Living Dead, also informally known as Of the Dead is a blanket term for the loosely connected horror franchise that originated from the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. The film, written by George A. Romero and John A. Russo, primarily focuses on a group of people gathering at a farmhouse to survive from an onslaught of zombies in rural Pennsylvania. It is known to have inspired the modern interpretation of zombies as reanimated human corpses that feast on the flesh and/or brains of the living.
Due to a copyright error during its release, Night of the Living Deads status in the public domain has resulted in numerous works claiming to expand upon or spin off from the plot points and characters of the film, sometimes without the involvement of the original cast and crew members. They consist of various films, literature, and other forms of media that explore the outbreak and evolution of a zombie apocalypse and society's reaction to it. The two most notable are Romero's Dead series, consisting of five additional films, and the Return of the Living Dead series, which was loosely based on Russo's novel of the same name.
Films
George A. Romero's Dead series
As of its latest installment, Survival of the Dead, Romero's Dead series includes six films all written and directed by Romero himself. Labeled Trilogy of the Dead until Land of the Dead, each film is laden with social commentary on topics ranging from racism to consumerism. The films are not produced as direct follow-ups from one another, and the only continuation is the epidemic of the living dead. This situation advances with each film, but with different characters, and the time moves ahead to the time when they were filmed, making the world's progression the only interlocking aspect of the series. The fifth film does not continue the depiction of the progress of the world; acting as a reboot, it is nonetheless contemporary just as the sequels are. The films deal with how different people react to the same phenomenon ranging from citizens to police to army officials and back again. There are no real happy endings to the films, as each takes place in a world that has gotten worse since the last time we saw it, the number of zombies ever increasing and the fate of the living remnant always in the balance.
Romero tried to make each movie unique from the previous, but this led to some of his more serious works, like Day of the Dead, receiving a worse reception compared to his spoof-like film Dawn of the Dead. He explained this in an interview with Telegraph film reviewer Tim Robey saying, "You know, I've made six zombie films, I've tried consciously to make each one different from the next. But that's not what people want these days. They want the same thing! I don't know if that's part of this television mentality, where people tune in every week to see the same thing." Romero does not consider any of his Dead films sequels since none of the major characters or story continue from one film to the next. The one exception is that the military officer from Diary of the Dead (Alan van Sprang), who robs the main characters, is a main character in Survival of the Dead as well.
George A. Romero's Dead series includes: Night of the Living Dead (1968) Dawn of the Dead (1978) Day of the Dead (1985) Land of the Dead (2005) Diary of the Dead (2007) Survival of the Dead (2009) Twilight of the Dead (2027)
Dead series remakes Remakes have been made for three of the original films with the involvement of some of the original cast and crew members:
Night of the Living Dead (1990)
Directed by Tom Savini, former special make-up effects artist, who worked on Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead while George A. Romero rewrote the screenplay. The plot of the film follows closely the 1968 original, where Barbara, Ben, the Cooper family and Tom Landry and his girlfriend Judy Rose Larson are trapped in a rural farmhouse in Pennsylvania trying to survive the night while the house is being attacked by mysteriously reanimated ghouls, otherwise known as zombies.
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Directed by Zack Snyder. A group of strangers: Ana, Police Sergeant Kenneth Hall, Michael, Andre and his pregnant wife, Luda, break into a nearby mall where they are confronted by three living guards – C.J., Bart and Terry – who make them surrender their weapons in exchange for refuge. The group secures the mall, then heads to the roof where they see another survivor, Andy, who is stranded alone in his gun store, across the zombie-infested parking lot. The next day more survivors arrive at the mall and are let in. After some of the survivors start dying from zombie attacks and any hope of being rescued gone, the group decides to fight their way to the Milwaukee marina and travel on Steve's yacht to an island on Lake Michigan.
Day of the Dead (2008)
Directed by Steve Miner, the story is located in Leadville, Colorado, where the couple of Trevor and Nina find themselves in a town suddenly sealed off by military forces. People begin acting strangely and the dead come back to life, with the couple and the soldiers trying to escape.
Dan O'Bannon and John Russo's Living Dead spin-offs
There are currently two distinct franchises utilizing the Living Dead moniker. The first was Return of the Living Dead, which originated as a novel written in 1978 by John A. Russo. It was later adapted to a film by Dan O'Bannon, which spawned its own series of movies, with a total of four sequels. This could be seen more as a spinoff of Night of the Living Dead rather than sequels, as the first movie treats Night of the Living Dead as a movie that was based on real events.
Russo and producer Tom Fox planned to bring Return of the Living Dead to the screen offering O'Bannon the director's seat, he accepted on the condition he could rewrite the film radically so as to differentiate it from Romero's films. O'Bannon discarded Russo's script in its entirety and rewrote it, retaining only the title and changing the "rules" significantly. His alterations to the canon include the zombies' fixation on brains alone (whereas Romero/Russo zombies will devour any part of a living human), the ability to move rapidly and communicate (despite physical defects that would render such activity impossible), and the ability of 2–4–5 Trioxin to resurrect any deceased life form, regardless of how long the decedent has been interred. Although Russo and O'Bannon were only directly involved with the first film in the series, the rest of the films, to varying degrees, stick to their outline and "rules" established in the first film.
Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead series includes: The Return of the Living Dead (O'Bannon, 1985) Return of the Living Dead Part II (Ken Wiederhorn, 1988) Return of the Living Dead 3 (Brian Yuzna, 1993) Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis (Ellory Elkayem, 2005) Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (Ellory Elkayem, 2005) Return of the Living Dead (Steve Wolsh, 2026)
Then, in 1998, Russo went back to the original Night of the Living Dead to reshoot extra sequences into the film. This version, which was officially named Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition, added a subplot, alternate opening, and new score. Russo followed this with another Living Dead film, Children of the Living Dead. Finally, in 2026, Russo served as Producer on the newest Living Dead film, "Rebirth of the Living Dead" from prolific indie Filmmaker Dustin Ferguson. Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition (Russo, 1998) Children of the Living Dead (Karen L. Wolf, 2001) Rebirth of the Living Dead (Dustin Ferguson, 2026)
Romero's vs. O'Bannon's zombies
While the two kinds are similar in appearance, there are certain distinguishing details:
Infection Romero's original Night of the Living Dead explains that an unknown phenomenon causes re-animation of the brain. Instead of being spread from person to person, the phenomenon presents itself in any human that has recently died from any cause (except those that destroy the physical structure of the brain). The first animated corpses appear in many locations simultaneously, quickly reaching pandemic levels. Characters speculate about the cause of the phenomenon; suggestions at various times include a spaceborne virus, divine punishment, radiation from a satellite returning from Venus, or that "there's no more room in Hell". While bites from these reanimated creatures are uniformly lethal, by mechanics unknown, death by other means would have the same result, so a bite is not necessary. It is suggested in Day of the Dead that the immediate amputation of bitten limbs may prevent victims from dying, but while the treatment is attempted, its success is never conclusively demonstrated. In George Romero's original Day of the Dead idea, a person was to have his bitten arm amputated, but still return as a zombie. Survival of the Dead shows that, in the rare instance of a living person biting the undead, that person will become infected. Many characters in films (including George Romero himself) have referred to the bitten area as the "infected area" or an "infection".
The state of zombification seen in O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead series is induced by the chemical compound Trioxin, an extremely toxic substance found in a gaseous state at standard temperature and pressure. Depending on the film in the series, Trioxin zombies may or may not be able to contaminate living humans with Trioxin via bite. Very small amounts of Trioxin are sufficient to have full effect, and bodies need not be fresh to be re-animated. Both factors were illustrated in the first two films, wherein Trioxin seeped through several feet of earth to reach graves several decades old and animate the occupants (The Return of the Living Dead even depicted a near-skeleton coming out of its grave). If a zombie corpse is stored for too long in a sealed container, the decomposition process will generate noxious gases containing trace amounts of Trioxin, so the drum can only be safely opened in a sealed lab environment. The requirement of Trioxin exposure makes containment to a specific area or group of people somewhat easier than Romero's plague (though the extreme tenacity of the zombies may mitigate this advantage).
Memory Romero's zombies have very limited to no memory of their previous life. But they all remember how to walk, and how to use their hands for several tasks (such as striking or holding something or someone). They recognize many objects such as cars, houses and other structures, and they recognize the doors in order to enter them. As characters state in Dawn of the Dead, the zombies are in the mall since it was "an important place in their lives". They also kept the instinct of eating and biting. In Day of the Dead, the zombie dubbed 'Bub' is experimented on and trained by the scientist Logan and recalls how to use a razor, a telephone, and a book. When Capt. Rhodes walks in the room, Bub salutes him, fires an unloaded pistol at him, and later in the movie shoots Capt. Rhodes with a loaded pistol, going so far as to ensure it was loaded this time, as he remembered the previous gun not having fired. In Land of the Dead, the undead retained some memory of their past lives, allowing them to use tools they remember operating, and even display emotion, giving some of Bub's intelligence to other zombies.
The zombies in the Return of the Living Dead series retain their full memories as of their time of death, whether or not they were reanimated immediately or after long interment.
Intelligence