Jesse Corti, Danielle Harris, Bill Moseley, Joe Pilato, Alona Tal and Cornell Womack are all lending their voices to Night of the Living Dead: Origins.
The 3D CGI re-imagining of the George A. Romero zombie classic will be directed by newcomer Zebediah de Soto.
Like most zombie films, the story will follow a group of humans trying to stay alive during a zombie attack.
Corti (Heroes) will voice a news reporter, and Harris (Halloween II) will play a woman is forced to come to grips with the absence of her family.
Moseley (Carnivale) will reprise the role he played in a 1990 live-action remake Living Dead: a snooty Wall Street-type.
Pilato, who appeared in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, will voice Harry Cooper, a blue-collar worker with an injured daughter, and Tal (Supernatural) will voice his wife, Helen, who blames her husband for all the ills of the world.
Womack (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) will portray a no-nonsense New York cop.
The voice work for the film is in the early stages
De Soto said some of the casting is “a nod to Romero fans. Horror is a genre and zombie movies are a subgenre that people have been following for years and years.”
De Soto, whose background is in the commercials world, said he grew up in a household where his mother forbade him to watch television, fearing it would lead to smoking and drinking. When he finally saw his first horror movie, Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” it made such an impression on him that it created an obsession.
“When you’re not allowed to watch TV and then you see this movie where this broadcaster speaks about this (zombie) disaster, it translated as so real to me,” he said.
De Soto also said that he does not want to follow the zombie film standard and have the film end in a claustrophobic locale like a house or mall and will use CGI to attain that.
“I wanted to make this look like a living Monet; it’s expressionism,” De Soto said. “It’s going to be the first zombie movie played on a epic scale. This is the Empire of the Sun of zombie films. … I lived through the L.A. riots and saw the city on fire; I remember seeing people running, people getting pulled out of cars. And with 9/11, these images have been ingrained on people of my generation. I just thought that is the way it would really be, a lot of chaos.”
Source: Hollywood Reporter
