Last weekend was Halloween. A night for creeps. An evening of shrieks. For some scream queen royalty, they got one of the more unpleasant kinds of frights. Richard Driscoll, who crowdfunded a sequel to the 1985 punk zombie classic Return of the Living Dead, published the new film on his website. This came to the surprise to the original cast, who were attached to star in the follow-up. Instead it seems Driscoll opted to use AI to generate the film, leaving fans and alumni more aghast at him than the flesh eating ghouls.
“This is not what we signed up for,” says Beverly Randolph on the Caffeinated Horror Dude podcast. “We got to get something out there because there’s so much hate on us right now.”
Due to some erroneous paperwork, George A. Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead was released directly into the public domain in 1968. Because of this, it enabled any director and studio, including Romero himself, to develop ‘sequels’ to the series regardless of legal claim. One of the more adored successors is Return of the Living Dead, where a gang of punk teenagers take refuge in a morgue after a melting brain eater escapes containment. It has since stood on its own as a cult classic, generating its own sequels. This includes Brian Yuzna’s grotesque Return of the Living Dead 3, which I mostly bring up because it scared the shit out of me as a kid.
In 2024, Driscoll, who operates his own no-budget streaming service “DragonFLIX,” launched an Indiegogo page for “TRASH’s REVENGE Return of the Living Dead Universe.” Unlike other fan projects, this one had a large portion of the original cast involved, with stars Randolph and Linnea Quigley acting as producers. It also threw in Quigley’s fellow Sorority Babe in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama Michelle Bauer and the Oscar nominated Eric Roberts, who has seemingly been in everything except The Living Dead.
From what Quigley described, this movie was intended to be a blend of Sunset Boulevard and Rocky Horror. Trash, Quigley’s character who was last seen as a nudist zombie, had become a Norma Desmond recluse, relishing in the glory days of her brain eating spree. This sounds incredible. But after some confusion and radio silence between the cast and director, this incredible movie did not come to be.
Last Halloween night, Driscoll pushed out The Return of the Living Dead: Aftermath, an almost entirely AI generated heap of rotting flesh. The results won’t surprise you. Robotic line delivery. Nonsensical sequence of events. Object impermanence. Everything’s wet. Everyone looks shocked. At one point the video just flips around like you’re watching on a phone someone dropped. And while the Return cast didn’t film any of this footage, their likenesses are peppered throughout.
“It turned out to be a fiasco,” says Quigley. “I warned him, “Whatever you do, don’t do any AI, because people don’t like it, the fans don’t like it.””
Living Dead alumni, even those who weren’t attached to this film, have spoken out against Aftermath. They seem most concerned about the existing and continued use of their likeness, given that Driscoll has seemingly pivoted ‘Trash’s Revenge’ into an additional project. Randolph encourages those who provided any funding to ask for a refund through their credit card company. While Romero’s original film was public domain, Return was not. Randolph also encourages Amazon, who bought MGM in 2022, to take legal action.