George Romero’s Original Day of The Dead Script Was SO Much Better

Zombie master George Romero’s Day of the Dead was a great film, but it could’ve been even better, as his original script was truly epic. While he’s sadly no longer among the living, nobody did more to create the modern zombie genre than Romero. He all but invented the zombie, and did invent how we know it today, with 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. He then topped himself with 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, which many fans consider the best zombie movie ever.

In 1985, Romero completed his then-trilogy with Day of the Dead. At the time, Day of the Dead really didn’t get much respect, earning bad reviews from critics and lots of fan derision due to how relentlessly grim and not like the beloved Dawn of the Dead the threequel was. As with many horror films though, Day of the Dead went on to amass a large cult following, and some now even regard it as being on the same quality level of Night and Dawn.

As good as Day of the Dead is, it’s a far cry from Romero’s original vision for the film. Sadly, what Romero wanted to do just wasn’t possible with what he had to work with.

George Romero’s Original Day of The Dead Script Was Better

George Romero’s original plan when conceiving Day of the Dead was to make it, in his words, “the Gone with the Wind of zombie films.” While that might sound like an odd comparison, Romero was referring to Gone with the Wind‘s epic scope and scale. Gore effects maestro Tom Savini also compared Romero’s original script to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Romero originally thought he would get to make the film he wanted, with a $7 million budget, which is way more than he had worked with before at the time. Unfortunately, his financiers wanted the film to be rated-R, and Romero insisted it be released unrated like Night and Dawn had been. Romero didn’t want his vision to be compromised for the sake of the MPAA’s often ridiculous demands.

This led Romero to agree to cut his budget in half to $3.5 million in exchange for an unrated release, but that of course necessitated that his original script had to be massively changed. This script saw the team of scientists researching zombies live above ground in a massive jungle fortress surrounded by electric fences, while the military forces lived below ground in a bunker like the one in the final film, coming up topside to provide security. The overall story was also much more complex, involving the training of zombie armies to fight other zombie armies, and actually would’ve seen the zombie outbreak “end”, in the sense that no new zombies were said to be rising, for reasons unknown. The full script can be found online via a quick Google search.

Thankfully, some of Romero’s unused ideas for Day of the Dead did eventually become available for fans to see, albeit in a different film. 2005’s Land of the Dead – the only Romero zombie movie to be produced by a major studio, in this case Universal – sported a $15 million budget, and allowed the director to incorporate quite a few of Day of the Dead‘s abandoned aspects, especially when it came to the continued evolution of zombies. However, with Romero gone, his true intent for Day of the Dead will never get to be realized, and that’s sad.

About The Author