Return of the Living Dead: A Modest Proposal

After Night of the Living Dead, co-writers George Romero and John Russo eventually went their separate ways, and both continued different branches from the Night of the Living Dead tree.

Romero made his own series of sequels - Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and Survival of the Dead. Russo wrote a novel, Return of the Living Dead, which he planned to adapt to film himself, although eventually, Dan O'Bannon wrote and directed The Return of the Living Dead.

Russo's novel was a direct sequel to Night and more horror based. O'Bannon ignored the novel and went in a more comedic, spoof direction. Night of the Living Dead, the movie asserts, was based on a true story, but the facts were altered. The "true" story is the Darrow Chemical Company developed a gas called Trioxin-245 to spray on marijuana plants, but when the chemical seeped into the morgue of an Army hospital, it reanimated the dead bodies. 

The movie begins with this chemical leaking in a medical supply warehouse in Louisville and eventually into an adjacent cemetery, resulting in a horde of zombies that feed on local punks, paramedics, and cops before the military drops a nuke on everything.

These zombies are virtually indestructible. Not even shooting them in the brain will put them down. They retain their human memories and can talk, but they are driven insane by the "pain of being dead" and feeling their bodies rot. The only thing they can do to alleviate the pain is eat brains. 

The Return of the Living Dead arrived in theaters in 1985 and did well (performing better than Day of the Dead). Success meant sequels. We got The Return of the Living Dead Part II, which mostly rehashed the same plot but toned the violence to a more cartoony level, made the main character a kid, and dispensed with the more adult elements (no Linnea Quigley dancing nude on a tombstone).

Brian Yuzna made the worthwhile Return of the Living Dead III, which went in a more dramatic direction involving a doomed romance, but aside from the gas and brain-eating zombies, it feels separate from its forebears. A further pair of sequels, filmed simultaneously, debuted on the SyFy Channel in 2005, but let's not talk about them.

The Return of the Living Dead is a genuine horror-comedy classic. The sequels, for the most part, were cheap cash-ins, although Part 3, while not hitting the heights of the original, certainly has merit.

If I had been asked to make a sequel to The Return of the Living Dead, here's the direction I would have gone. I would have played up the pseudo "true story" aspect of the original. I would start by having the characters ask each other, "Have you seen that movie, The Return of the Living Dead? It was based on a true story."

I would do to Return what Dan O'Bannon did to Night. I would say it was based a true story, but now, with this sequel, here's the real version of what happened, and from there, launch into the new story. 

I'm not sure what exactly I'd change, but for any subsequent sequels, I'd keep the trend going. The previous movie lied; here are the real facts. And that would open the series to change as needed while retaining the same attitude and style, so the movies still felt connected.

What do you think? Would this idea have worked? Do you have another idea? Or do you prefer what the series ended up doing?