At this year’s Comic-Con@home, SyFy dropped the first trailer for its new series, Day of the Dead—the ultimate love letter to the godfather of zombies, George A. Romero.
Somehow I missed the news last February that SyFy had greenlit a TV reboot of George A. Romero’s classic 1985 zombie horror film, Day of the Dead—just before the widespread onset of a deadly global pandemic, no less. And somehow the series managed to get into production despite all the shutdowns. SyFy dropped the official trailer for the ten-episode series during a panel at Comic-Con@home, with a planned premiere date this October, just in time for Halloween. You can watch the full 45-minute panel here.
The original Day of the Dead was the third in a trilogy of films that launched a franchise, preceded by Night of the Living the Dead (1968) and its sequel, Dawn of the Dead (1978). Romero originally envisioned Day of the Dead as the Gone With the Wind of zombie movies, but disagreements with the studio over a proposed R-rating—Romero wanted the film to be unrated—meant that the director ended up with half his original budget (about $4 million). He was forced to scale back his vision substantially, so much of the film takes place in a secure underground bunker in the Everglades, where tensions rise between the scientists and soldiers on-site.
Romero has said that Day of the Dead is his favorite within the franchise, although it has the lowest “fresh” rating (83 percent) on Rotten Tomatoes of the initial trilogy. It only grossed $34 million worldwide (mostly from VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray releases), but it still left its mark on popular culture. The pseudo-civilized zombie “Bub” made a cameo on a S4 episode of The Walking Dead as one of the “walkers” encountered in a railroad tunnel. And in Stranger Things S3 (set in 1985), the teens all sneak into a mall theater to watch an early screening of Day of the Dead. Three more films in the franchise were released in 2005, 2007, and 2009, and Night of the Living Dead II is currently in production, slated for a 2022 release. Three of the original cast members from Day of the Dead will reprise their roles in that film.
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