Return of the Living Dead Will … Return … for Christmas of 2025, According to New Teaser

It seems that in the near future, Tarman will rise again, as the team at Living Dead Media today announced that their long-gestating new entry in the Return of the Living Dead zombie horror franchise will officially arrive for the Christmas season of 2025, via a first look teaser trailer. Likewise now bolted onto the Christmas season, no doubt for the extra marketing opportunities this offers, the film looks to be going the full-on legacy sequel route, complete with “same name as the original.” In this case, the new film, written and directed by Steve Wolsh, will apparently be titled Return of the Living Dead, just as the 1985 classic from director Dan O’Bannon. It’s hard to believe they missed the opportunity to call it Return of the Return of the Living Dead, frankly.

The original ROTLD is widely regarded by horror geeks as one of the most popular and influential zombie films ever made–it lands at #2 on our own list of the 50 best zombie movies of all time, in fact, behind only George Romero’s own Dawn of the Dead. It remains beloved today for its mordant humor, satire of 1980s teen culture, punk rock soundtrack, eye-popping practical effects and pitch-black satirical undertones. The film has had such influence, in fact, that it convinced an entire generation of post-80s horror neophytes that the classical zombies of George Romero’s films had specifically sought to consume “brains!” rather than simply human flesh. It was also one of the first films to present the concept of fast-moving, intelligent and nigh indestructible zombies, which results in the city of Louisville, KY being obliterated by a nuclear strike in the film’s conclusion in an attempt to eradicate the swiftly multiplying undead.

This 2025 version of Return of the Living Dead, meanwhile, reportedly takes place 18 months after the events at the UNEEDA Medical Supply warehouse that kicked off the original, and the action now revolves around a small Pennsylvania town that must weather another outbreak of the undead created by the same 2-4-5 Trioxin gas that the U.S. military has so ineptly left laying around all over the country. One wonders what exactly it might be like, to live in an alternate version of 1985 where the heart of Bourbon Country had been wiped off the map by our own nukes a year earlier. Somehow, we don’t suspect that writer-director Wolsh, mostly known for not particularly well received low-budget horror films like 2015’s Muck and 2023’s Fog City, will be delving too deeply into the national psyche following that sort of momentous Cold War tragedy.

But at the very least, there’s sure to be zombies and guts involved, and there’s reason to hope that the zombies will at least look good–the film is bringing back FX veteran Tony Gardner, who worked on the original and has subsequently worked on films like Zombieland in the years since. That’s a decided step in the right direction. The film from WithAnO Productions counts Christopher W. Fox among its producers–he’s the son of executive producer Tom Fox, who produced all the previous entries in the series. There hasn’t been a film bearing the Return of the Living Dead title in almost 20 years at this point, not since the fifth installment Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave finally killed the series off in 2005.

It will probably be a while before new details trickle out on this one, but you can expect it to at least be a horror geek talking point for the 2025 holiday season. In the meantime, check out the first teaser below for a glimpse at the iconic zombie series’ return.