Romero's highest profile film to date, undoubtedly his highest budget, and his first studio film. It would also have been his best chance to branch out of the horror genre in the minds of both financiers and audiences. Had he gotten to make it, it seems extremely possible that the second half of his career could have taken an entirely different shape. Those implications aside, it is also one of Romero's most entertaining scripts!

Romero's War of the Worlds: The Night They Came radically re-conceives H.G. Wells' story and its various adaptations (including the infamous radio broadcast created by Orson Welles, one of Romero's artistic heroes), that moves it from the countryside into a crowded metropolis. All the action takes place in and around a single skyscraper into which a malfunctioning alien ship crashes at the start of the script. The cross-section of characters includes reporters, scientists, businesspeople and various office drones, and a janitor, Zack Howard, who is the film's most heroic figure (if not necessarily the main character). Romero planned the adaptation to have two parts, although the archive givess no indication that the second script was ever written. The first part is structured around a core group of characters attempting to survive that single ship, with the second part presumably being a special effects extravaganza in which entire planet fights back against the legions of alien spacecraft on their way to Earth. As for the aliens, they are not the spindly large-headed creatures of previous versions but rather formless blobs that are encountered inside bulky contraptions that the humans at first mistake for robots.

The group, trying to survive and fight back while urgently figuring out the baffling nature of the threat, eventually discovers that the little blobs operating that terrifying machinery are a hive mind, a single entity spread out across geographically disparate pieces that can break apart and join back together again. They can also take control of human bodies, killing the host but possessing brain and body. In the script’s climax, the corpse of parapsychologist Dorothy Lyman – the character who has done the most speaks to the human survivors in broken English:

Now and future time…..I am being this planet….this habitat. You are many. I am all. I am ever. I am undead. […] I am….above you. I future create habitat you. I not harm when you serve I need. I harm when you harm I.

To which Zack Howard responds “KISS MY ASS, MOTHERFUCKERS!” A very human response, and the sort of thing that for Romero usually compounds into greater and greater conflicts. Here, however, that first impulse to violence seems to be more correct than it usually in a Romero script. We can’t know how Romero would have resolved the invasion in  “War of the Worlds – Part II: The Day of Combat.” But the end of this first part, we see something almost wholly unique in Romero’s work: cooperation. Allan, a reporter, wonders if the coming battle would be familiar to humanity: “Salvador. Nam. Huddled in some alleyway….waitin’ for the bomb that has our name on it….askin’ ourselves this very same question. Do we stay or do we run? Is it our war or somebody else’s?” Janet, a fellow reporter and Allan’s sometimes girlfriend, gives the stirring, heroic message in response, declaring that “This is our war. This is everybody’s war.” The script ends on a rousing note with the three survivors resolving to fight the invasion together.

Zack, a black character very much in the mold of Ken Foree's Peter from Dawn, recognizes that they mean to enslave humanity, and that understanding comes out of the pain and trauma of American racism. “Those things talkin’ ‘bout we gonna be their slaves, man. My grandaddy was a slave.” The aliens that claims that they won't hurt humanity unless they resist are actually offering neither peace nor coexistence, but rather dominance and exploitation. But their very mode of existence is itself a threat: the de-individualized hive mind in which every part is interchangeable and expendable, and in which any person can be killed and possessed, is just as dangerous in Romero’s thinking as are their laser cannons. Lack of individuality is equated with slavery, and with death. It is another kind of zombie – referred to repeatedly as “the undead” by the aliens – in which one’s body becomes a vehicle for someone else’s agenda.

That imperial domination becomes even more explicit in the second draft. In the revision, a character named Tommy Peterson is possessed and offers a variation:

in soon time…. more of i will arrive this planet. you…. are many. i am more. i am all. i am forever. […] i future allow nourish you. i future create habitat you. i not harm you when you serve i. […] i not am enemy. you need understand…. one law only. i am…… sovereign…. you exist…. only to serve. now you go. speak this law among others.

This fear of humanity becoming a permanently subservient underclass is, of course, grounded in a history of atrocities committed by humanity, and specifically by America. Zack makes it explicit: we will all become slaves, white America’s crimes being revisited upon itself by another “sovereign” empire.

Only three years earlier, Romero had written versions of Day of the Dead in which zombies had become that permanent underclass. Here the aliens threaten humanity with a future akin to zombiedom. Zombies were figures whose trace remnants of humanity had already become essential to Romero’s horror philosophy. But whereas Day takes place after humanity has failed to cooperate to overcome the zombie hordes, his War of the Worlds actually dares to imagine the possibility of humans working together. to prevent it. As in Night of the Living Dead, characters fight amongst each other over whether the proper course of action within this besieged building is to go up or down: up to the roof and the possibility of helicopter escape, or down to the street where they can leave by foot. There is dissension and disagreement throughout. But, in the end, there’s cooperation and hope among the three survivors. They will fight to save humanity, together.

There are a few immediate caveats tempering Romero's optimism. First, this is only a group of three people, two of whom are in a romantic relationship. Second, these three have no actual power against the incoming horde of alien ships. It is indeed a hopeful note to end on, but one that is largely theoretical rather than practical. Would the next script have begun with the trio attempting to convince the world’s governments to join forces? Would they simply be soldiers in the war? The first script was conceived with at least one eye towards budgetary constraints, limiting the number of sets and characters, focusing special effects in a handful of flashy scenes. But how much grander would the scale have had to grow to accommodate the scope of the actual battles?

For all of its hopefulness, in other words, Romero still cannot imagine a scenario in which humanity and its governments would successfully work together in harmony to defeat a civilizational threat. That would be punted into the hypothetical second script, along with questions of budget and scope.

-Adam Charles Hart

In 1992, R.L. Stine debuted Welcome to Dead House, the first Goosebumps book. It was creepy, it was spooky, and it was MASSIVELY popular, introducing countless young readers to the horror genre and spawning a series that would sell hundreds of millions of copies around the world. For a stretch in the 1990s, Stine was the best-selling writer in America, aided in no small part by his incredible productivity, publishing dozens of books in that span. TV quickly pounced on it, with an ongoing series premiering in 1995. But it wasn't until 2015 that it hit the big screen. In the wake of the Goosebumps' initial sucess, George Romero was one of the filmmakers who explored the possibility of a feature film adaptation. That effort seemed to have eventually started moving forward with Tim Burton, but, according to Stine, the project was delayed by Burton's aborted Superman project and eventually abandoned. The exact timeline of the production and Romero's place within it is unclear, but Fox at one point placed a Goosebumps movie on their tentative release schedule for Halloween 1996.  (It seems unlikely that Burton's film would have used anything substantial from Romero's script. It would not have been uncommon for the studio to commission multiple scripts over the course of a few years, as Universal did with The Mummy, for which scripts were written and/or revised by Romero, John Sayles, Mick Garris, and Alan Ormsby, among others, resulting in a complicated arbitration process to determine the credited writers for the 1999 film.) The eventual Goosebumps film, written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, takes a meta-approach, with Jack Black playing "R.L. Stine" in a town plagued by a host of monsters from his books. Romero's script was a far more straightforward adaptation of Welcome to Dead House, albeit one with a very distinct take on the story. 

The Stine book is set in a town called Dark Falls whose inhabitants are, secretly, the living dead. When the Benson family moves in, young Josh and Amanda discover that a flashlight beam is sufficient to crumble the town’s residents into dust. Every year, the town must feed on the blood of a new family to sustain their undead existence. Romero retains the basic scenario and all of the major character names but tweaks the story in revealing ways. In the Stine book, the zombification comes, a la Return of the Living Dead, because of a mysterious gas that escapes from a local factory. Romero makes the capitalistic origins more emphatic: the town patriarch, the wealthy Foster Devries, has in death possessed the town. The state of living death experienced by the residents stemmed from a supernatural power that Devries has now shared with/imposed on the town.

There were a handful of horror scenarios that Romero returned to repeatedly over the years but which never made their way into a finished film: bigfeet, golems, Frankenstein's monsters, etc. His version of Goosebumps picks up an idea that he had developed for years in a project called Apartment Living that came very close to production in the late 1980s, and which he would return to again: a house that is alive, and which feeds off of its inhabitants. Here, it's more accurate to say the house is undead, as it is possessed by Devries’ spirit. Devries/the house feeds off its inhabitants, sucking out their energy until they die, after which they are revived to join the rest of the undead in the town. The energy harvested from the inhabitants sustains the residents for another year. And escaping the town means defeating De Vries and his toadies, his loyal former employees who still do his bidding in exchange for this new form of wages. As town leader Compton Dawes tells Josh:

Those who give life to the house… give life to Foster Devries. Somehow… he continues to exist… within the very walls of the home he cherished. And, being a man who honors his obligations… he pays those who have served him… by giving them… immortality.

To which Josh responds, “By turning them into walking corpses… like you!"

Romero re-imagines Dark Falls as the ultimate company town, in which the townspeople are wholly reliant on their boss for their continued undead existence, but the scope of their new “eternal lives” are highly circumscribed, limited entirely to what Devries allows. That means remaining within the city limits and feeding him a new family every year. Unlike in the Stine version, the threat here is not that the inhabitants will simply kill them and drain their blood, but that they will be forced to join the town and “live” according to the requirements of the town. That means a loss of independence, no possibility for self-determination. There is a growing rift in the town, the children increasingly resentful of their parents but still, reluctantly, obedient. The disagreement is articulated in terms of the “future.” Dawes tries to lure Josh into joining them willingly by promising him a “bright future.” But after Josh has vanquished Devries and Dawes, Dawes’ daughter Karen appears along with the other undead children to apologize to him. “We saw you as… a threat to us…” she says, “because… that’s the way… our parents saw you. We shouldn’t have believed them.” Josh sees that they have begun to fade away and gets emotional, yelling “WHAT’S HAPPENING? WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” to which Karen responds:

Into the future. We just wanted to thank you, Joshua. For giving us that future. For giving us back… our lives. We’ll never forget you. Never.

The “future” that Josh has granted them seems to be, simply, death. Or, at least, freedom from the living death that has trapped them in their bland, limited existence in Dark Falls. The divide about the “future” between generations is one that seems to hinge on the question of what sort of existence is worthwhile. Dawes has embraced a future in which, as long as the town continues to follow the rules laid down by his boss, and as long as they find another family to victimize, they can continue living in their uncanny stasis. Romero’s nightmarish scenario here involves not being killed and eaten but, rather, essentially having an awful, soul-killing job. Living in Dark Falls means living a fundamentally compromised and circumscribed existence, one that forces you to contribute to the predatory, parasitic system by finding further victims. The freedom to die and enter whatever this film’s version of the afterlife is is freedom from being stuck working for their boss. 

Romero liked to talk about his Dead movies as taking stock of and analyzing America every decade or so. This wasn't a sequel to Night, Dawn, and Day, but it was a zombie movie. And in this return to zombies, Romero envisions a truly hellish nightmare: being stuck in an awful job with an overbearing boss for all eternity. In its way, the script seems just as incisive and insightful about 1990s America as its sorta predecessors did about their time, capturing something visceral about the growing demands on workers made by employers and the dangerous precarity lying just underneath the surface of all that apparent prosperity.

-Adam Charles Hart 

The University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS) is pleased to announce several significant new acquisitions to its Horror Studies Collection.

First announced during an installment of the ULS Horror Studies Webinar Series, hosted in collaboration with Pitt’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), the ULS has acquired the papers of Linda D. Addison, the most decorated horror poet today with a total of six Bram Stoker literary awards. Addison became the first African American writer to win a Stoker in 2001 for her collection, Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes and has also received the Lifetime Achievement (2018) and Mentor of the Year (2016) Awards from the Horror Writers Association as well as the title Grand Master from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (2020). Her poetry explores themes of race, gender, loss, struggle, hope, and the resiliency of humanity through a lyrical style that employs both traditional horror tropes of the supernatural as well as stark realism. Her archive will include drafts and manuscripts of her poetry as well as ephemera such as convention programs and awards which help demonstrate her impact on the genre. On her hopes that her archive will inspire others, she says:

Having my writing journey from journals, through edits to final versions, become part of the University of Pittsburgh Horror Studies Collection is a dream, I never imagined, come true! To think that others, studying my process, could find value and inspiration will allow my work to safely exist past the length of my life, is an incredible blessing.

The ULS has also acquired the papers of Kathe Koja, who is a true iconoclast whose works push boundaries, expand our conceptions of horror, and prove that horror is indeed a true literary genre. Her first novel, The Cipher (1991), won both a Bram Stoker Award and Locus Award and solidified her impact as a force within new horror. She employs a striking and unique prose style to explore themes of alienation and social isolation as well as transcendence, often through art. Her collection will include drafts, manuscripts, and notes from her novels and short stories. On her decision to establish her archive at the University of Pittsburgh, Koja said:

A book is its writing as well as its words: the thoughts and notes and drafts and edits (and edits, and edits) that comprise the final text. To have all that making made available for scholars, readers, and fans of horror literature is a real boon, and I'm beyond delighted that my own horror novels will now be available this way.

Lastly, the ULS has acquired the archives of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), the premiere professional organization for writers working in the genre.  This collection, established by current HWA President John Palisano with support from former President Lisa Morton, documents the history of the organization through its newsletters, convention booklets and programs, and other published materials. Collectively, these materials illustrate the work of the HWA, as well as the community it has built. The HWA has been the main space for writers working within the genre to collect and collaborate since the late 1980s and has issued the Bram Stoker literary awards since 1987 at yearly conventions, such as the World Horror Convention and, since 2016, StokerCon.

Horror Studies Collection Coordinator Ben Rubin recently announced the acquisition of the HWA and Koja archives at StokerCon2021, where he participated in a live panel discussion about the archives, the potential for research, and their importance in bringing legitimacy to a genre often maligned during StokerCon along with Addison, Koja, and Palisano. Says Rubin:

These collections represent significant steps forward in developing the horror studies collections. They highlight the diversity of the genre, not just in its creators, but also in the ways in which it interprets, explores, and exposes the complexity of the human condition through its fears and anxieties. Further, the HWA archives in particular serve to illustrate the strong sense of community, collaboration, and support within the horror literary community and how it has thrived.

Processing work will begin on these new collections in summer 2021.

- Ben Rubin

In 2006, Romero wrote several treatments for a proposed television series called, alternately, Zombisodes and Zomboid. The script is a cartoonish burlesque on zombie movies whose hapless undead protagonist is slashed, shot, blown up, crushed, run over, and otherwise punished over and over again. His jokey introduction sets the tone:

A world no longer in use. Deserted. No Cars. No pedestrians. Only RUBBLE drifting on the breeze.

WIND blows a NEWSPAPER up against a wall. It flips open revealing a BANNER HEADLINE:

            DEAD RISE!

            EAT LIVING!

We hear SLUGGISH FOOTSTEPS. A SHADOW appears on the pavement and LURCHES TOWARD US. After a moment, we see THE FIGURE that is casting the shadow. Male, Neanderthal-like, a bit of a gorilla… (call him ZOMBIE KONG)… his flesh is rotting. He’s been DEAD for quite some time.

FREEZE FRAME. SUPERIMPOSE TITLE:

            ZOMBIE

            (AKA: “DEADALUS STINKUS”)

The IMAGE UN-FREEZES. The Zombie shambles on.

Like Wile E. Coyote or Itchy and Scratchy, Zombie Kong exists solely to combat his nemesis, a woman the script dubs “T-Bird.” Zombie Kong isn’t particularly zombie-like in some ways: he cannot speak (though his inarticulate grunts are translated with subtitles), and he wants to eat T-Bird, but he’s also smart. He knows how to use complex tools. He devises intricate plans involving vehicles and weapons, all of which are foiled, either by T-Bird or be happenstance. He can operate cars and hot air balloons! He can plant explosives and fire torpedoes and set hilariously elaborate traps. The most narratively important aspect of his zombie-hood seems to be his ability to take punishment. He sustains such extreme injuries that he barely maintains bodily integrity. And yet he manages to carry on, holding the steering wheel with his teeth or using a wheelchair when necessary.

With each episode, Zombie Kong gets more and more exasperated, and he sustains increasingly absurd damage. The last few episodes end with explosions, with the 15th ending with several successive torpedo misfires. The first comes after Zombie Kong has, with great care and delicacy, set up a torpedo for T-Bird to run over when she passes. As the legless Zombie Kong begins to crawl away a crow flies overhead, and as it passes directly over him, it shits:

Zombie Kong cringes and squints his eye shut…

…assuming that the glob of shit is going to hit him.

It doesn’t.

It drifts on the wind…

…and hits the torpedo instead.

Squarely on its half-submerged blasting cap…

…with Zombie Kong still well within range.

KA-BLOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The 18th and final episode ending with an enormous stockpile of grenades, bombs, and the like being struck by a lighting bolt before T-Bird comes into range, setting off “an EXPLOSION equivalent to Hiroshima.”

In 2006, Romero was already at work on Diary, and he would make Survival of the Dead not long after that. After that, he would work with Steven Schlozman to adapt Schlozman’s novel The Zombie Autopsies into a film. He would write the Empire of the Dead comic and would begin the novel The Living Dead – completed after Romero’s death by Daniel Kraus.

Romero would sketch out ideas for another zombie movie, Twilight of the Dead, that takes place in an all-zombie village in which Big Daddy from Land of the Dead leads a zombie society onto which a lone surviving human stumbles. That story incorporates some elements of his early Kubrick-inspired writing about protohuman societies (including The Footage). That brief synopsis suggests an increasingly pessimistic approach to zombies writ large. Twilight’s zombies have not just formed a society, they have learned to live together, and alongside humans. Or, at least, the couple of humans they’ve encountered since the fall of Fiddler’s Green. The bulk of the story implies an almost utopian vision, the re-starting of civilization that Romero so often seems to yearn for in his zombie work. Big Daddy is a benevolent but stern leader, and the inhabitants of the village live together in peace. But things begin to disintegrate when invaders – also zombies – arrive at the village. It ends with the two groups of zombies at war, a pile of twice-dead bodies alongside the few who remain standing and fighting. Romero’s utopian vision has fractured, the zombies fighting among themselves just like the humans had. Humanity is doomed, even after its death.

Of all of these zombie projects, Zombisodes stands out for the ways in which it departs from and mocks the legacy of zombie movies. It’s funny and absurd, and it seems unlikely that it would ever be made. In casting a zombie as a decomposing Wile E. Coyote who loses most of his limbs, he created a scenario that could not have been realized in live action without a fairly massive special effects budget, and which was likely far too violent and gross for a cartoon. Writing several series of drafts seems to indicate that, at some level, Romero was serious about the project, or at least that he enjoyed writing it. However, it’s unclear who would have funded it. It could potentially be scaled down a bit to be realized on a fairly low budget, as there were literally only two characters, the setting was an open landscape, and the explosions and bodily destructions could be tempered somewhat for a television audience. But in 2006, networks weren’t looking for slapstick gore. 

The episodes are funny, and often corny, with its humor built around the increasingly elaborate, incessant destruction of Zombie Kong’s body. Silly as they are, there is in these drafts a kind of sadistic delight being taken in the litany of injuries and humiliations piled upon the zombie, composed not long after Romero’s return to the undead with Land.  He was clearly injecting some legitimate variety into the zombie formula, but perhaps also working out some frustration. It is hard not to see the script as punishment being inflicted not just on Zombie Kong, but on zombies writ large, a kind of therapeutic annihilation of the albatross that had been hanging around his neck for almost 40 years at that point. At the very least, it joyously stomps on the legacy of the undead.

- Adam Charles Hart

In 2005, after a 20-year hiatus, Romero returned to his zombie universe with Land of the Dead.  The film was the biggest budget entry into the Dead series and featured Pittsburgh in its most prominent role despite being the first of the series filmed entirely outside of the region.  The film continues the bleak tone of Day as it depicts a stratified Pittsburgh with the rich living in safety and luxury within the fortified and barricaded Golden Triangle of Downtown Pittsburgh, while the rest of society toils amongst slums outside the gates with threats both human and undead.

The roots of the film date back to July 25, 2001 and the initial drafts present a different story than what fans know as Land of the Dead.  The project was originally titled ‘Dead Reckoning’ after the vehicle of the same name in the film.  Romero has stated in interviews that he did not want to continue the use of the ‘of the dead’ format but was later convinced to return to it.  This first imaging as ‘Dead Reckoning’ has some fascinating differences worth highlighting.

• An opening scene that went right for the scares: Riley lying in bed with a woman; she climbs on top to straddle him and he is suddenly faced with a zombie dropping maggots onto his face! Riley bolts awake and the audience realizes it is a dream.  This surely would have been a memorable jump scare to reignite the franchise with a bold statement of zombie carnage.  Alas, the studio did not like the opening and provided the feedback “let’s not open with implied necrophilia”.
• Differences in characters and dynamics:  Riley was originally meant to be an African American lead and embodied many of the traits that are later distributed among several characters.  Riley and Cholo are always at odds and the main conflict is between them with very little between Kaufman and Cholo.  Kaufman is not the supreme leader of Fiddler’s Green but one of many (although he does eventually solidify his control).  Slack is a mercenary employed by Kaufman to assist Riley in capturing and retuning Dead Reckoning and doesn’t show up till over halfway through the film.
• No zombie army! One of the most iconic aspects of Land of the Dead is Big Daddy and his zombie army, but they were completely absent from the original script.  Indeed it is hard to imagine the film without the scene of the zombie army rising from the river.  Instead, we get one scene in a basement laboratory in which zombies are being experimented on in ways that resemble Day of the Dead.  The lead scientist expresses excitement over having trained one zombie to eat cat food rather than human flesh.  At least until a later scene when the scientist is distracted and the lust for flesh returns and the zombie dispatches him in familiar gruesome fashion. 
• A much more explosive ending: the climax of the story plays out in a much different manner.  Dead Reckoning is mostly destroyed atop Mt Washington, killing Cholo along with it.  The vehicle is in three segments and mercenaries destroy the segment containing Cholo just before he can launch missiles at Fiddler’s Green.  Riley and Charlie then destroy the middle section containing the rest of Cholo’s crew before driving off in the caboose setting off fireworks on their way to Canada.  The studio pushed back that this ending was unsatisfying as it lacked any cathartic confrontation between the protagonists and antagonists.  Meanwhile, in Fiddler’s Green, Kaufman and the other elites plan to escape the city by helicopter as it is obvious the zombies are loose from the basement lab and taking over the building.  One helicopter leaves but the pilot is killed by a stowaway zombie causing the chopper to go off course and crash into the Green, exploding, and destroying the top of the building and Kaufman with it.  While not stated outright in any studio response, one might suspect that this ending became untenable after the world events just a few months later.

A few revisions of this version continue through October 2001 followed by a long hiatus.  The project reemerges in January 2003 under the name Land of the Dead and follows the shifted storyline that we are familiar with from the film released in June of 2005. 

-Ben Rubin