America’s Economy Faces a Zombie Recovery, Even With Vaccine
Businesses in the area where Night of the Living Dead was filmed are staggering along on government stimulus but may collapse before more help arrives.
The Living Dead Museum, now closed, in Evans City, Pa.
Photographer: Ross Mantle for Bloomberg Businessweek
This was supposed to have been a good year for zombies. At least that’s what Kevin Kriess, owner of the Living Dead Museum and Gift Shop in Evans City, Pa., thought. The business, not far from the cemetery where George Romero filmed the 1968 zombie classic Night of the Living Dead, was gearing up for an expansion. Kriess planned to open a second location at a mall a 45-minute drive away, where the sequel Dawn of the Dead was set. “This year was going to be super big for us,” says Kriess, a horror-movie buff turned purveyor of T-shirts, posters, and other memorabilia to obsessed fans of the undead.
Instead, in October, Kriess packed up his ghoulish wares and turned off the lights for the last time in the storefront he had rented across from a funeral home, another victim of a pandemic that has upended lives around the world.