In 1979, flush with the surprisingly immediate success of Dawn of the Dead, Romero quickly began developing another Dead sequel. It would be another 5 years before Day actually went into production, and its final form would be radically different not just from his original idea. This brief synopsis is just over 4 pages long – almost more of a sketch than a proposal – but much of it would be retained in the early drafts. 

This synopsis was whipped up as preparation for a 3-picture deal that would ultimately finance Knightriders, Creepshow, and Day - the zombie sequel was a necessary component to obtain funding for the other two. Romero would develop a version of Day over the next few years that was, as I've described on this blog before, a grand epic. He would ultimately have to hack at the budget so much that he would later consider the original version of Day to be an entirely different, unrealized project from the film he ultimated produced and released. 

In the synopsis, "the world as we know it has ended." The process of societal collapse shown in Dawn is now complete and zombies are the dominant population on earth. The lone exceptions are isolated refugee groups - the spiritual leader, John, of one of these groups will be the hero of the film - and fascistic militaries that have sprouted up across the country. John's "commune" is attacked by zombies, who kill the rest of the group. This is where Romero's approach to zombies differs radically from what came before: 

John faces death once more at the hands of the attacking creatures but to his amazement and to ours, he is allowed to live. The Zombies take him prisoner.

We also note that the creatures do not devour the other victims. Instead, they load the corpses onto refrigerated vans. This organization is startling in creatures who had previously acted on pure animal instincts. We are puzzled until we become aware of human "Lieutenants", who are running the maneuvers. The Living Dead seem to respond to the officers' commands and do their bidding in every way.

In this version of the story, the zombies are trained by the militaries to kill rebels and refugees. Their training in some early scripts goes beyond blitz attacks to include clean-up, operation of machinery, and even precision shooting. That training requires, of course, ensuring that the zombies do not get hungry, a logistical problem that leads to some of the most disturbing moments in Romero's entire body of work. A version of this persists into the final film, but here the villainous General Balthazar, who commands a literal army of the undead, has instituted the farming of humans to provide meat for his troops. (He first begins exploring this idea in 1974, with the first, unfinished script of Dawn of the Dead.) Even darker: this version of Romero's zombies starve and wither away if they don't feed. So not only is Balthazar slaughtering humans like cattle, he is perpetuating and worsening the zombie apocalypse. 

The story climaxes with a battle between Balthazar's zombie army and that of a rival military leader, which provides enough confusion and cover for John and a group of rebels to break into the general's headquarters in an underground bomb shelter. John dies in the attack, but his supporters prevail, exiling Balthazar to the surface, "where he and a small band of defeated tyrants are literally consumed by the returning army of the Living Dead."

The group that Romero does actually refer to as "the 'good guys'" wait out the zombies and let them start to die and disperse before resurfacing to clear up the corpses and mourn the dead. The synopsis ends with a remarkable bit of ambiguously hopeful poetry from Romero:

Then the humans begin to look for ways to resume a life.

-Adam Charles Hart