Living Dead is a blanket term for various films, series, and other forms of media that all originated from, and includes, the seminal 1968 horror film Night of the Living Dead conceived by George A. Romero and John A. Russo. The loosely connected franchise predominantly centers on different groups of people attempting to survive during the outbreak and evolution of a zombie apocalypse.
After the film's initial success, the two creators split in disagreement regarding where the series should head, and since the film was in the public domain, each were able to do what they liked with the continuity of their projects. Romero went on to direct five additional Dead films focusing on society as the living dead begins to evolve, while Russo branched off into literary territory, writing Return of the Living Dead, which was later loosely adapted into a film of the same name and have its own franchise, and Escape of the Living Dead.
The term may also refer to the reanimated human corpses that feast on the flesh and/or brains of the living seen in the films.
Read more about Living Dead: George A. Romero's Dead Series, Dan O'Bannon and John Russo's Living Dead Spin-offs, Unauthorized Sequels and Remakes, Living Dead in Other Media
Famous quotes containing the words living and/or dead:
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)