The Unfinished George A. Romero Projects We Never Got To See
With seemingly more outlets than ever scrambling to get their meathooks on the Next Big Franchise, it's a peculiar truth that George A. Romero's catalogue of unproduced works exists at all. The cinematic mastermind is arguably responsible for a solid slice of the pop culture pie from the last twenty years, having gotten the ball rolling on just about anything with the suffix "of the Dead" in the title. His contributions to the horror genre are legion: "Night of the Living Dead," "Dawn of the Dead," and the whole shambling lot, all the way up to 2009's "Survival of the Dead." There was "Monkey Shines," and "The Crazies," and the "Creepshow" movies and "Tales from the Darkside." The guy was a once in a generation talent that took a sack of cow intestines and a handful of friends with nothing to do after dark anand turned them into one of the most enduring parables in show business history.
Following the filmmaker's death in 2017, swathes of his work took up residence at the University of Pittsburgh thanks to the contributions of his wife, daughter, and former business partner. Included in the mountain of props, memorabilia, and photographs were a pile of unproduced screenplays and movie treatments — more than 100, according to The Void. Now, some of these unrealized potential classics are finally being made available to fans of one of the horror genre's greatest contributors.
A new collection of Romero scripts has fans feeling like it's Christmas
According to Benjamin T. Rubin, the George A. Romero Archival Collection's curator, the University of Pittsburgh currently contains over 100 boxes of papers written by Romero, with the majority of them made up of scripts "Perhaps the most surprising and interesting part of the collection is the sheer amount of unproduced projects," Rubin told The Void in a recent interview. "There are 114 and counting."
"Some examples are a haunted house film called 'Before I Wake' that almost made it to production in the early 2000s," Rubin continued. On the more bananas end of the spectrum, there was also "a treatment called 'Monster Mash' that would have been a television series about a M*A*S*H* style field hospital with the Universal classic monsters."
All that, and at least 112 more, can currently be perused at the horror fan's leisure by visiting the George A. Romero Archival Collection's website via the University of Pittsburgh, where the complete contents of the archive are described in riveting detail. It's a fascinating look into the creative works of one of pop culture's most formative minds.