'Night of the Living Dead: Origins' finds its voices as director speaks

Jesse Corti, Danielle Harris, Bill Moseley, Joe Pilato, Alona Tal and Cornell Womack are lending their voices to “Night of the Living Dead: Origins.”

The 3D CGI re-imagining of the George A. Romero zombie classic is 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 of “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 voice work 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.”

Comments

[gifts for men]

I would say that was mentioned in “this is being remade without Romero’s involvement for the second time”. Romero wrote the 1990 remake but had nothing to do with the 3D version in 2006 or this one. So two unofficial, one official.

[John Pisciotta]

Ill bite.

[HorrorFatale]

Works for me, anything in 3D is all good.