George Romero Working On THE ZOMBIE AUTOPSIES, An Undead Economic Thriller

You have to give George credit, though - he tries to do new things with his zombie movies. He did a found footage zombie movie (the truly horrible Diary of the Dead) and a zombie western (the underloved Survival of the Dead). Now he's looking at doing a medical thriller zombie movie based on the book The Zombie Autopsies (I guess Autopsies of the Dead is a little redundant).

George explained the way that the book actually ties in with the modern economic crisis to io9:

A friend of mine recently wrote a novel called The Zombie Autopsies, and it's about an isolated group of people doing autopsies on zombies during the zombie apocalypse and trying to figure out what the hell caused this. They come upon this discovery.

The scientists discover that this is not a naturally occurring virus, they deduce that it must have been created by somebody. And they later discover that it was created by people who were trying to topple the economy. So that's a unique way in to talk about the economy, but it's not my story. Steven C. Schlozman is the guys name, he's a Havard Psychologist who has somehow been swept into the zombie craze and is writing zombie novels.

It's very tense and very medically correct. This guy's a doctor, it's all about being medically correct. I think about it like the first Hammer Frankenstein film, which was all about very graphic scenes of brains floating in blood and things like that. I want it to be perfectly accurate, almost shockingly so.

Another ironic thing: Night of the Living Dead wasn't intended to be all that political - Duane Jones was cast because Romero liked him, not because he was looking to make some statement about race (by the way, I'm not discounting political content in Night, because there definitely is a political aspect to it that comes just from the times in which it was made. I'm just saying that the film's biggest political statement ended up being accidental). Now Romero's zombie films are ALL political, with him saying as much in this latest interview.