Movies
Full Casting Announced for ‘Night of the Living Dead: Origins’
The cast is filling up for Zebediah de Soto’s Night of the Living Dead: Origins as the Hollywood Reporter announced that Jesse Corti, Danielle Harris, Bill Moseley, Joe Pilato, Alona Tal and Cornell Womack are lending their voices to the 3D prequel of George A. Romero’s groundbreaking zombie film from 1968. You can read more about the project and about each star’s character details by reading on.
The 3D CGI re-imagining of the George A. Romero zombie classic being directed by newcomer Zebediah de Soto. Simon West and Simon West Prods. president Jib Polhemus are producing.
The story again follows a group of humans trying to stay alive during a zombie attack.
Corti (“Heroes”) is voicing a news reporter, and Harris (“Halloween II”) plays a woman who held her family together forced to come to grips with its absence.
Moseley (“Carnivale”) is reprising the role he portrayed in a 1990 live-action remake “Living Dead”: a Wall Street-type with an expense account attitude.
Pilato, who appeared in 1978’s “Dawn of the Dead,” is voicing Harry Cooper, a blue-collar worker who lives for his injured daughter, and Tal (“Supernatural”) voices his wife, Helen, who blames her husband for all the ills of the world.
Womack (“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”) is a no-nonsense New York cop.
The movie is being animated with the voicework in the early stages
De Soto said some of the casting is “a nod to Romero fans. Horror is a genre and zombie movies are a subgenre that people have been following for years and years.”
De Soto, whose background is in the commercials world, said he grew up in a household where his mother forbade him to watch television, fearing it would lead to smoking and drinking. When he finally saw his first horror movie, Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” it made such an impression on him that it created an obsession.
“When you’re not allowed to watch TV and then you see this movie where this broadcaster speaks about this (zombie) disaster, it translated as so real to me,” he said.
De Soto also said nearly all zombie movies end up in an enclosed environment, be it a house or a mall, and he aims to change that. He’s counting on the CGI technology that he and his New Golden Digital effects company is developing.
“I wanted to make this look like a living Monet; it’s expressionism,” De Soto said. “It’s going to be the first zombie movie played on a epic scale. This is the ‘Empire of the Sun’ of zombie films. … I lived through the L.A. riots and saw the city on fire; I remember seeing people running, people getting pulled out of cars. And with 9/11, these images have been ingrained on people of my generation. I just thought that is the way it would really be, a lot of chaos.“
Up next from The People’s Joker director Vera Drew is a found footage movie titled Trandemic, and it’s being made possible by the Transgender Film Center Found Footage Feature Fund.
Deadline notes in a report this afternoon that Vera Drew’s Trandemic is the very first recipient of the award, created to “support micro-budget feature filmmaking by transgender creators.”
The outlet explains, “Applications were first evaluated by the Transgender Film Center and partner representatives, with finalists then presented to Duplass Brothers Productions, who selected the winning project.” Vera Drew will receive a $25,000 cash grant to bring Trandemic to life, with the project being described as a “cosmic found footage horror-comedy.”
Deadline further details, “The award package also includes creative advisory support from Duplass Brothers Productions; mentorship with Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice; a final script review from Duplass before production; development guidance from Kevin Nicklaus of Sandstone Artists; 15 days of in-kind post-production services from Aesthetica Post, including conform, color grading, light VFX, DCP delivery and festival-ready masters; a $37,000 post-sound package from Aura Sound and Color; and festival submission waivers from Transgender Film Center and partner festivals, including Fantastic Fest.”
“I’m so wildly stoked and honored to be receiving this grant from the Trans Film Center and Duplass Brothers Productions,” Vera Drew said in a statement. “Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass reinvented the found footage genre with the Creep franchise, so their support means the world to me as I gear up to do the same with my sophomore feature film Trandemic.”
“There were so many incredible projects submitted to us, I wish we could have picked every one of them,” Mark Duplass said. “But here’s the good news … everyone who built their projects to be made at a $25k budget? The hard part is already done. They can now go out, crowdfund it, and bring it to the world at a time when auteur-driven found footage horror is having a real moment.”