phantom limb /ˈfan(t)əm’lim/ n. an often painful sensation of the presence of a limb that has been amputated.

Welcome to Phantom Limbs, a recurring feature which will take a look at intended yet unproduced horror sequels and remakes – extensions to genre films we love, appendages to horror franchises that we adore – that were sadly lopped off before making it beyond the planning stages. Here, we will be chatting with the creators of these unmade extremities to gain their unique insight into these follow-ups that never were, with the discussions standing as hopefully illuminating but undoubtedly painful reminders of what might have been.

For this entry, we’ll be taking a look at Road of the Dead, meant to be the newest film in George A. Romero’s long-running zombie saga and announced in May of 2015 with this intriguing logline: “The story is set on an island where zombie prisoners race cars in a modern-day Coliseum for the entertainment of wealthy humans.” Strangely though, it has yet to enter production all these years later. Billed as George A. Romero Presents Road of the Dead and written/to-be-directed by Romero friend and collaborator Matt Birman, Road has seemed to be inexplicably idling in development hell for the last couple of years – a strange fate for a project that initially commanded a great deal of excitement and anticipation.

Mr. Birman joins us for this chat to discuss why the film hasn’t yet been made, why it may no longer be an official continuation of Mr. Romero’s Dead films, and the likelihood of fans ever being able to see this tale of the road-racing undead.

Noting that Road was to be a chronological continuation of 2005’s Land of the Dead, Mr. Birman reveals that it was the final moments of that film that inspired the core idea behind Road. “It’s how I got the idea for the pitch. The last shot in Land, when Big Daddy turns to the camera and roars as the trucks take off and the fireworks go off. I kept saying, ‘The whole thing is an extension of Bub. The intelligence, the learned memory, using tools. Bub almost talks, and salutes. Then we’ve got zombies using tools and firing guns. So I just said, ‘Why don’t they just get in the car and follow them wherever they’re going?’ They’ve been following them for the whole movie. They made it through the water, they made it to Fiddler’s Green. The next logical thing for them to remember how to do is drive. Both George and Peter [Grunwald], his partner, thought it was hysterical. But ‘Nah, it’ll never fly. Why would they drive?’ I was like, ‘Well, why are they using bats?’ George thought it was a great idea, but he could never figure out why they would be driving. He threw me a biscuit by putting a zombie on the ferry in [2009’s Survival of the Dead, Mr. Romero’s final zombie film]. The zombie that drives in Survival was an in-joke between us saying ‘Let’s give Matt his driving zombie.’ That guy on the ferry is remembering what “P R N D” is on the gear shift. And George was like ‘There! Done with it now.’”

Nevertheless, Mr. Birman notes that he continued mulling over his idea. “I couldn’t get it out of my head. As it evolved, I wanted to bring back a military element, a tie into Day as to … ‘Which social commentary are we making here?’ I got a little inspiration from The Dark Knight, when Chris Nolan said ‘No, this has nothing to do with Occupy.’ But no, it totally does. Bruce Wayne is a one-percenter. I was in London, and I walked past an Occupy tent in 2012 near St. Paul’s Cathedral, and they all looked like zombies in these tents. And I just went, ‘I think we hit on something.’

“I went to Ponce, Puerto Rico in 2012 and wrote it. [Romero] read it, and didn’t really like it. He didn’t like the style I wrote in, in terms of screenplay writing. He didn’t like some of the lingo in the narrative. But he loved the idea of the story. He just still couldn’t figure out ‘Why are they driving?’, but he liked my idea of a scientist trying to come up with a way for us to live together, as opposed to curing it. And then I wrote a second draft in 2016, and that’s when he perked up. He loved it, he just wanted funnier jokes. So I said ‘Well, isn’t it time you joined the party?’ He took a pass at some of the dialogue, and making funnier jokes. He did a dialogue pass, and then we had one big story point that he wanted to change, that I eventually changed, but no. But he never did a full draft of the script, so to speak. But that’s the point where we put his name on it, so it said ‘Written by Matt Birman and George Romero.’ Ended up biting me…”

Big Daddy (Eugene Clark) in ‘Land of the Dead’ (2005)

Before we get to how that choice ultimately came back to haunt Mr. Birman, let’s take a look at Road’s story: set in “the darkest days of the Zombie apocalypse”, Road of the Dead focuses on a Canadian island safe haven whose inhabitants are protected from the undead, but are sadly subject to the harsh laws and astronomical taxes of its tyrannical leader, Brigadier General Leon “Copperhead” Styles. Also on this island are our heroes – Dr. Harriet Jane and her mentor, Hal Cain. The duo are working on creating an antigen that will help dampen the basic zombie’s need for human brains. Not a cure, exactly, but something that will help humans and zombies live in some sort of peace. Jane tests her antigen on a supply of “dead heads” that are supplied to her by Copperhead, who uses the remaining captured zombies to participate in drag racing events. That’s right, the General runs a drag strip as a latter-day Coliseum, entertaining the wealthy masses who gamble and thrill to the inventive carnage they witness on the track. Of course, this being a Dead film, things go terribly wrong and a number of zombies are unleashed on the island’s populace, forcing Cain and his Special Ops trained daughter Julia to attempt an escape just before one final, fateful race draws them back…a race that will determine not only their fate, but that of the entire world.

“We came up with the Ben Hur idea, that it’s entertainment for the wealthy. I started cross-breeding it with Jewison’s Rollerball, making it about one-percenters trying to stay entertained while they try to survive in the last safe place on earth, while a couple of neurologists work on…not a cure, but a way for us to live with [zombies].” And what of Land of the Dead? Would that film and its finale have factored into Road’s plot? Mr. Birman reveals that the bulk of the remaining characters from Land would not have survived. “The zombies follow the Dead Reckoning [the heavily armed and armored vehicle our heroes use in Land]. Everybody dies. I kept one character alive, who is in the Road of the Dead screenplay, though I won’t reveal who that is. We knew we couldn’t use any of those names, because they were all studio property, because Land was a studio picture. So I couldn’t even use the name of the truck or the characters’ names. I wasn’t going to get Simon Baker or Asia Argento. So all of that went out the window. I was stuck on the idea that the truck makes it to an island, the last safe place on Earth. That island has moved from Puerto Rico to Canada, for production purposes. Other than that, it’s a chronological continuation that skips past [the standalone reimaginings that were] Diary and Survival.”

Mr. Birman also gives a little more detail on the film’s wild, racing zombies premise: “I don’t mind it being revealed that they’re not actually hopping into cars and driving them. They’re being corralled into the cars, and they’re on a track. All they remember how to do is press the gas petal. That’s why it’s mayhem. They’re not actually driving. They’re just entertaining. The cars are up on jacks. They get in the car, the wheels spin, they drop them off the jacks, and away they go. It’s a gambling game. So if people are picturing Mad Max with zombies chasing humans in cars … there’s a bit of that at the end, but it’s just a moment in the film when one of the hero zombies takes a truck.”

Bub (Sherman Howard) in ‘Day of the Dead’ (1985)

Speaking of “hero zombies”, this fan had to ask – is there an equivalent to the more evolved zombies like Day’s Bub or Land’s Big Daddy in Road? “There is. It’s a mix of both. That’s one of the things that fascinated me about Big Daddy. It’s taking Bub to the next level. It’s all a follow-up on the same thing, that they’re just going to get more and more evolved. The best driving zombie [in Road] is a mishmash of those two characters, and is transgender. She’s the best of the best. The whole idea behind her was that it was Big Daddy taken to the next level.” As fascinating as the character sounds, Mr. Birman stops just shy of revealing her name. “The character name? No! It’s too good. It’s a play on words. It’s a surprise sight gag in the movie. We see her name on her racing outfit. And then we come around the back to find out her last name, and that’s where the gag is. I don’t want to give that away. But when you see that zombie, you’ll know who it is.”

Mr. Birman goes on to note a few other fun facts about the screenplay: “I use a country club golf course as a 1%-er metaphor, so of course a Hillbilly Zom gets into trouble in the rough, so to speak.” Another noteworthy zombie is “Skelly”, featured on the film’s original sales artwork. “The zombie in that old poster is so tall that he sticks out above the roof of his old rag top, so his demise is particularly gruesome.” In addition, it sounds as though Mr. Birman had done a bit of wishful fancasting for his film in the writing stage: “One of the three super strong women that are our heroes is modeled after a certain famous NASCAR/Indy driver, and she is the race team leader. She gets dined on, of course, which creates a human/zom romance. Sort of! Very hard to explain, but not Warm Bodies! We never got her on board the project, but…hopefully GoDaddy reads Bloody D.”

In addition to these fun bits, Mr. Birman reveals that Road would have also featured several nods to the previous Dead films. ‘“There was the easter egg from Land, for sure. And I wanted Savini to come back. Because you just can’t kill that character. And I wanted Greg [Nicotero] to do a funny thing somewhere. Because he cameoed in Diary. And he’s Greg! There were a bunch of planned easter eggs, and a zillion in-jokes. There are jokey easter eggs referring to my own onscreen (and off-) roles in Land, Diary and Survival, as well as mine and G’s feelings about the Dawn remake and Rez Evil 4, both of which I worked the stunts on. I can also tell you that the opening scene is a play on the opening in Dawn, in that a certain guy with headphones on in the opening sequence reappears as a zombie. There’s a bunch of those. I mean, how could you not? There’ll be even more when I get to it.”

Mr. Birman sums up the story by discussing its thematic concerns: “It’s not a groundbreaking story in terms of heroes and bad guys, and what the zombies represent. It’s basically about Occupy. There are some old ideas now because so much time has gone by, that our bad guy will now be … everybody’s gonna think it’s Trump, but it wasn’t in 2012. I had a black NASCAR driver. I wrote it back then, and look at what happened with this guy Bubba [Wallace, regarded as being one of the most successful African American NASCAR drivers]. I got lucky with a couple of things. And I’m gonna keep all of that, I don’t care if people say ‘Oh, it’s Trump.’ Because it all makes sense, and it’s all fitting. As humans, we all just keep making the same mistakes, so why not keep making movies about them?

“So that’s the great scheme of it. It’s the Coliseum, it’s two best friends pitted against one another, it’s a doctor trying to find a serum, and the zombies are just entertainment. Until they get out, of course. It went through a whole bunch of different stages, and when we arrived at something we both agreed with, [George] said ‘Okay, now you can put my name on it.’ And that’s where we made our mistake…”

‘Road of the Dead’ concept poster

It’s at this point that Mr. Birman describes just exactly why we haven’t yet gotten this entry in the Dead saga. “It did pick up a bunch of interest in 2015, 2016. We picked up a couple of cool producers who thought we could get it made for $2-3 million bucks. And then [George] got sick, and we put it on hold. But when Montreal came up … we did not tell anyone about his diagnosis. [And he passed away] about two weeks before the festival. So they called, and sort of put us front and center because of his passing, and it was bittersweet. I had fifty meetings, and – even if he’d been with me – we probably would’ve had maybe ten. The movie got picked up at Fantasia. We had three producing entities. We had Elle Driver, if you’re familiar with them. Sales agents and managers. We were just about to go out to cast, and the whole thing fell apart. It’s not dead, no pun intended.”

So what happened here, if the film was so close to getting made? “The production teams weren’t strong enough to deal with management, so to speak. The bottom line is that they couldn’t agree to numbers. The numbers that his previous management wanted were astronomical. George and I wanted it to be a small little movie, with maybe one star. Because he passed away, everyone saw it as – ‘Now it’s going to be this humongous movie!’ And it’s not! The genre doesn’t lend itself to that. It wasn’t intended to be that. It was intended to be a look back at Dawn and Day, and in that style. That ‘not fancy, not Land of the Dead’ style. Just campy fun, like the pie sequence in the mall.

“For the last year or two, I’ve resolved myself to it being that it’s not going to have ‘George Romero Presents’. We can’t use George’s name. We basically ran up against a roadblock that none of my producers could deal with. There was a huge kerfuffle over the fact that it’s my script, and I wrote it, but both George and I made the mistake of putting his name on the script in an effort to get it picked up. So we sort of pitched it as a ‘by both of us’, but he never had any legal [rights] to it. That caused a problem when he passed and people started to show real interest, because it could possibly become a legacy thing. He just wanted to, in his words, ‘help Mattie get his thing made’. That’s all it was really intended for, and the idea was just to use his name as ‘George Romero Presents’ and make him an executive producer. But there was a big kerfuffle over whose script was it, and nobody believed us.

“[George] wasn’t interested [in the legal aspects of getting the film made]. He just wanted to get it made. We saw Road as a stepping stone to a couple of other non-zombie projects that we really wanted to do. So we didn’t give Road the weight, legally … we didn’t protect ourselves, in terms of how to get it off the ground in the smoothest way possible. Not until he passed away did it get all that interest in Montreal.

“But it may have enough clout when, if the publicity is correct, everyone will know what the movie is. It’s possible. It would have to have a much more powerful entity behind it to deal with the legal stuff with his estate. Or if not powerful, at least creative. But the problem I ran into is – people that were willing to go that far and deal with the estate were then suggesting that I wasn’t the guy to make it. That they needed a bigger name director. I was like, ‘I know I’m not a big name director. I only have one feature under my belt, and twenty-five years of directing second unit, and I’m a five time Best Director winner, but does it matter that I was his pick? Does anybody care that it was my project, that he wanted me to direct?’ It’s like the managers and producers forgot how much George loved the stuff that I did direct for Land, Diary, and Survival, and that’s where his faith in me came from. So there’s that to hang on. But it’s very hard for me to just say ‘Y’know what? Give me a bunch of money, and go ahead and make it.’ Because he would kill me and he’d have fucking hated that! It was sort of our baby. I’d rather do it in my own backyard with a phone than have somebody start to try to reimagine it. I don’t want to lose the ideas that we both dug together. I don’t want to make it sound like it was all rosy. He had some ideas I didn’t like, and we’d negotiate. ‘No, his name should be this!’ They weren’t big, giant story point things. We were both freaks for Apocalypse, and Brando, and we loved Rollerball, and we thought it’d be a hoot.

“It’s possible [that it could still get made as ’George Romero Presents’], but somebody would have to emotionally give in, and say ‘Look, this is not about money. This is about his legacy, and his fans.’ It’s a horrible way for it all to stop. I want to continue the story, even if it’s just for one more movie.

“I had a bunch of support from a bunch of people, but it all sort of went to shit. Except for Greg! Greg Nicotero was still with me at the end. He was like, ‘You can use my name if it helps, Mattie!’ We’ll see what happens. It’s certainly not dead. I had a couple of really good meetings in December and January, but COVID shut everything down.

“I’m still going to make it! It’s just going to have a different name, and it’s gonna be pitched as the movie I wasn’t allowed to make. There are a whole bunch of projects that we had, scripts written, and it’s stuff I can’t go through with not using his name because it’s just this massive legal battle with them. Which is a shame, because he was absolutely not that guy. He was not interested in that shit.”

‘Road of the Dead’ sales poster

While fans wait to see what ultimately becomes of Road of the Dead, it is worth noting that there is a Jonathan Maberry-penned comic book prequel titled Road of the Dead: Highway to Hell that is currently available, which fills in the events between Land and Road. “I got a call from [comic book publisher] IDW a few years ago. They wanted to do a comic, which they did. Road, chronologically, comes after Land. That’s what the comic was about. IDW asked ‘What happens between Land of the Dead and Road of the Dead’. I said ‘I dunno. They go to Canada.’ I gave them a two page thing, and said ‘Here, go with this. Here are some characters from the script that are kind of cool.’ And they filled in the blanks of how Dead Reckoning makes its way to Canada. It borrows some stuff from the screenplay, mostly Harriet Jane herself.” Though the comic has been out for some time, some Romero fans may have missed it on the stands due to his name being nowhere on it. “There’s a tiny little Pig Dreams copyright, which is my company. But we didn’t do any kind of publicity or put anything out there to let fans know that this is actually tied to the movie, for legal reasons of course.”

Beyond this comic book prequel, one wonders what the future of the franchise was meant to look like beyond Road. Was this film intended to set up further installments in the Dead saga? “There’s a very big sight gag at the end of Road that gives away what the next movie would be. If they’ve remembered how to drive, it’s the next thing they’re gonna remember how to do. We used to joke about another trilogy. ‘Look, you did three, and then you sorta did three, we gotta do three more.’ When I joked about that second film, he’d say ‘Forget about it! No!’ But yeah, there’s a possible trilogy. If I don’t get Road made, that’s never gonna happen. But there’s a lot of fun if it does. There was an eye to continue.”

Given the resurgence of interest in Mr. Romero’s work of late, spurred on in no small part by the recent publication of his epic zombie novel The Living Dead (co-written with Daniel Kraus) and the promise of a lost Romero film due for release soon, it strikes this writer as strange that we might be denied his final word on the cinematic monster he gave birth to a half century ago. With Road, we have a project boasting a wonderfully insane story, timely themes, and a could-be-iconic transgender motor racing zombie antihero. More importantly, this project was personally touched by Mr. Romero himself. In doing so, he passed the zombie legacy baton to Mr. Birman for safekeeping, and that should in no way be taken lightly (or dismissed altogether, as it were). One need only look at this project’s short history to see what Mr. Romero’s own wishes were for this film, given his efforts. Forgive my editorializing, but George A. Romero Presents Road of the Dead is a film that should exist as just that – presented under the name of the man who inspired it and gave it his blessing. Anything shy of that, no matter its ultimate quality, will undoubtedly rob both fans and the memory of Mr. Romero of this one last extension to his signature franchise.

In finishing up our talk, Mr. Birman gives his final thoughts on Road of the Dead and its future. “It’ll eventually get made, whether it’s a $4 million movie or a $1 million movie. Whether it has stars or no stars. But it’s always gonna be, for me, a continuation of his legacy. It just won’t be promoted as such. So I’m gonna just do it on my own, and you’ll see the dedication at the end. Finally, fans should know the title is now Wolfe Island, only because I had a blood and whiskey promise to G that I could and would never make an ‘…of the Dead’ without him. But I sure as fuck will make this for him. I miss him terribly.”

Very special thanks to Matt Birman for his time and insights.

Matt Birman and George A. Romero, 2016