How Queens Of The Dead Glammed Up The Zombie Thriller

Any zombie movie owes an allegiance to George A. Romero. His Night of the Living Dead brought the subgenre back to life for a new generation, establishing a canon so complete that any director, consciously or not, is doing their own spin on its own beats. That makes Queens of the Dead such an ironic addition to said canon. Romero’s daughter, Tina Romero, helms the horror in her feature debut. It might not be the film she’d have seen herself making years ago — naturally, she resisted telling a zombie story at first — but it’s one she was obviously born to tell.

“I felt a calling to take this torch and continue telling a story with the monster that my dad created,” Romero tells Inverse. Her version of the story would end up flipping the script on the zombie thriller entirely, starting with its queer cast and colorful, glammed-up setting. Queens unleashes a zombie outbreak on the island of Manhattan during a wild night out, focusing its action on a queer bar in the heart of the city. That alone allowed Romero to implement plenty of changes to the story structure her late father made famous.

Queens makes clear — either through its sparkly-skinned zombies or through characters’ winking dialogue — that this is not a George Romero film. Sure, there will be similarities between his work and his daughter’s, but Tina Romero was much more interested in the reckoning that a zombie apocalypse would bring to the queer community. For all its fantastic elements, it’s really about humanity, making it a potential entry point for the horror-averse: “We put glitter in the blood; it’s going to be OK.”

Inverse spoke with Romero about her unique approach to the zombie film, her penchant for “glam-gore,” and the message she hopes the queer community takes away from Queens of the Dead.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I’m curious about the seed of this idea. I read that you kind of resisted zombies and horror for a while, and that makes total sense — so what made this the story that had to be your first feature?

It was a bolt of lightning that just hit me when I spent many years DJing in the queer nightlife scene of New York, and there was a big promoter drama, and somebody posted online “When will the queer community stop devouring its own?” Just reading that sentence is what gave me the lightning bolt. I was like, “Oh, my God, this is how I could tell a story in the zombie genre that is authentic to me about people that I know and care about, and a world that is very familiar to me, with details that I understand.” Because that’s what it’s about. I think zombie movies are best when it’s really not about the zombies and it’s more about the people. I felt a calling to take this torch and continue telling a story with the monster that my dad created, but in the queer world.

“When will the queer community stop devouring its own?”

I love the idea of queering the canon. We still have so few kind of horror pastiches from people saying “Hey, let’s make this specific to my experience.”

Exactly. What I also love about the fact that this is an ensemble film with queers, we really wanted to flip the script in our motley survival crew. Instead of having the one token gay, we wanted to have all gays and one straight guy from Staten Island who didn’t think he was going to be here on a Saturday night but ultimately is so glad that he is. It doesn’t put the pressure on anybody to be the one queer, [saying] “I have to carry all of queerness for this movie.” So it gave people more room to play and sort of live in their authentic bodies.

The cast is such a dream cast, and they were able to bring their authentic selves to the role. I’m obsessed with them all, and I think they did such a great job. I fell in love with each and every one of them. And I hope that people also fall in love with these characters. I think they’re just delightful.

You tell us early on in the film: “This is not a George Romero movie.” That’s clear in a lot of ways, but could you talk about the conscious choices you made to put your own spin on the genre your dad helped perfect?

Yeah, I think it starts with the glam-gore of it all. I didn’t want to be hyperrealistic with the way the gore looked. I was interested in bringing everybody to this party: “People who maybe aren’t horror heads, come on over to Queens of the Dead. We put glitter in the blood; it’s going to be OK.” I think before I even started writing, I had a lookbook, and I really wanted to figure out a way to make the gore as fabulous as possible. One of the biggest distinctions between me and my dad is my penchant for whimsy and production design and the color pink. [That was part of] some of the earliest conversations I had were with David Tabbert, my costume designer who was just a genius. He and I started collaborating years before we had funding, just putting [things] together.

I love costumes. It’s such a big part of drag. It’s such a big part of all the work that I’ve done. I’ve always been a costume-forward person, and we wanted to make sure that everybody looked as fabulous as possible, including the zombies. These are zombies who died on a Saturday night in Bushwick after going out. They’re not wearing ripped-up jeans and flannel. They are wearing sequins. I think that aesthetic is one of the biggest differences between me and my dad. In addition to the fact that it’s not a final girl movie. We have most people make it out of this movie alive, which is also something that was important to me from the beginning. I didn’t want the feeling at the end of this to be grim and fatalistic. I wanted people to leave the theater feeling hopeful and a little motivated, and that they had a good time, because this is a queer story. There’s enough queer suffering in the world. I wanted this to be celebratory.

In that same vein, I do also love that a lot of these characters are not perfect. They make these crazy mistakes, and sometimes they’re fatal mistakes. Sometimes their friends end up paying for them. I’m thinking of the scene where Sam gives up the keys to an escape vehicle because he’s threatened by those cops...

I really appreciate you clocking that moment when Sam gives the keys. Nobody has brought that up. It’s a rich moment because you have a Black man confronted by cops, albeit they’re fake cops and they’re kind of giving stripper vibes, but he doesn’t know that, y’know? That’s his arc. He’s kind of up against his internal demon of like “I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.”

“They’re not wearing ripped-up jeans and flannel. They are wearing sequins.”

It’s so refreshing to see that. It feels like when you are part of a marginalized community and you’re writing something, you feel the urge to take the flaws out because there’s going to be criticism. But I just love that you lean into that and use it to propel your story.

And that’s exactly why. Going back to the original spark of the idea: When will the queer community stop devouring its own? The reason that was the bolt of lightning is because that is what zombies are about. Zombies are so heartbreaking because all of a sudden your best friend, your mother, your cousin, your daughter is trying to eat you. It is about us eating each other. It is about the ways that we get in our own way, how we get in each other’s way. And the queer community is not an exception.

We have plenty of infighting, especially between [generations], so we wanted to tackle that too. We wanted to make sure that within our spectrum, we had older gays and younger gays who maybe don’t see eye to eye, [because] we are fighting each other online without actually sitting down and talking to one another and understanding each other’s experience. But if you spend an hour, if you spend a night with each other, you’re going to find common ground. I mean, again, I’m a little bit of an optimist, but I like to believe that people can ultimately get to a place of understanding. I do think, especially in the zombie genre, you’ve got to dig into the conflicts as much as the ways that people are strong.

Queens of the Dead is now playing in select theaters.