George A Romero’s unfin­ished final work is back on track

George A Romero passed away in 2017, a trail of prac­ti­cal-effects vis­cera in his wake, hav­ing left the zom­bie genre he pop­u­lar­ized changed for­ev­er. At that time, he was in the pre­lim­i­nary stages of devel­op­ment on one last walk­ing-dead hor­ror­show, the post-apoc­a­lyp­tic epic Twi­light of the Dead – a project his sad death left unfin­ished, until now.

The Hol­ly­wood Reporter ran an arti­cle over the week­end announc­ing that Romero’s swan song will be posthu­mous­ly com­plet­ed by a cre­ative team includ­ing his wid­ow, Suzanne Romero. As the THR bul­letin details, she and three oth­er screen­writ­ers have pre­pared a shootable draft of the late great’s script, and now seek a suit­able direc­tor to real­ize this untold vision.

Dystopi­an-zom­bie cross-pol­li­na­tion has spiked in recent years, exem­pli­fied most recent­ly with Zack Sny­der​‘s lat­est film Army of the Dead (its title an homage to Romero, who got Sny­der start­ed in this busi­ness with the remake of Dawn of the Dead). But in Twi­light of the Dead, there ​“still may be hope for human­i­ty,” as the teased log­line attached to the THR item goes.

This new install­ment in Romero’s ever-expand­ing __ Of The Dead Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse fur­ther com­pli­cates an already-jum­bled up time­line; Twi­light will tech­ni­cal­ly be a direct sequel to 2005’s Land of the Dead, tying up the as-of-now unre­solved fate of the self-aware zom­bie king­pin Big Dad­dy. The two install­ments that fol­lowed Land, Diary of the Dead and Sur­vival of the Dead, don’t count, con­sid­ered to be cre­ative­ly com­pro­mised works by Romero due to bud­getary constraints.

At this junc­ture, the fate of this once-thought-lost work now depends on the replace­ment direc­tor the sur­viv­ing Romero and her pro­duc­tion team hires. What’s Eli Roth up to these days, anyway?