In an exciting edition of Galactic Journal from 1985, George A. Romero, godfather of the zombie movie, details how he'd originally planned to cap off his ...of the Dead trilogy with a banger. 

"I had a script that literally was the end of the story," Romero said.

"It ended, and the dead stopped coming back to life."

That original script was fleshed out during a two-year writing period. The story involved zombie armies that now did the bidding of their human counterparts, engaging in combat as human proxies. The idea came out of the short story Romero wrote in preparation for Night of the Living Dead.

"When I first wrote the short story, part three of the trilogy was literally just a paragraph, and it all happened at the farmhouse. In the final paragraph of the story, the army comes over the hill and looks like another human army, only it turned out to be an army of zombies that was being in fact, controlled by a small human faction that had survived and had managed to dominate even this new and revolutionary society. That was the denouement to the original story."

As is true for so many creative endeavours, ultimately, money was the deciding factor in how this movie changed. Romero was locked into a three-picture deal with United Film Distribution Company, which agreed to finance Day of the Dead but under some pretty strict conditions.

"They said, 'Okay, we'll support that. But you have to, for that amount of money, deliver an R-rated picture. Or, we will spend 3 to 3 1/2 million and you do what was originally intended, which was to make a picture which we'll distribute without a rating.'"

So, Romero was forced to return to his script and rewrite it under the budgetary restrictions he'd been allotted. Instead of the grand finale he originally intended, Day of the Dead focuses on the beginnings of humans controlling their zombie counterparts. It's still a landmark horror movie, but it's fun to think about what could have been!