Six join Night of Living Dead voice cast
Jesse Corti, Danielle Harris, Bill Moseley, Joe Pilato, Alona Tal and Cornell Womack are lending their voices to Night of the Living Dead: Origins, the 3D CGI reimagining of the George A. Romero zombie classic.
The story again follows a group of humans trying to stay alive during a zombie attack. Newcomer Zebediah de Soto is directing.
Corti (Heroes) is voicing a news reporter, and Harris (Halloween II) plays a woman forced to come to grips with er family's absence.
Moseley (Carnivale) is reprising the role he portrayed in a 1990 live-action remake, Living Dead: a Wall Street type with an expense-account attitude.
Pilato, who appeared in 1978's Dawn of the Dead, is voicing Harry Cooper, a blue-collar worker who lives for his injured daughter, and Tal (Supernatural) voices his wife, Helen, who blames her husband for all the ills of the world. Womack (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) is cast as a no-nonsense New York cop.
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 noted that nearly all zombie movies end up in an enclosed environment, be it a house or a mall, and he aims to change that. He's counting on the CGI technology that he and his New Golden Digital effects company are developing.