Night of the Living Dead: Origins

Lets talk a little about Zebediah de Soto's Night of the Living Dead: Origins. As a lover of horror flicks, I'm certainly a fan of George A. Romero's 1968 classic tale of a group of people hiding in a farmhouse from bloodthirsty zombies. I've seen and enjoyed most of the 'of the dead' movies that followed, but de Soto's venture to create a re-imagining of the movie that started it all sort of freaks me out. Most of my worry is because of the 3D CGI component of the movie. CGI zombies just don't seem as scary or real to me. But we'll see.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, joining the previously announced Mos Def as Ben, Danielle Harris as Barbra, Joe Pilato as Harry Cooper, Alona Tal (Jo on "Supernatural") as Helen Cooper, Bill Moseley as Johnny (reprising his portrayal of the same character in Tom Savini's 1990 NOTLD remake), and newcomers Erin Braswell as Judy and Mike Diskint as Tom will be Jesse Corti ("Heroes") and Cornell Womack (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen).

"I wanted to make this look like a living Monet; it's expressionism," de Soto says. "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."

De Soto says 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.”

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.

De Soto, whose background is in commercials, told the entertainment that he grew up in a household where his mother wouldn’t let him to watch television. When he finally saw his first horror movie, Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” it made a huge impression on him.

“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.

Here's some artwork from the movie: