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ON THIS DAY ON HORROR - August 16th

"THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD" released in 1985

Just suppose that Night of the Living Dead was actually based on a true story told to filmmaker George A Romero by a disgruntled soldier who explained that the US Army was experimenting on biological warfare (nicknamed 2-4-5 Trioxin), that unintentionally resulted in reanimating the dead? That's the hypothesis for John A Russo and Dan O'Bannon's cult 80's classic, The Return of the Living Dead!

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At a medical supply warehouse in Louisville, warehouse foreman Frank (James Karen) shows new employee Freddy (Thom Mathews) around, sharing gruesome stories of the origins of the "specimens" they supply. Frank then decides to take Freddy down to the basement to show him military drums that accidentally wound up in the basement of the building; drums that contain the medical remains of an experiment gone wrong, and may have inspired the movie Night of the Living Dead. While messing around with the barrels, Frank and Freddy accidentally release the toxin in the drums, that knocks them both unconscious. Meanwhile Freddy's friends, Spider (Miguel Núñez), Trash (Linnea Quigley), Scuz (Brian Peck), Suicide (Mark Venturini), Casey (Jewel Shepard), Chuck (John Philbin) and girlfriend Tina (Beverly Randolph) decide to surprise Freddy at work, but instead decide to wait for him in the cemetery across the street. Freddy and Frank wake up and discover to their horror all the medical specimens in the warehouse have come to life, including a very agitated  reanimated cadaver they manage to lock in the walk-in freezer. Calling their boss Burt (Clu Gulager), the three of them manage to destroy the cadaver's brain, but the cadaver keeps moving! Taking the body to the neighboring mortuary, Burt convinces the weird mortician Ernie (Don Calfa) to burn the remains in his crematorium. All this does is release the gas to into the air and bringing a toxic rainfall that starts to resurrect the dead in the graveyard that Freddy's friends are partying in. The acid rain forces the friends to seek refuge in the warehouse, and arrive just in time to save Tina from the contents of the mysterious barrel (a decomposed zombie, known as Tarman). Fleeing again, the group is seperated when the zombies start to attack, with Tina, Spider, and Scuz going to the mortuary (where they join Burt, Ernie, Frank and Freddy), while Chuck and Casey run back to the warehouse. As Frank and Freddy grow sicker from the effects of the toxin and zombies besieging the mortuary, the remaining survivors desperately search for a way to contact the military to their situation - not knowing that that is the worst thing they could possibly do!

Burt Wilson: I thought you said if we destroyed the brain, it'd die!
Frank: [referring to Night of the Living Dead] It worked in the movie!
Burt Wilson: Well, it ain't working now, Frank!
Freddy: You mean the movie lied?

Top:   Freddy (Thom Mathews) and Frank (James Karen) start to realize what

they've done, when they are attacked by a headless cadaver!;

Above:   Burt (Clu Gulager) discovers you should never sneak up on mortician

Ernie (Don Calfa)

After parting ways with George A Romero after the release of Night of the Living Dead, co-writer John A Russo managed to retain the rights to any titles featuring Living Dead while Romero was free to create his own series of sequels. Russo began writing a story that was a direct sequel to Night of the Living Dead, taking place ten years later and dealing with a trio of sisters being menaced by looters on the countryside when the zombie plague mysteriously begins again, at the same time that Romero was preparing to make Dawn of the Dead. The rights to the script were purchased by independent producer Tom Fox, whose initial plan was to have Tobe Hooper direct the film in 3D (3D film-making at that point was experiencing a revival with earlier 3D horror films Jaws 3D and Friday the 13th Part 3). When Hooper backed out of the project to direct Lifeforce, Fox approached screenwriter Dan O'Bannon to direct, who agreed on the proviso he be allowed to rewrite the script with more comedy, employing "splat-stick" style morbid humor and eccentric dialogue. Ultimately John A. Russo received story credit despite the only similarity to his original treatment being the title! Fox then joined with Hemdale executive producers John Daley and Derek Gibson to finance the film. Daley and Gibson would later try to contact George A Romero several times to act as a name "executive producer", but Romero did not respond.

The part of Burt was originally offered to Leslie Nielsen (who wanted too much money), then Robert Webber (who hated the script), then they tried Scott Brady, but was too sick to take the role and actually died a year later. Fox and O'Bannon finally went with Clu Gulager right before the first day of filming, with Gulager coming into the role "cold" having missed out on the two weekes rehearsal the other actors got (interestly, the lead pipe that Gulager uses in the movie was secretly replaced with a rubber by the crew, as O'Bannon was getting concerned with Gulager's frequent angry outbursts on set!). According to Jewel Shepard (playing Casey), O'Bannon met her at a strip club where she worked as a stripper. He initially wanted her in the role of Trash, but she was at the time fed up with being naked, and then suggested to O'Bannon that she could audition for the role of Casey (the party girl, since she liked to party). The role of Trash would go to scream queen Linnea Quigley. O'Bannon was originally supposed to play Frank and he wrote the part with himself in mind, but when James Karen came in to read for another part, O'Bannon was simply blown away and hired him on the spot.

TRIVIA:   Thom Mathews got his ear pierced for the role of Freddy since the character's description specifically called for one; he later found out he could've had a fake earring attached for the role.

Top and Above:   Freddy's friends Spider (Miguel Núñez), Trash (Linnea Quigley), 

Scuz (Brian Peck), Suicide (Mark Venturini), Casey (Jewel Shepard), Chuck (John Philbin) and 

girlfriend Tina (Beverly Randolph) decide to party in a cemetery!

Set in Louisville, Kentucky, although filmed in California, The Return of the Living Dead began production on July 4th, 1984, with cinematographer Jules Brenner using a Spanish name on the call sheets because he did the movie as a non-union job. During filming Jewel Shepard had tremendous difficulty with her "Go choke a chicken" line because she didn't know what the phrase meant. As a direct result of this, forty-five takes were done before Shepard finally said the line right. The scene where Tina falls through a broken step was done without Beverly Randolph's knowledge it was going to be done. O'Bannon had a false step put in while she was at lunch, then told her to do a test run up the stairs. She wound up banged and bruised as a result, and also the reason why Tina didn't get up immediately and run in the scene. The actors weren't the only ones to finish filming unscathed, with some of the zombie extras at least being paid more to eat real calf brains in the film. To his credit, O'Bannon didn't want the extras to do anything he wasn't willing to do himself and ate some raw calf brains first in front of them.

TRIVIA:   The gravestone to the left of the large one upon which Trash first performs her striptease has the name 'Archibald Leach' on it. This is the real name of the actor better known as Cary Grant.

Top:   Trash feels the need to dance naked on a grave stone in perhaps the most

memorable scene of the entire movie:

Above:   Trash eventually gets her wish, and is swarmed by "old angry men" and

torn apart!

Of course the most memorable scene of the entire movie is Trash's naked dance in the graveyard, with actress Linnea Quigley initially doing the entire sequence completely naked. However, producer Graham Henderson visited the shoot that day, and according to himself and others, threw a fit, yelling at O'Bannon that "You can't show pubic hair on television!". O'Bannon sent Quigley away and had her completely shaved, which coincidentally, Linnea herself found to be the most embarrassing part of the whole thing. Then they did another shoot, to which Graham Henderson cried out "Oh god it's even worse, you can see everything!". At this point they sent Linnea Quigley over to special make-up effects artist Bill Munz and production designer William Stout, where they made an alginate crotch piece, resembling the bottom of a g-string and glued it on. According to Linnea, this was a bit of a problem, since every time she had to go to the bathroom, they had to remove it. Henderson would not stop there; when noticing the word's on the back of Freddy's jacket read, "Fuck You", Henderson complained that the shot could not be used in case it was ever shown on TV, so O'Bannon made a second jacket that says "Television Version" instead (it can be seen in the TV version of the movie!).

Freddy: I can finally see, the one thing... the one thing that will relieve this horrible suffering.
Tina: What, Freddy?
Freddy: [turning into a zombie] A live... BRAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIN!

Top:   Puppeteer Allan Trautman, getting into his Tarman suit;

Above:   Tarman takes a bite out of Suicide's head!

The Return of the Living Dead was a critical and a moderate box office success when released. Dan O'Bannon claims he was surprised at how many women were in the initial audiences and said if he'd known he'd have such a large female following he would have shown Freddy (Thom Mathews) naked as well! Roger Ebert wrote that the film was, "not a great creative breakthrough, but it is a satisfactory ghoul movie, moving with precision from the funny opening scenes through the obligatory middle passages of pseudo-science, and on to the barf-bag climax... The ghouls in all of these movies perform more or less the same function. They shuffle inexorably toward the camera, drawn by their insatiable appetite for human flesh. The tasks of the living characters in the movie are threefold: (1) to attempt to destroy or control the monsters, (2) to flee the monsters in panic, and (3) to become the monsters." Return of the Living Dead also popularized the notion in the public conscious of zombies eating specifically brains (as opposed to simply flesh) - it is a popular misconception that George Romero invented this specific trait as part of his Night of the Living Dead series, though even he has emphasized that it was not his idea.

In an unprecedented move, a fan of the film started an internet campaign to get the movie released on DVD. Going beyond simple fan petitions, Michael Allred created a web page consolidating every bit of news relating to the film, and contacted many of the film's principals including the writer and director Dan O'Bannon. He went on to put O'Bannon in touch with MGM (the studio that owned the film) and work began on getting the film released on DVD in 2012. O'Bannon and others who worked on the film credited Allred and his campaign for getting the movie released on DVD.

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:   91%