Trivia / Day of the Dead (1985)

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• Awesome, Dear Boy: Joe Pilato said he got the role of Captain Rhodes with relative ease, and stated in an interview that the cutting in half of the budget helped him get the part.
• Blooper:
  • After Miguel draws the horde in through the elevator and another horde comes in through the corral, some extras can be seen in both places at the same time. Notably, the kid in the soccer uniform.
  • During the opening, in the overhead shot from the helicopter, you can see a car driving on the left side of the screen.
• Creator's Favorite Episode:
  • George A. Romero has cited this as his best movie, as well as his favorite entry of the Living Dead series.
  • Special Effects supervisor Tom Savini considers this his greatest work.
• Doing It for the Art: Romero was committed to getting the film released unrated, without any cuts to the violence and gore, and so he let the budget be cut in half ($3.5 million as opposed to $7 million) in order to do it.
• Fake Irish: Funnily enough, Roger Ebert thought that Jarlath Conroy's Irish accent was fake and commented as such in his initial review, even though Conroy is actually a native Irishman.
• Fake Nationality: Terry Alexander was born and raised in Detroit, but pulls off an excellent Caribbean accent.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • In the opening Jump Scare, Lori Cardille's husband played one of the zombie arms. She later remarked that he tried to swat away any hands that reached for her chest.
  • Additionally, Cardille is the real-life daughter of Pittsburgh TV personality Bill Cardille, who had a Newscaster Cameo in the original Night of the Living Dead (1968).
• Throw It In!: The reason the zombie on the opening title looks like that is a happy accident: while drilling a hole in the dummy's face, some foam got caught on the drill bit which promptly lead to its lower jaw getting torn off. The effects crew liked that look better and decided to use it.
• Troubled Production: This probably had the hardest time getting to the screen of the whole series.
  • To begin with, the production company cut the budget in half in response to Romero's decision to forgo an MPAA rating and release the film unedited, forcing him to greatly scale back his original script. He'd envisioned Day as a legitimate Epic Movie, the biggest zombie film ever made up to that point, but the budget cuts led to a film that was much smaller in scope. (A number of his ideas that got left on the cutting room floor would later be reused for his fourth Living Dead film, Land of the Dead.)
  • Most of the film was shot in an abandoned mineshaft in Wampum, Pennsylvania. The high humidity inside the mine caused frequent mechanical and electrical failures and played merry hell with Tom Savini's gore effects (though he still won the Saturn Award that year for best makeup effects), and the long distance from Wampum to the nearest city made transportation of crew and equipment difficult.
  • Savini also recounts a story where, during filming of Captain Rhodes' death, they used real animal guts to show him getting eviscerated and torn in half by the zombies; unfortunately, somebody accidentally unplugged the refrigerator where they were stored, leaving them to rot for two weeks before it came time to use them. The stench was almost enough to make Joe Pilato puke.
• What Could Have Been: Romero's original script. Think of it as a mix between this film and Land of the Dead. Budget restrictions forced Romero to rewrite.
  • Tony Todd auditioned for the role of John.

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