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.
