John A. Russo

What begins as a simple visit to a gravesite soon escalates into a night of sheer terror when bloodthirsty zombies suddenly begin amassing everywhere. Will they survive?

Louisville, Kentucky There is a new employee in a medical supplier company, Uneeda, which says that "You need it --- We got it". It provides universities with corpses so that students can learn, and for experiments. There are also dead animals' corpses, for vets. It's the 3rd July 1984, 17:30 Eastern Daylight time. In the lab, Frank (James Karen) will stay an hour more to teach Freddy (Thom Mathews), the new employee the tricks of the trade. As it's important that corpses have good teeth, skeletons usually come from India. Burt Wilson (Clu Gulager), the boss, leaves. It's the day before Independence Day. There is a human corpse in the freezer. Frank shows Freddy the prosthetics and half dogs. Frank tells Freddy how the army forgot some caskets with living dead inside. Apparently, there was a real incident which inspired George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, something about a chemical substance, Trioxin 4-5, which returned dead bodies to life in the morgue. When the army solved the problem, they didn't know what to do with the remaining corpses and sent them to Uneeda by mistake. Soon, they forgot to reclaim the living corpses from the medical supply company Uneeda. The Darrow Company, the one which invented and lost control of the substance, threatened Romero with a lawsuit if he told the truth to the public. Darrow should have gotten the living corpses, but they only wanted to hide them from the public eye. Freddy gets impressed and frightened, almost panicky. Linda, Frank's wife, calls him to talk about dinner. Frank is going home soon, but first, he offers to show Freddy the corpses, all wrinkled behind the glass. Frank cleans the glasses and hits the containers: a green gas spills out, leaving Frank and Ernie unconscious. Immediately, the butterflies, the half dogs and the hooked corpse come to life. California, 16:00 hours. An army officer, Colonel Glover (Jonathan Terry) arrives home late. His wife Ethel Glover (Cathleen Cordell) complains that he's to be available all the time. He's expecting the chaos to erupt some time or another. It's clear that he is waiting for the living dead to appear, although they may never do so. Ethel complains that the radio equipment interferes with the oven. Meanwhile, Suicide (Mark Venturini) is a punk who drives all his friends around. He's violent and a bit crazy. Because of a row, they end up outside Uneeda. Freddy is at work and they want to hang out with him. Back to Uneeda, Frank and Freddy wake up. The wrinkled corpse (Terrence M. Houlihan) has disappeared. Frank and Freddy kill again one half of the dead dog which is now wishing for dog brains. The hooked corpse starts banging against the door, and Frank calls Burt, the boss. At the cemetery, red-haired Trash (Linnea Quigley) starts getting turned on thinking about the most horrible way of dying. She gets hot and starts dancing naked - wishing for old men to eat her alive. Tina (Beverly Randolph) is jealous of Trash's body, so she tries to diminish it. At Uneeda, Burt is worried about getting sued by Darrow Co. and investigated by the government. They open up the door of the freezer, let the corpse (Allan Trautman) out and cut him into pieces. The undead is still undead, and destroying his brain doesn't seem to be enough. We can read the thoughts of the undead body. They go to the crematory of the morgue Ernie Kartlebrunner (Don Calfa). He's the owner of his own business, Resurrection Funeral Services. At the cemetery, Suicide wants everybody to follow the punk way of life. Some of the punks notice Frank and Ernie taking the thinking corpse away, wondering if Freddy is one of them. It's not. Frank, Ernie and Burt interrupt an autopsy. Ernie takes some coffee. He explains how to break rigor mortis. Burt asks Ernie to burn the living corpse down and to keep the secret. Burt admits that there are not dogs in the bags. Out from a rubbish bag, there it pops a moving arm which attacks Ernie. While Burt tells Ernie the story, we come back to some of the punks. Meanwhile, Suicide is hitting on Casey (Jewel Shepard). It's almost 22:00, when Freddy finishes work. Another of the girls is anxiously waiting for him. Tina walks out of the cemetery and goes to the medical supply company. Meanwhile, Ernie says that the big favor will have to be returned, and is pissed off about the arm which tore his red trousers. Ernie says that the heart will be the difficult part, as it's a hard big muscle. Burt doesn't even want the ashes to survive. The fire seems to do the trick, but through the chimney, ashes and dust mix with the air and the clouds. Immediately, a storm breaks out. It doesn't rain down, it pours down. It's a kind of radioactive rain. Tina gets inside the Uneeda building, still searching for Freddy. Trash, Suicide, Scuz (Brian Peck), Spider (Miguel A. Núñez Jr), Chuck (John Philbin) and the rest of the gang run to their car. The rain falls down over the local cemetery. It's like acid rain. They start fighting and bickering among each other because Suicide's car won't start up. A weird smoke comes out from the crematory. Ernie checks that all parts of the body are dead. Burt hugs him, and tells him that he owes him big time. Both Frank and Freddy feel sick, weak, about to throw up. They blame the gas which knocked them out. Frank throws up. Frank wants to see Linda. Burt calls for an ambulance, and says that there are two poisoned patients. Inside Suicide's car, Trash is still naked. They start hearing the moans of the zombies, longing to dig themselves out and eat brains. At Uneeda, Tina finds mayhem and Freddy's cap. She goes down the stairs into the basement and stares at the open casket, which smells horribly bad. The original corpse goes after Tina's brains. She falls down the stairs and imprisons herself within a room. The zombie tries to open the box. All the gang come to the rescue of Tina. The zombie opens up Tina's hiding place and eats Suicide's brains. Apparently, they taste like chicken. Only Spider is left to try to hold the door close. Paramedics (Drew Deighan & James Dalesandro) arrive. Freddy and Frank are trembling with cold, their tongues orange. Burt doesn't want to phone the Army until the next morning. Neither of the paramedics can hear the beat of the patients' heart. The gang keeps on searching for Freddy. Zombies sprout from everywhere, while the storm becomes a flood. Trash is left behind and is eating by the zombies. The paramedics realize that, theoretically, Frank and Freddy are dead. The surviving punks arrive to the building of Resurrection with the zombies in tow. The zombies are fast and can devise plans to attack the living. Paramedics go out to the ambulance and zombies attack them. Burt learns that Spider, Tina and Scuz have seen the corpse at Uneeda. Tina realizes that Freddy has changed. Ernie goes out to see why the paramedics are taking so long, but nobody is there, but the ambulance has all the doors open. A zombie (Jerome 'Daniels' Coleman) is eating the brains of one of them. At Resurrection, they close windows and doors, and try to contact the police. One of the zombies (John Durbin) asks for more paramedics. The dispatcher (Leigh Drake) complies. One of the punks gets Burt to tell what he knows about the Army chemical. Ernie checks on Freddy and realizes that the rigor mortis is advancing. Another team of paramedics arrives, but they are immediately attacked. Burt, Spider, Ernie, Scuz begin to board up the doors and windows as the zombies attack. But Scuz is grabbed by one zombie and pulled outside just long enough to have his head ripped open and eaten by half a zombie (Cherry Davis). Burt, Ernie, and Spider hack the half-zombie woman and bring her into the building. They tie her down on a slab and talk with her. The Half-Lady zombie explains that zombies eat brains because of the pain of being dead. Spider wants to know how to kill them, but Ernie and Burt think they can't be killed. In the cemetery, Trash herself becomes a naked zombie. A bum (William Stout) with a supermarket trolley is walking by in the night. He stares at the naked Trash, who eats his brains. The dispatcher officer sends more cops to Resurrection. Tina doesn't allow Frank and Freddy to be imprisoned in a different room. They put them inside the mortuary's chapel. A cop (Robert Craighead) arrives, but shooting the zombies won't help. There's a helicopter (with the voice of Dan O'Bannon) hovering around, but can't do anything apart from trying to calm everybody down. Cops' brains taste like pork, apparently. Another zombie (David Bond) asks for more cops. Frank and Freddy are in huge pain. Tina hugs Freddy, who dies. Freddy dies and wants to eat Tina's brain. Tina pushes him away and runs away from him. Frank runs away at that moment. Burt throws acid into Freddy's face. Spider gets hysterical. The strapped zombie keeps on asking for brains to eat. Attempting to imprison Freddy in the chapel, Ernie gets hurt in his foot. Freddy gets out of the chapel and runs wild. Ernie limps to the door and says that the favor which Burt owes him is to come back for him with the police car. Burt and Spider charge outside and keep the mob of zombies off them with a baseball bat and crowbar. They make it to the police car, but immediately, the car gets surrounded by frantic zombies. In a desperate move, Burt drives away, leaving Tina and Ernie behind. Tina panics, thinking they have abandoned them, but Ernie is faithful that they will return for them. Burt and Spider drive away from the mortuary and out of the cemetery, but they find the road leading away blocked by HUNDREDS of zombies. Spider and Burt crash the police car against the Uneeda building and are forced to flee inside. Back at the mortuary, Tina and Ernie go up to a penthouse and kick the ladder out when the zombie Freddy breaks down the door to get at them, all the time crying out for Tina. The zombie Frank turns on the crematorium fire, kisses Linda's wedding ring and jumps onto the fire. That's more ashes to the atmosphere. The zombie cop prepares an ambush, and more responding policemen are attacked by the zombies and dispatched as well. Freddy tries to sweet-talk Tina into submission. Ernie ponders killing Tina to save her from Freddy and to save himself. Spider, Burt and the two surviving punks, Casey and Tom, go down to the basement, where the copse of Suicide is. They call the police whom by this time are setting up barricades. The Captain (Bob Libman) doesn't understand what's happening. Just as Burt tries to explain about the zombies, hundreds of zombies attack the police barricade. The running zombies easily surpass the barricades and eat all the cops, while Burt listens over the phone. As a last resort, Burt calls the phone number stenciled outside the original zombie containers and manages to get in contact with General Glover. Burt talks to Glover. He tells everything that happened. Glover tells control about the zombie outbreak in Louisville, Kentucky. Glover has a plan. A suspicious Spider inquires about what the plan is. At a remote hilltop, Sergeant Gilbertson (Derrick Brice) is told to prepare. He fires a long-range "super gun" with a nuclear weapon towards Louisville, Kentucky. When the bomb hits, Freddy has just broken onto the penthouse where Tina and Ernie are hiding. It's 5:01 a.m. in the morning, Eastern time. A nuclear explosion has destroyed the city of Louisville, killing all of the zombies and apparently all the population as well. Glover gets a report that the death toll is less than 4,000. Glover calls his boss, whoever he or she is, saying that everything has been taken care off. He thinks that the rain will put out all the fires in town. He's preparing the visit of the President to the hit area. While he talks, we see more corpses being woken up by the acid rain.

Bickering siblings Johnny and Barbra are traveling by car to a rural cemetery, where they visit their father's grave. Johnny complains that the drive is too long for the simple act of placing a flowered cross on the grave. Johnny teases his sister's fear of the cemetery after dark, saying "They're coming to get you, Barbra!" They are approached by a tall, pale-faced man who stumbles toward them and suddenly attacks Barbra. Johnny pulls the man off of Barbra and struggles with him, but is knocked unconscious and possibly dead after the man thrusts Johnny's head violently on the edge of a gravestone. The man then pursues Barbra back to the car, but Barbra cannot start it without Johnny's keys. She takes the car out of gear and it begins to drift away on its own, but she accidentally steers it into a tree. She abandons the car and runs down a roadway to a nearby farmhouse, with the man still pursuing her. She discovers the house seemingly deserted, and the phone is out of order. Her attacker stumbles around the outside of the house looking for her, and is joined by several others. They all seem to be in a kind of trance. Exploring the house further, Barbra makes a gruesome find at the top of the stairs: a human body that seems to have been partially devoured by something. In a panic and attempting to flee the house, Barbra is intercepted by Ben, who arrives in a pickup truck and attacks the mysterious figures with a tire iron. Barbra is further driven into hysteria when she sees Ben violently smashing the skulls of the strange men who keep trying to get into the house. Ben urges her into action and the two of them begin boarding up the doors and windows from the inside with dismantled furniture and scraps of wood. They awkwardly trade their stories; Ben seems to be a drifter who was passing through the area when suddenly a wave of unexplained violence began unfolding. He tells Barbra about a scene of mayhem that he encountered at a diner, and Barbra tells him about the incident with Johnny in the cemetery. When Barbra becomes hysterical and wants to go out after Johnny, she strikes Ben and Ben hits her in the face. Barbra passes out in shock. Ben finds a rifle and a radio as Barbra lies incapacitated on a couch in the living room listening to the radio report. Emergency broadcasters tell stories of widespread violence and mayhem being committed by people who seem to be in a 'trance'. Ben continues to board up the doors and windows with anything he can find: he finds a hammer and nails and uses the interior doors, part of a dining table and an ironing board. He also makes a lucky find with a lever-action rifle and cartridges. Suddenly, Barbra is startled when the cellar door opens and two men emerge from the basement. Ben is attracted by her screams and they confront the newcomers. An older middle-aged man introduces himself as Harry Cooper, and the younger man is named Tom. Harry says that he has his wife, Helen, and his daughter, Karen, are in the basement as well. Karen has been hurt and cannot be moved. Tom has a girlfriend named Judy, also in the cellar. Immediately the group begins bickering. Ben is furious with Tom and Harry for not coming out earlier to help him barricade the house. Harry is an irrational and domineering man who insists that they all barricade themselves in the cellar and wait for help. Ben refuses, saying that if their attackers ever got into the cellar, it would be the end of all of them, as there is only one entrance -- if they stay upstairs they have a "fighting chance" to hold off their attackers outside. Harry angrily says he's going back to his family in the basement and will barricade the door. Ben angrily agrees, saying that he'll defend everything in the upper part of the house. Tom calls his girlfriend Judy upstairs. Harry bars the door while Tom tries to reason with him, saying they can defend the house if they all work together. Harry gloats that they'll be safer down there, but when Helen learns about the group and that they have a radio that keeps them informed, she insists that they go upstairs into the house to help out. Radio reports explain that an epidemic of mass murder is sweeping across the eastern seaboard of the United States. Later, Ben discovers a television and the whole group watches the emergency broadcaster who reveals that the murderers are recently deceased human beings who have returned to life and who are consuming their victims' flesh. Experts including scientists and military generals are not sure of the cause of the reanimation, but one scientist is certain that it is the result of radiation emanating from a Venus space probe that exploded in the Earth's atmosphere. The report instructs that a gunshot or heavy blow to the head will stop the "ghouls" and that posses of armed men are patrolling the countryside to restore order. The TV broadcast provides a constantly scrolling list of local towns that contain "rescue stations" to provide citizens with protection and necessities. Ben notices a nearby town called Willard which Tom and Judy recognize since they're from the area. Ben devises a plan to escape using his truck, but it needs refueling. While Harry throws Molotov cocktails out a second floor window at the walking dead outside the house, Ben exits the house armed with the rifle and a flaming torch. Tom and Judy offer assistance, but when they arrive at a fuel pump near the house, Tom carelessly splashes gasoline on the truck and torch, starting a grass fire that quickly spreads to cover the truck. Judy's sleeve is caught on something inside the truck when it explodes with Tom and Judy inside. Ben runs back to the house to find that Harry locked him out. He kicks the door open and forces his way inside, and after Harry helps him board up the front door again, he punches Harry repeatedly for his cowardice, furiously telling him he should throw Cooper out the front door and let the zombies eat him. As Cooper watches in horror, some of the living dead eagerly begin eating Tom and Judy's charred remains. A little later, another broadcast comes on the television, showing a local news reporter (Bill Cardille) interviewing a local sheriff (George Kosana) about the search and rescue operations that are underway in the area. Another news report indicates that the levels of the "mysterious radiation" in the area have been increasing, suggesting that the phenomenon is going to become even more widespread than it already is, but also that the situation is going to be under control soon. The reporter asks if ordinary people can fight off the attacks and the sheriff confidently tells him shots to the head, blows to the head with blunt objects and fire are all effective against the hordes. At that moment, the house goes dark when the area loses power. Perhaps triggered by the darkness, the ghouls surrounding the house begin to attack, attempting to break through all of the boarded up the doors and windows of the house. Ben manages to hold them back, but drops his rifle. Harry seizes the fallen rifle and turns it on Ben. Cooper orders his wife to go down to the cellar. Ben manages to wrest the rifle away from Harry and then shoots him. Harry stumbles into the cellar and dies, approaching Karen's seemingly lifeless body. Helen also attempts to hold off the zombies, whose great numbers are beginning to overwhelm the barricades over the windows and doors. Barbra suddenly comes out of her catatonic state throws herself into the battle, and Helen escapes back into the cellar, where she discovers that her daughter has been transformed into one of the living dead and is consuming part of Harry's corpse. Karen stabs her mother repeatedly with a cement trowel, killing her, before going upstairs. Meanwhile, the undead finally break into the house and Barbra sees her brother Johnny among them. The resultant shock causes her to lower her defenses and she is carried away into the zombie horde. (Barbra's fate is not shown, but it is strongly assumed that she is eaten alive by the mob of flesh-eating ghouls). Then, the zombie Karen comes up from the basement and attacks Ben, but he throws her aside and retreats into the cellar, locking the door behind him (which, ironically, was Harry's plan all along). When Harry and Helen Cooper reanimate, he shoots them both. With nowhere to go, Ben crouches in a corner of the basement with his rifle ready to make his last stand, while the undead walk through the house as well as pound on the boarded up basement door. The reinforced door holds and the ghouls give up trying to force their way into the basement. In the morning, the undead mob has left the house and disbursed. A posse approaches the house and kills the remaining zombies lurking around the house. Hearing the commotion and gunshots, Ben cautiously goes up the cellar stairs into the living room and peers out the window. The sheriff from the newscast sees Ben and orders one of his men to shoot him, having mistaken him for a zombie. His body is carried from the house and burned in a large bonfire with the rest of the zombie corpses.