A buried manuscript from the Night Of The Living Dead director was brought back to life

Just like the generations of zombies he helped inspire, the most recent novel from late horror legend George A. Romero was once buried but has been reborn. Romero, who died in 2017, wrote and directed the Night Of The Living Dead series, which also included films such as Dawn Of The Dead, Day Of The Dead, and Survival Of The Dead. 

According to a new interview with The New York Times, Ben Rubin, who oversees the Horror Studies Collection at the University of Pittsburgh (side note: sick job), found Romero’s unfinished manuscript in an unassuming container when the horror pioneer’s papers were donated to the library. As it stood, the piece, titled Pay The Piper, was a 348-page, undated printout containing very few explanatory notes and no sense of an ending. (Based on the type of paper Pay The Piper was printed on, Rubin estimates it was written somewhere in the late ’90s or early 2000s.)  “It was hard to read that much, and not get a payoff,” Rubin said. The writer-director had also kept the manuscript completely hidden. The horror archivist had never heard of it, nor had Romero’s widow, Suzanne Desrocher-Romero. Still, Romero clearly cared about the sprawling story, which follows “a young girl as she fights a monster haunting her impoverished Louisiana hometown,” according to NYT.

After finding the manuscript, Rubin brought it to author Daniel Kraus, who had helped turn an unpublished Romero story into the novel The Living Dead in 2020. Kraus then traveled to Louisiana for research to rework the manuscript and give it a proper ending. “I had to study what he’d written for clues about where he was going,” Kraus said. “And I had to think about George’s perspective: How would he feel about this decision? Does it fit into his philosophy of life and death?”

Unlike much of Romero’s previous work, Pay The Piper has nothing to do with zombies. His loved ones and admirers, however, are happy the world will finally get to see more of the author’s “diverse interests,” according to Desrocher-Romero. “His excitement is tangible in his prose, because he was doing something different,” Kraus added. “The Living Dead, as good as his manuscript was, is a book George probably felt he had to write. And Pay The Piper was the book he wanted to write. It’s just filled with his own idiosyncratic enthusiasms.”

In this project and other posthumous releases, Desrocher-Romero preaches respect. “You have to tread softly—you can’t be exploitative, but you need to shine a light on the man’s talent,” she said. This isn’t the first time she’s faced this ethical dilemma. In 2020, Romero’s elusive 1973 film The Amusement Park was restored, and Desrocher-Romero says a new zombie film called Twilight Of The Dead is set to go into production soon, from a manuscript Romero was working on before he died. The director also left over 100 unfinished films and TV projects waiting in the archive for their own time to be unearthed.

Pay The Piper is available now.