George Romero adapting THE ZOMBIE AUTOPSIES for next project

Movie The Walking Dead about 12 years agoby

George Romero has found his next zombie project. /Film reports that Romero is adapting Steven C. Schlozman's book The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse. The book follows a group of scientists as they perform autopsies on zombies after a zombie apocalypse.

Romero was recently interviewed by io9 and he talked about his next zombie movie:

This is Steve’s story, not mine. It’s more like The Andromeda Strain. 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.

Here is a description of the book from the Publisher’s Weekly review at Amazon:

Presented as the journal kept by a neuroscientist investigating the medical causes of zombiism, Schlozman’s clever debut shows that there’s still life left in the overworked horror theme of the living dead. Dr. Stanley Blum is already infected (as is two-thirds of humankind) with ataxic neurodegenerative satiety deficiency syndrome (ANSD)—the virus that makes flesh-eating zombies lurch and lunch—when he decamps to Bassas da India, an island overseen by the U.N., to vivisect captive zombies in the hope of isolating the pathogen before he succumbs to it. Schlozman makes the science both accessible and plausible. In lieu of a meaty plot, he provides a grim vision of zombie apocalypse and a surprise explanation for the virus’s origin. Printed as a handwritten diary and illustrated in gory glory with clinical drawings by Andrea Sparacio, this book is sure to be scarfed up by ravenous zombiephiles.

Romero also revealed that he had been asked to direct a few episodes of The Walking Dead by AMC. He liked the show and the comic, but felt no connection with the material:

I love the books, I haven’t seen any of the episodes. Listen I love Frank [Darabont], I know he’s done a good job. I love the books, I never watched any of the episodes because… my zombies are sort of my own. I didn’t want to be part of it. Producers called and said, “do you want to direct some of these,” and I said no. Because I just didn’t think it was me. I’ve been waiting to see the whole first season, which I missed because I’ve been traveling. I’ve been waiting to look at it, but I haven’t seen any of it.

I love zombies and am a super fan of Romero's zombie movies, so I am already planning on seeing this film. What are your thoughts on this new project?