SYFY have dropped the trailer for its new reimagining of George A Romero’s Day of The Dead. The new series will arrive on SYFY in October, and will be a brand new series based on Romero’s classic zombie movie of the same name. Revealed as part of [email protected], the trailer brings a first look at what can be expected from the highly anticipated long-form take on the story, and it appears to be an absolute blast of blood, gore and homages to the master of the genre.
Day of The Dead TV series follows six strangers attempting to fend off zombie hordes in the first day of an undead apocalypse. Like many other popular franchises to feature the walking dead, the series will once again prove that there is nothing that can bring otherwise unlikely allies together than the threat of being eaten alive by some rotting corpses. The series stars Keenan Tracey, Daniel Doheny, Natalie Malaika, Kristy Dinsmore and Morgan Holmstrom, while Steven Kostanski acts as executive producer and directs the first quartet of episodes.
“Well, I can say honestly that the on-set experience for that show was such a scrappy low-budget adventure that it definitely felt like what I imagined Romero felt like on the ’70s movies, where it was a lot of really thinking on our feet and seeing how we can stretch our budget as much as possible,” Kostanski told ComicBook.com previously. “It’s a very low-budget affair but we really pushed hard to have as many crazy gags and stuff as possible. I can’t explicitly give any details on plot or anything like that. It’s not really my place to divulge those secrets just yet, but I can say that I had a blast shooting and I had a great time working with the showrunners. I really feel like we’ve made something that really captures the spirit of the era of Romero’s movies. So I hope people like it.”
While the team have worked on a limited budget, it doesn’t particularly show in the trailer footage, with some of the zombies looking like The Walking Dead‘s undead monsters, and buckets of gore that could rival The Evil Dead series. Being on SYFY, the series was never going to be given an unlimited budget to work with, but as Kostanski noted himself, Romero didn’t have a huge budget to work with on his earlier Dead movies. Sometimes not being able to rely on the expensive special effects that the likes of Amazon and Netflix are throwing into their original material, means that more time is spent working on the story, characters and produce something better for it.
The original movie was the last part of Romero’s zombie trilogy that began with Night of The Living Dead and continued through Dawn of The Dead. While there have been a number of sequels, remakes and reboots, this is the first time a series has been developed from the premise. While Romero’s movie focussed on a group of scientists and soldiers trying to learn about their enemy, it looks like the series will center on a regular group of youngsters simply trying not to end up a zombie chow. Day of The Dead arrives on SYFY in October.