Judith O'Dea reveals the “twist” that made her return as Barbara in unreleased NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD sequel

Judith O'Dea, who originated the role of Barbara in George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead, has confirmed she returned to the character decades later for a film that has still never seen release.

Night of the Living Dead is one of horror's foundational texts. Romero's low-budget, black-and-white debut effectively invented the modern zombie film and, thanks to a clerical error at distribution that stripped the copyright notice from prints, fell into the public domain almost immediately. That status turned the film into one of the most widely available and endlessly reissued titles in cinema history, but it also meant the underlying trademark and story rights have been fought over for decades, with various parties, including surviving cast and crew, laying claim to different pieces of the franchise's legacy.

Barbara, played by O'Dea in the original, is the film's traumatized entry point: a woman who flees her brother Johnny's death at a cemetery early in the film, holes up in a farmhouse under siege by the reanimated dead, and famously spends much of the runtime nearly catatonic before meeting her end at Johnny's undead hands in the film's bleak final act. 

The character has long been a touchstone in conversations about the era's "final girl" archetype, and about the ways Romero's film subverted it.

In a new interview with Comics Beat’s Avery Kaplan, O'Dea addressed the long-rumored Matt Cloude project, clarifying that the film's title has itself become a casualty of the franchise's tangled rights history. Because the Night of the Living Dead trademark is now locked down, the project was retitled simply Barbara.

O'Dea played an older version of the character in a framing device: the film opens in an insane asylum, where Barbara has spent the intervening years — meaning that, in this version, she survived the events of the original film. Her elderly self narrates what happened before the story flashes back into the events of Night of the Living Dead itself.

The twist was the draw for O'Dea. Popular memory holds that Barbara dies in the 1968 film, killed by her reanimated brother Johnny. But according to O'Dea, Cloude's script imagines that Johnny retained enough humanity to spare her, and Barbara is instead found wandering, having simply survived.

“The movie opens at an insane asylum, and that’s where Barbara has been all these years,” O’Dea said. “So the movie is old Barbara relating what happened to her, and then it goes back of course into the actual movie of Night of the Living Dead.”

O'Dea declined to reveal how the film ultimately ends, saying only that the ending is a real twist, and that she's holding out hope the project will eventually be released.

“It ends up with Barbara," continued the actress. “I won’t tell you how it ends, because someday, that film is going to come out. But I wanted to do that role because of that twist. People will say, ‘Do you think Barbara survived, or did they kill her?’ I think most people think that Barbara was killed. But Matt came up with this idea where she wasn’t. Her brother had enough humanity, according to Matt, not to have her killed, and somehow she’s found at the beginning of the film, you know, walking along the road. She’s just managed to survive. But I thought, ‘What an interesting twist.’”

Source: Comics Beat