MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by NIKYATU. (@nikyatu)
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by NIKYATU. (@nikyatu)
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
Jusu will be joined by The Walking Dead’s LaToya Morgan who will pen the screenplay. Village Roadshow Pictures, Westbrook Origin Story, Vertigo Entertainment, and the late George Romero’s Sanibel Films are all involved in the production. No further details about the plot have been revealed just yet. However, it has been reported by Deadline that the film will be an expansion upon the 1968 version and is “intended to reignite the Night of the Living Dead franchise.”
Continental Distributing
George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead changed horror filmmaking forever, becoming the inventor of the zombie genre we still see today. The 1968 film “revolutionized how we see monsters in a literal sense,” showcasing that true horror can also reside in banality. Through the casting of Duane Jones — a Black man — as the lead Ben, the film’s connotation was unintentionally transformed, resulting in an additional layer of social commentary to the horror that emulated the Black existence and treatment in America.
Just as Romero ushered in a new age within the zombie horror genre, Nikyatu Jusu is poised to do the same. When looking at her past work, she’s already in a league of her own as she paves a new path forward in horror that centers Blackness and provides commentary. Her feature debut Nanny is a harrowing tale touching upon immigration, power dynamics, white racial tolerance, and the “American Dream” all while retaining an air of newness due to Jusu’s incorporation of African storytelling tradition and mythology into the story. Her widely acclaimed 2019 vampiric horror short, Suicide by Sunlight is about a Black mother’s emotional journey to reunite with her twin daughters as she internally struggles with an insatiable bloodlust as a day-walking vampire.
