Night of the Living Dead Sequel is Coming from Original Creative Team

Night of the Living Dead sequel is coming from the original creative team

Just because October’s over doesn’t mean the scares will stop coming. Now, with this year being the 50th anniversary of George Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead, what better way to celebrate than with news of an official sequel? According to Bloody Disgusting, the original writers, Romero and John A. Russo penned a direct sequel to the 1968 classic, and now Living Dead Media has unearthed the long-since unproduced script and plan to bring the film to theaters next year — with the original surviving writers and producers at the helm.

Though Night of the Living Dead launched five more zombie-centric stand-alone sequels, starting with 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, but this will be a direct continuation of the story that started it all. Given that Romero left behind multiple unused scripts, novels, and films after his passing in 2017, the fact that there’s a fully fleshed-out sequel that follows the groundbreaking original should be no surprise.

Related: Night of the Living Dead 4K Restoration Opens in New York this October

Night of the Living Dead was shot outside of Pittsburgh at a fraction of the cost of a Hollywood feature by a band of filmmakers determined to make their mark, Romero’s masterpiece is one of the great stories of independent cinema: an ultra-low-budget midnight hit turned box-office smash that became one of the most influential films of all time.

A deceptively simple tale of a group of strangers trapped in a farmhouse who find themselves fending off a horde of flesh-eating ghouls newly arisen from their graves, Romero’s claustrophobic vision of a late-sixties America (literally) tearing itself apart rewrote the rules of the horror genre, combined gruesome gore with acute social commentary, and quietly broke ground by casting a black actor (Duane Jones) in the lead role.