Night of the Living Dead: Greg Nicotero to direct film about the making of George A. Romero classic

There are several horror films where the making of the movie was so interesting that it’d be worth making a movie about. The making of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre could be the foundation of a great movie. (And might be. Christopher Garetano has been hoping to make such a movie, with the title South Texas Blues, for a long time, and Ambitious Entertainment has optioned the film rights to Gunnar Hansen’s memoir Chainsaw Confidential.) You could make an incredible movie about the making of The Evil Dead… but who could be cast as Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell? Another awesome movie could be made about the making of the original Night of the Living Dead. And Greg Nicotero is setting out to do just that.

Deadline reports that Nicotero and his company Monster Agency Productions are teaming up with Jimmy Miller’s company Mosaic to get the Night of the Living Dead movie off the ground. They have secured all the necessary rights and are working with Suzanne Desrocher-Romero, the widow of Night’s legendary director George A. Romero. Nicotero and Miller will be producing the film alongside Brian Witten of Monster Agency and M. Riley of Mosaic. And now they’re searching for a writer.

Nicotero knew Romero for decades. He visited the set of the original Creepshow while it was filming, and went on to work in the effects department on Romero projects like Day of the Dead, Creepshow 2, Monkey Shines, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and Survival of the Dead. These days he’s an executive producer on The Walking Dead and has directed thirty-nine episodes of the show. He’s also the creative supervisor on the Shudder series version of Creepshow. He says the idea to make a movie about the making of Night of the Living Dead struck him while he was attending a memorial for Romero, who passed away in 2017.

(Romero and his collaborators) really had no experience. One of the actors was the makeup artist. It was this bunch who’d shot a couple commercials, sitting around saying, ‘Hey, we should make a movie.’ And someone in the group said, ‘Yes, let’s make a horror movie. They always make money.’ I love that spirit of a group of people getting together who had no real idea what they were doing and fumbling their way through. They found this rickety old farmhouse in Pennsylvania. One of the interesting things to me is, when you watch the movie, it has this sense of film noir because of the way the lighting is. A lot of that is, they just didn’t have money to afford a lot of lights. So they created a very unique lighting style for a lot of scenes, which played into the motif of what Night of the Living Dead is about. Even when they struck the prints to distribute, they used cheap film stock, so there was a lot of contrast. Everything that was black went black and everything white went really white. That added to this weird noir film vibe of, what’s going to come out of the darkness and get me? It was a perfect storm of events with a group that loved working together and rolled up their sleeves.”

Moments in Nicotero’s film that recreate scenes from Night of the Living Dead will be shot in black and white, while the rest of the movie will be in color. Because “you have to be able to see things like how they melted chocolate to serve as the blood.” Nicotero said,

I put George in the same category as Tobe Hooper or Wes Craven — these young maverick renegade filmmakers who were bucking the system. Back then they said, ‘You can’t show that, it’s too gruesome’ or, ‘You can’t show that, it’s offensive.’ Meanwhile, with the time period, and the U.S. being at war and the social upheaval, they were like, ‘You can’t tell me what I can show. I’ll show whatever the f*ck I want to show.’ The result of that was Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, all these really stark, horrific horror movies. George was one of the first people to buck the system. When people said, ‘You’ve got to move to California, you have to be in Hollywood,’ he said, ‘No I don’t. I have Hollywood right here.’ He was loyal to his crew, to his town, and he continued to make all of his movies in Pittsburgh. That was another way of George saying, ‘I’ll do things the way I want to.’ Jimmy and I wanted to celebrate him, and also our home in Pittsburgh where he made his movies.”

George A. Romero is my favorite genre filmmaker and the original Night of the Living Dead is the movie I have watched more times than any other, so I’m thrilled to hear there’s going to be a movie made about Romero and the making of his classic feature debut. I trust that Greg Nicotero is going to make something special with this one.

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