While the screenplay for the blockbuster 1979 science fiction horror film Alien is solely credited to Dan O’Bannon, with O’Bannon sharing a story credit with executive producer Ronald Shusett, the Alien script was also guided by the influence of several other important creative collaborators. O’Bannon’s original Alien script was extensively rewritten by producers David Giler and Walter Hill, who introduced the villainous android Ash, while artist Ron Cobb conceived the idea of the film’s titular creature having acidic blood. Of course, it’s hard to imagine that the Alien franchise would be nearly as expansive and successful as it is today without the twisted vision of artist H.R. Giger, whose original creature design revolutionized the horror and science fiction genres alongside Alien.
Regardless, Alien made O’Bannon and Shusett genre icons. This lofty status was most apparent with their next collaboration, the 1981 horror film Dead & Buried, in which a sleepy coastal town is terrorized by the reanimated corpses of murder victims. Dead & Buried, which was directed by Gary Sherman, was financed and marketed as being a film by the creators of Alien. However, despite O’Bannon and Shusett’s supposed name value, Dead & Buried, which grossed less than $300,000 at the box office against a $5 million production cost, was a box-office failure.
Instead of being propelled by the success of Alien, Dead & Buried was overshadowed by the film, which created unrealistic audience expectations for Dead & Buried and obscured the film’s various qualities. On its own terms, the movie is a solidly entertaining horror film that effectively blends a creepy atmosphere and gruesome special effects, culminating in a genuinely shocking twist ending.
Dead & Buried Was Deceptively Advertised
Dead and Buried
- Release Date
- May 29, 1981
- Director
- Gary Sherman
- Runtime
- 92 min
Dead & Buried stars James Farentino as Dan Gillis, the Sheriff of the small coastal town of Potters Bluff, where, as the film opens, a visiting photographer is seduced on a beach by a beautiful young woman, only to be assaulted and set afire by the woman and a mob of townspeople. While the man survives the attack, he’s later killed by the woman, posing as a nurse, in his hospital room. As more tourists are murdered in similarly gruesome fashion on a daily basis, Gillis struggles to find a motive for the murders until Gillis discovers that the town’s eccentric and elderly coroner and mortician, Dobbs, has developed a technique for reanimating the dead.
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Unlike Alien, Dead & Buried wasn’t based on a story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, who became attached to the film based on a story developed by writers Jeff Millar and Alex Stern. Actually, Shusett, who also served as one of the film’s producers, completed a script for Dead & Buried before reaching out to O’Bannon, whose name on the project, in terms of the film’s eventual “The creators of Alien bring a new terror to Earth” tagline, was considered vital to the project’s commercial viability.
Producers Sales Organization, the production and sales company behind the film, thoroughly exploited the Alien connection, which enabled the company to raise most of the film’s budget prior to the start of filming. However, O’Bannon only agreed to lend his name to Dead & Buried on the condition that Shusett would incorporate some of Bannon’s changes to the film’s script, as Shusett promised. After seeing the finished film and recognizing none of his changes and concepts, O’Bannon, who eventually disowned the movie, tried to have his name removed from the film to no avail.
The Return of the Living Dead Was Inspired by Dead & Buried
The biggest similarity between Alien and Dead & Buried is related to the fear of the unknown, specifically in terms of a fate that’s worse than death. In Alien, this involves the unspeakable thought of being cocooned and then turned into an alien egg by the film’s slimy creature, while the ultimate horror of Dead & Buried involves people being murdered and then turned into reanimated corpses.
While most of O’Bannon’s concepts for Dead & Buried weren’t used in the film, the film’s reanimated corpse plot served as an inspiration for O’Bannon’s feature directorial debut, the 1985 comedy horror film The Return of the Living Dead, in which a secret military experiment results in the accidental release of a toxic gas that reanimates corpses and turns them into flesh-eating zombies.
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While the brain-craving zombies in The Return of the Living Dead behave much differently than the live-seeming zombies in Dead & Buried, the mordant sense of humor and punk sensibilities of The Return of the Living Dead, which was much more commercially and critically successful than was Dead & Buried, provides an intriguing glimpse of the kind of film Dead & Buried might have become if O’Bannon had been more involved in the creative process.
Dead & Buried Has Gained a Large Cult Following in Its Post-Theatrical Life
For many years after its release, Dead & Buried was better known for its historically significant pedigree, which includes the appearance of horror icon Robert Englund and early special effects work by the legendary Stan Winston, than for the film itself. However, over the past 20 years, Dead & Buried has slowly but steadily transcended its proximity to Alien and gained a reputation for being one of the most underrated horror films of its era.
While Dead & Buried has found a sizable audience in its post-theatrical life, the film nonetheless holds very little meaning in the legendary careers of Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, whose third and final collaboration came in the 1990 science fiction film Total Recall, which, like Alien, is considered to be one of the best science fiction films ever made. Dead & Buried is streaming on Tubi, Peacock, Pluto TV, and AMC+. The newest entry in the Alien franchise, Alien: Romulus, will hit theaters on Aug. 16.
