‘Return of the Living Dead’ Turned Romero’s Zombies Into a Really Good Joke

The Big Picture

• The Return of the Living Dead is a hilarious tribute to George A. Romero’s zombie movies, parodying the genre without making fun of it.
• The movie takes a more meta approach, turning Romero’s established tropes upside down and adding absurdity to the premise, creating scarier yet goofier zombies.
• The film was loosely based on a novel written by Night of the Living Dead‘s co-screenwriter.

Horror, like few other genres, can bring out intense emotion from its audience. The only other genre that comes close is comedy. One makes your heart race with fear, the other makes you laugh. Then there’s the combination of the two: the horror-comedy. When done right, they’ll have you in stitches while ripping you open at the same time. There have been some great ones over the years which take a lighter approach to classics that came before. Joe Dante‘s Gremlins was a chaotic wink to monster movies of the 50s. Tremors did the same. Scary Movie started out as an over-the-top parody of Scream. The Cabin in the Woods took on The Evil Dead and every “killer in the woods” trope.

Zombies are fertile ground for comedy, too. I mean, under the right lense, a stumbling, moaning person is pretty silly. Edgar Wright hit it on the head with Shaun of The Dead in 2004, as did Zombieland half a decade later. They are tributes to the past without making fun of it. No horror-comedy did it better, however, than The Return of the Living Dead. Not only was it a hilarious tribute to George A. Romero‘s zombie creations, but it also shares a creative connection to someone who was involved with Night of the Living Dead right from the start.

‘The Return of the Living Dead’ Writer John Russo Also Wrote ‘Night of the Living Dead’

George A. Romero is the credited mastermind behind the modern zombie, but he’s not alone. Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead was co-written by John Russo. As Russo tells it, he was actually the one who came up with the idea of the dead coming back to life and feasting on human flesh. In a 2018 interview with Cryptic Rock, Russo described the process. He and Romero worked for a small film company called Image. They were trying to come up with ideas for a horror movie, when Russo said it should begin in a cemetery. Russo began working on an idea about aliens who ate human flesh, while Romero came to him with a story about a girl being chased through a cemetery after her brother is attacked. When trying to figure out the plot, Russo suggested combining ideas but turning the villains from aliens to the walking dead. Russo revealed:

“I said, ‘Why don’t we use our flesh-eating idea?’ He said that was good. So that is how they became dead people after human flesh. We don’t even reveal that in the movie for a long time. You don’t see them eating anybody until after the young couple are blown up in the truck.”

Russo did not return to work with Romero for Dawn of the Dead in 1978. Nor was he involved with the second sequel, Day of the Dead, which would come out in 1985, the same year as The Return of the Living Dead. That didn’t mean he left the world of film and horror behind. Russo wrote and directed the sex comedy The Booby Hatch in 1976 and the horror exploitation film Midnight in 1982. He also took the time to write a novel published in 1977 that was set in the Night of the Living Dead universe and took place 10 years after the events of the film. He titled his novel Return of the Living Dead.

‘The Return of the Living Dead’ Was Originally Going to Be a Serious Horror Film

The Return of the Living Dead novel is not like the film moviegoers would see a few years later. It was a serious project — a pulp novel about a group of zombie apocalypse survivors holding out inside a farmhouse. Sound familiar? The novel has its hit-and-miss moments, but Hollywood still noticed, despite the flaws. They sought to turn The Return of the Living Dead into a film, and it was decided that Dan O’Bannon would write the screenplay and direct. Now, O’Bannon had never directed a movie before, but he was still a very respected name. After all, he had written the screenplay for 1979’s Alien, based on a short story that he also wrote. With a huge credit like that to his name, it showed that he knew what it took to create a serious film.

There was just one problem. The distributor didn’t want a serious horror movie. Russo told Cryptic Rock that O’Bannon’s original script was stark, dealing with cults, rapists, and murders, everything that would happen during a real epidemic. Russo said:

“The distributor said straight horror is dead, and you have to turn it into a comedy. Well, straight horror is never really dead if you come up with a good idea. (Laughs) At that time, it was out of my control. I liked what Dan did, though. He was a good guy, and he did a hell of a job – so did all the people in the movie.”

‘The Return of the Living Dead’ Became a Spoof of George A. Romero’s Zombie Movies

George Romero’s original zombie trilogy is a trio of dark films. There are not a lot of laughs to be found, especially in that first film, where everyone dies. Night of the Living Dead might have been more than a horror movie, as it accidentally explored racism by casting a Black man (Duane Jones) as the hero, but it was no comedy. The Return of the Living Dead could have been a disaster, but the changed direction ended up being a blessing. Rather than this new movie being a clone of Romero’s work, it parodied it but without making fun of it. Even Romero saw that, when in an intro for the movie on the Mystery Channel, he said it was “a spoof on my zombie films” and these “zombies sort of resemble mine in that they also eat flesh and terrorize a small town. However, this story offers a slightly different twist and uses 80s clichés, humor, and teen angst to appeal to the audience.”

The Return of the Living Dead leans into all of that, but it starts by also mentioning Night of the Living Dead, with the character of Frank (James Karen) telling a new young employee at the medical supply warehouse, Freddy (Thom Matthews), that Night of the Living Dead was based on a true story and Romero was only allowed to make his movie by changing the facts. Now, one of those zombies from the supposed real life incident is sitting in a barrel in the basement. When that barrel bursts, letting out a toxic gas, it turns everyone in its wake into zombies and raises the dead. That in itself is the setup for a scary movie, but The Return of the Living Dead leans into the comedy, spoofing Romero’s movies while keeping his ghouls terrifying.

This movie knows the absurdity of its premise, so it takes a more meta approach like Scream would do a decade later. It takes the tropes Romero established and turns them upside down into the unpredictable. Romero’s zombies are slow, so these run. Romero’s zombies are silent, so these speak, begging for brains and asking for more police and paramedics when they attack a group of first responders. Romero’s zombies can be taken down with a headshot, so these keep coming. The gang of teenagers, including Linnea Quigley as Trash, are strange over-the-top stereotypes. At every turn, where Romero may have went darker and more serious, The Return of the Living Dead goes more punk and silly with headless zombies, skeletons with impossible eyeballs, and characters who whine while they fight. These zombies, so difficult to defeat, are at once scarier than Romero’s and yet goofier. Even the film’s dark ending, with the U.S. government bombing the town to nothing, is funny as we listen to the whistle of the bomb falling as if we’re in a cartoon. The Return of the Living Dead is a love letter to George Romero, one that knew there is a fine line between funny and frightening when it comes to the concept of walking dead people. Instead of tip-toeing the line, it decides to plunge right over the edge.

The Return of the Living Dead is available to stream on Tubi in the U.S.

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