The following notes on The Return of the Living Dead (1985) were written by Josh Martin, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison. The Cinematheque will present a 40th anniversary screening of The Return of the Living Dead on Friday, July 4 at 7 p.m. The screening will be at the Cinematheque’s regular venue, 4070 Vilas, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!
By Josh Martin
“Let me ask you a question, kid,” inquires Frank (James Karen), the grizzled-yet-playful old-timer at Louisville, Kentucky’s Uneeda Medical Supply warehouse, “did you see that movie, Night of the Living Dead?” Frank is taking Freddy (Thom Matthews), Uneeda’s young new punk on the block, on a tour of the warehouse when he suddenly initiates a discussion of George A. Romero’s zombie classic and the “true” tale behind the 1968 film. “What really happened,” Frank stresses, was a convoluted scheme involving a chemical spill, hidden by the government, with all the details changed when Romero adapted the story into his nightmarish vision. As the old man recalls, the hazardous bodies were captured by the U.S. Army and accidentally shipped to Uneeda, where they remained in sealed tanks in the basement for nearly two decades. “Leak?” Frank scoffs when pressed by his concerned new colleague, “these were made by the U.S. Army corps of engineers,” loudly smacking the tank to prove its sturdiness. Of course, the pressurized container immediately unleashes a torrent of gas, reanimating Uneeda’s cadavers and kick-starting the apocalyptic chain of events that unfolds over the next 91 minutes.
In this brief prologue, director Dan O’Bannon immediately primes the viewer on what to expect from The Return of the Living Dead (1985), establishing the archly comic sensibility, nihilistic attitude toward authority, and sly reflexivity that define this meta riff on Romero’s classic. Some clarification is required here: Return is not an official chapter in the Romero-directed series of sequels, which includes Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), and Land of the Dead (2005). In an interview for Christian Sellers and Gary Smart’s extensive history of the franchise, Night co-screenwriter John Russo notes that Return originated prior to production on Dawn in 1978. “[Romero and I] read each other’s scripts,” Russo recalls, “and I gave him the right to pursue financing for Dawn of the Dead and to call it a sequel and he gave me the right to pursue Return of the Living Dead without calling it a sequel.”
Russo’s script eventually became a book, the rights to which were purchased by producer Tom Fox. Following this deal, the team encountered several years of developmental false starts, highlighted by Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) director Tobe Hooper’s lengthy attachment to the project. Enter Dan O’Bannon, best known prior to Return for co-writing John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974) and Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). As he emphasized in a 2002 interview, O’Bannon “didn’t want to make [Russo’s] script” for fear of duplicating Romero’s work on his ongoing franchise. Without any legal or logistical barriers in his way from Russo, O’Bannon rewrote the film completely. What emerged from O’Bannon’s reconfiguration is a kooky offshoot of the official franchise, creeping toward the parodic without fully abandoning the grisly horror and trenchant political bite of its inspiration.
In the aftermath of the prologue’s unfortunate accident, the film follows Frank, Freddy, and Uneeda owner Burt Wilson (character actor Clu Gulager) as they deal with the implications of this chemical leak. As night falls on this July evening, our trio frantically make a bad situation worse, enlisting mortician Ernie (Don Calfa) to incinerate the reanimated evidence. That temporarily works – until a rainstorm sends the crematorium smoke careening back down onto a local cemetery, where Freddy’s roving crew of punk friends are hanging out. “Do you ever fantasize about being killed?” muses the crimson-haired rebel Trash (Linnea Quigley). “Do you ever wonder about all the different ways of dying? You know, violently?” For Trash and her friends, fantasies of death soon become reality as the cemetery transforms into a minefield of reanimated beings, with everything from decrepit skeletons to freshly buried bodies rising up in pursuit of the punks.
Romero’s film continues to be a guiding force throughout – not just for O’Bannon, but for the characters in this reference-laden retooling of undead lore. Night of the Living Dead is initially treated by our heroes as a roadmap to survival, despite all evidence to the contrary. During their moment of mutual panic, Burt asks his colleagues, “In that movie, they destroyed the brain to kill it, is that what they did?” When our protagonists find that even removing the cranium doesn’t solve their problems, Freddy cries: “You mean the movie lied?!” The zombies in Return, meanwhile, are not just brainless carnivores, impulsively gnawing on whatever’s in front of them. Instead, O’Bannon’s undead are clever creatures, actively seeking to fulfill their insatiable appetites by disguising themselves as cops or otherwise duping our frightened characters. In one of the film’s most memorable moments, a zombie grabs a radio from an ambulance and makes an earnest plea to the operator for a late-night snack: “Send… more… paramedics.”
Despite the outlandish hijinks and winking allusions, there’s still plenty of real-deal horror in this high-concept genre hybrid. Infected by the toxin, Frank and Freddy’s slow decomposition is genuinely harrowing throughout the film, capturing the sweaty, clammy, nightmarish onset of rigor mortis as they face the inevitability of their demise. Indeed, while the general fatalistic attitude is part and parcel of the film’s confrontational punk rock aesthetic, the nuclear anxieties gestured to in the final act feel far from ironic or performative, presenting a chilling, government-approved annihilation that disturbs O’Bannon’s off-kilter world.
Yet even when confronted with gruesome scares and a grim outlook, O’Bannon’s Fourth of July extravaganza (the film famously begins at 5:45 PM on July 3rd) indulges in the pleasures of its riotous atmosphere. The soundtrack is a selection of prime punk rock needle drops from the era, highlighted by The Cramps, the Jet Black Berries, and, most importantly, 45 Grave’s “Party Time” emerging as the film’s de facto anthem as droves of zombies rise out of the muck. A modest hit at the time of its release, the film continues to grow as a cult classic thanks to its rowdy energy and breakneck pace, remixing the narrative tenets and Romero-initiated conventions of the subgenre into something singular. Four decades later, O’Bannon’s zombie party still rages on.