George A. Romero’s Final Living Dead Film Finds Director

Twilight of the Dead, the long-awaited Living Dead film whose script treatment was co-written by the late George A. Romero, has finally found its director in horror/thriller filmmaker Brad Anderson.

Roundtable Entertainment, the production company behind Twilight of the Dead, announced the news today, although it first broke on THR. The company didn’t reveal other specifics beyond the fact that Twilight of the Dead, which they’re calling “the seventh and final chapter of the Dead series,” is expected to go into production later this year.

Anderson is best known for movies like Session 9, the 2001 psychological horror flick that has since become something of a cult classic, as well as the 2004 Christian Bale thriller The Machinist and 2013 thriller The Call, starring Halle Berry. Joe Knetter, Robert Lucas, and Paola Zelati wrote the script from the treatment by Romero and Zelati.

In a statement released with the announcement of the news, Anderson, unsurprisingly, expressed his enthusiasm for the series, saying Romero’s Night of the Living Dead “may have been the first real horror movie I ever saw.”

“Its shock value, its keen social relevance, and even the means by which it was made were all hugely inspirational to me,” he continued. “This too is a zombie movie in which limbs fly and heads roll, but one that is also about social transformation, one that asks the question: What is it to be human? It is also a horror movie with ‘heart’ and, dare I say, hope.”

Romero’s 1968 seminal film Night of the Living Dead, of course, is considered to be one of the most influential horror movies of all time, and Romero himself is looked at as the architect of the modern zombie genre. He’d go on to direct five more movies in the series, the most recent being Survival of the Dead in 2009.

The decades-long franchise was stalled, however, when Romero died of lung cancer in 2017. But in 2021, his widow Suzanne Romero revealed that she was meeting with directors to develop Twilight of the Dead, based on the treatment Romero was working on before he passed away.

“This is the film he wanted to make,” Suzanne Romero told THR at the time. “And while someone else will carry the torch as the director, it is very much a George A. Romero film.”

And while it took a couple of years to land on Anderson, it seems like Twilight of the Dead may be seeing the light of day soon enough.

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Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.