George Romero’s early film sat unfinished for decades. When surviving footage resurfaced, his old collaborator Richard Ricci finally wrote the poem meant to accompany it. He handed it in four days before he died.
That is the story tucked inside Expostulations, a recovered piece of Romero’s pre-zombie career. According to the George A. Romero Foundation, Ricci spent about nine months on the poem in 2020. Nearly six decades after the original collaboration stalled, he had supplied its missing words.
Only 21 minutes survive from an anthology that reportedly ran around two and a half hours. The planned soundtrack was never completed, and most of the film is still missing. This recovery comes with holes that no restoration can simply wish away.
Now those surviving images are headed for an unusually fitting screen. Expostulations is scheduled for March 26, 2027, at Pittsburgh’s Byham Theater, with a new live orchestral score and narration by Day of the Dead actor Terry Alexander. The Byham was called the Fulton when Night of the Living Dead premiered there in 1968.
For horror fans, that is quite a double take: return to the building where Romero’s zombies made their debut, then meet the filmmaker he was before them.
The screening is part of A Night at the Symphony, a 30-piece-orchestra program created by composer Christian Kriegeskotte. The evening also revisits music from Romero films including Martin, Knightriders and the Dead series. It begins at 7:30 p.m.
There is plenty here for the horror-history completist. But Ricci’s contribution is what makes the recovered film feel personal: an unfinished project outlasting the years, and one of its makers getting his part back to it just in time.
Featured photograph: George A. Romero at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, photographed by Nicolas Genin; existing crop by Andibrunt, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0. The supplied crop is used unchanged. This is an archival portrait of Romero, not a still from Expostulations.
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