On July 16, 2017, the horror genre said goodbye to one of the world’s most iconic filmmakers, George A. Romero. As fans mourned many came to the realization that we would never see another book or film from the godfather of the zombie genre. As three years passed, the world had no idea that a new body of work from Romero would surface.
After the filmmaker’s death his widow and agent stumbled across a partially written book. After reading it, they reached out to New York Best Seller Daniel Kraus, the author who had teamed up with Guillermo del Toro to write both The Shape of Water and Trollhunters which both earned adaptations. Kraus set out to finish Romero’s novel The Living Dead.
We asked Kraus about the process of properly capturing Romero’s vision.
…studying all his films, screenplays, interviews, interviewing people who knew him, long talks with his wife, then reading critical analysis of his work. Finally, I got from his wife a list of stuff that he liked, the movies he liked, the music that he liked, and I studied that so that I could be inspired by what inspired him.“
Kraus described The Living Dead to us, saying, “it’s Romero’s final word on zombies from the man who created the modern concept of the zombie, fifty years after he made Night of the Living Dead. It follows several groups of people for fifteen years, starting the first day of the zombie apocalypse. It then covers the period that he made the movies. His movies cover about six years of zombified America. The Living Dead covers that time and picks up with the last of Romero’s movies.”
The Living Dead is finally set to be released on August 4th.
