Last weekend was Halloween. A night for creeps. An evening of shrieks. For some scream queen royalty, they got one of the more unpleasant kinds of frights. Richard Driscoll, who crowdfunded a sequel to the 1985 punk zombie classic Return of the Living Dead, published the new film on his website. This came to the surprise to the original cast, who were attached to star in the follow-up. Instead it seems Driscoll opted to use AI to generate the film, leaving fans and alumni more aghast at him than the flesh eating ghouls.

“This is not what we signed up for,” says Beverly Randolph on the Caffeinated Horror Dude podcast. “We got to get something out there because there’s so much hate on us right now.”

Due to some erroneous paperwork, George A. Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead was released directly into the public domain in 1968. Because of this, it enabled any director and studio, including Romero himself, to develop ‘sequels’ to the series regardless of legal claim. One of the more adored successors is Return of the Living Dead, where a gang of punk teenagers take refuge in a morgue after a melting brain eater escapes containment. It has since stood on its own as a cult classic, generating its own sequels. This includes Brian Yuzna’s grotesque Return of the Living Dead 3, which I mostly bring up because it scared the shit out of me as a kid.

” Unlike other fan projects, this one had a large portion of the original cast involved, with stars Randolph and Linnea Quigley acting as producers.

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