Tina Romero didn’t think she’d follow in her father George A. Romero’s footsteps and make a film about zombies unless she had something to say that took the genre into a new territory. Along with writer Erin Judge, Tina spent ten years on her script for Queens of the Dead and the resulting film is satirical, gross, hilarious, fabulous, and heartwarming. A found (and sometimes fractured) queer family mostly from Bushwick, New York takes on the zombie apocalypse, addiction, phone addiction, corporate exploitation of queerness, bad plumbing, toxic competitiveness, and finding a path forward to be yourself.
Queens of the Dead has an iconic cast including Katy O’Brian, Jaquel Spivey, Margaret Cho, Riki Lindhome, Jack Haven, Dominique Jackson, and Tom Savini – just to name a few. Queens of the Dead is a glitter and gore instant queer horror classic!
Nadine Whitney spoke to Tina Romero about her fabulous film and all the ingredients that make it sing.
Queens of the Dead is the opening night film of the Sydney Underground Film Festival which kicks off on 11 September 2025 and runs til 14 September 2025. Tickets are available via SUFF.com.au.
I know that it this has been a ten-year process with your co-writer Erin Judge just getting Queens of the Dead written to film ready. So, what made you decide, “Okay, it's time now for me to take on this genre as my first feature.”
Tina Romero: The goal for me since film school was always, “When am I going to make a feature? What's my first feature going to be?” I have other scripts I've written, and it's just this one when concept came to me, I just knew that this would be the perfect first feature. A good way to introduce myself. Playing in my dad's sandbox but doing it in my own way.
Your dad's films are inherently political, and Queens of the Dead is inherently political too. The survival of the queer community and how I think how the queer community fractures often along specific lines.
TR: It was important to me that there was an underlying silliness, playfulness to this project, because I do think that zombies are meant to be a little bit silly and a little bit a little bit fun. My dad’s zombies, I think, were fundamentally silly. His films had a darker tone and were a little bit more nihilistic, a little bit more focused on people are assholes and they're really the ones who are going to screw you at the end of the day.
Queens of the Dead takes a little bit of a different approach. I still wanted to dig into the infighting within the community, and the ways that we can get in each other's way. And how communication breaks down in a crisis. But I think, in this day and age and with what's going on for queer people all around America and other places, I wanted to have a little bit more of an uplifting ending. I wanted to lose some characters (it is a zombie movie), but not all like what happens in Night of the Living Dead. I didn't want to do a final girl situation. In many ways, I think about the queer community as the main character, like in the community, gets out like they make it out because of each other.
You have a great diversity of cast and characters that allow for a generational spectrum of the queer community. Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z.
TR: Erin and I knew we wanted to do an ensemble cast, something that represented the full spectrum of queer characters was like our flipping the script. So instead of having your token gay friend who's there with the motley crew, flipping it so that we have all queers and then the one straight brother-in-law from Staten Island who really did not think he was going to be here the night it went down, but is kind of glad that he is at the end.
Erin and I went to college together. Another person we went to college with is Emily Smith. She ran the kinds of parties that YUM in Queens of the Dead is referencing. She came to New York, and she would organise events in the quad. She's always been someone who brings people together. She always wanted to make fun for groups of people. She started this incredible queer party called Hot Rabbit and Erin and I watched her build it from the ground up; this little party that grew out and kept getting bigger and bigger venues.
We watched it grow over time starting as something that was more for women, and then as things shifted within the community, became much more identity agnostic. All of a sudden now you've got the queers, and you've got the more the gay boys. And something that was very important to Emily from the beginning was to have a highlight on performers. She was always giving people a stage, whether you are out there booking big named fancy performers, she'd also give people a shot, people who've never been on stage before. She would let everybody try, and she would have multiple performers a night. Emily just loves artists and performers and wanted to give them somewhere to showcase their talent.
Hot Rabbit is really the inspiration behind the film. Emily is the type who always wanted to keep her overhead as low as possible so that she could keep her tickets prices as low as possible. Not making a fancy party that no one can afford to come to, and as a result, she has to do everything DIY. She is screwing in light bulbs to make it like a more fun colour. She is schlepping a cart with like the flyers and the and the backdrops for the photo station. She's doing it all herself, sweating, just like, you know, we're doing the most which is, which is Dre (Katy O’Brian). You know, Dre is super based on Emily. Emily, in real life, is married to Nina, who is a who is a nurse like Dre is in the film with Lizzy (Riki Lindhome). We took inspiration from these two as our Lizzy and our Dre.
It was very important to us that our main lesbian couple made it at the end. We didn't want either one of them to die. In fact, we wanted a lot of people to make it!
Oh my goodness, your cast! Katy O’Brian, Jaquel Spivey, Dominique Jackson, Jack Haven, Margaret Cho, Eve Lindley… that’s just for starters.
TR: The cast is unbelievable. It's the cast of my dreams. I still am pinching myself!
Jaquel Spivey as Sam (Samoncé) what a heartbreaker! When I saw him on Broadway in Michael R Jackson’s A Strange Loop, I went home, and I was shook for days. I couldn't stop thinking about him. I was Googling every interview, every clip I could find, not even thinking about him for Sam, just because I was so moved by him as a performer, as a vocalist, as someone who carried A Strange Loop. Which, let’s just say it was the most, is the most fresh show. I haven't seen anything like this on Broadway ever.
There’s butt sex on Broadway, okay, like we have queer butt sex on Broadway happening, and it's just an addition to a lot of other incredible topics covered in the musical. And Jaquel carries the whole show. I couldn't get enough of him. When we were thinking Sam, that part was actually written for an older actor in a sort of in a midlife crisis moment, maybe mid 40s. But when Jaquel came up as an option, I was like, “Oh, my God, I am obsessed with Jaquel! Yes! I would like to have a meeting with him.”
I went and I had coffee with him. He read the script, and he said to me, “You know, when I got sent the script, I was like, I can't do this role. I can't be like, the lead of a zombie movie, I'm not a zombie fighter. But then I had a beat with myself, and I thought, no, this is exactly why I should do this role. Because people like me don't often get cast as the hero of a zombie slaying movie.”
I got goosebumps. I left that meeting feeling just so sure in my gut, this was who I wanted to be Sam. I knew it. I just wanted him so badly. So, you know, a year later, after we kind of got approval from all the people, and he was down, and he signed on it just, I feel like that was the moment that we got momentum with the cast, like everything started to fall in place. With Jaquel, Erin and I were like, we can absolutely update the script to be a younger 20 something. Grappling with the issues that young 20 somethings grapple with. Like, what is my path? Where should I be putting my time and energy? You’re more sensitive to the online monsters and the inner monsters than the zombie monsters.
I strongly resonated with the community ethic. And you know that little infighting. I You’ve got Nico (Tomas Matos), who's gorgeous, but nobody will call them their preferred stage name Scrumptious. Nobody takes them seriously but in the end, they're just such a fantastic and essential character. And I think that's the case for, for much all your characters, even your gorgeous, gorgeous Queen, who, unfortunately, at the very beginning gets bit. She's hilarious.
TR: Julie J. our Zombie Queen is phenomenal. She is hilarious. She's a truly a performer. She's stunningly beautiful. What a face! Just a delight to work with. And talk about stamina! We shot in the middle of a heat wave in Patterson New Jersey. Last summer, we had these queens in padding, and then on top of her padding and her wig, she has zombie prosthetics on and pounds of makeup. It is 89 degrees (32 degrees Celsius) on our set, and she just is fine. Never a grumble, never a complaint, just like ready to go again. She brought so much genius to her physicality and how she walked as a zombie. She really got it. She understood she needed to use her body to sell this with comedy. She just did such a phenomenal job.
Thomas, who plays Nico, is perhaps the actor who brought the most authentic flavour. You can't write a flavour like Tomas. You know, Tomas is so, so themselves – he, she, they pronounce all of it and truly represents the full spectrum. They are an utter professional: script highlighted notes on like Nico's arc, knew every single line and has a dancer background, is a vocalist, a triple threat. An absolute professional and a star, in my opinion. Tomas was able to make Nico so nuanced and deep. You know, even though it's like all this flair on the top, there's depth there. I'm so impressed with their performance.
Jack Haven is such a brilliant, self-proclaimed weirdo and was able to make Kelsey interesting. Kelsey could have been a pretty boring character. You know, it was like, I wanted Kelsey to represent the high femme, the high femme girl who loves women, which is a brand out here. These women who embrace their like high femininity but are just obsessed with loving women.
When I had a conversation with Jack, I said, “Are you down for this? Like, are you down to shave your legs? Are you down to, like, go girly?” And they said, “Hell, yeah! I have an alter ego that I do. A Russian drag queen. She's a blonde. Like, I'm gonna channel her. I'm gonna channel Barbara from Night of the Living Dead.” Jack really landed that. They didn't play Kelsey as just ditzy – not that Kelsey is ditzy, more innocently spaced out. There’s also depth to Kelsey. I think they really brought it home.
The cast brought it home. We didn't have a lot of time for rehearsals. But everyone had to come ready to go for it. We put a lot of scenes on their feet the hour before we shot them. Everyone was really down to change when something didn't work, like, from take to take. Our first take was often a rehearsal. Our second take was like, let's change some stuff. And by the third take, we got it, and we had to move on. You know, is that kind of fast shooting, and I couldn't have done that without professionals, like every single one of these actors, they were so good.
They really were fabulous. The fast shooting and changes is something you spoke about previously. With a film there's the scripting, the filming and the editing and these three things change. You have to be flexible within them, because they're rarely what you are you envision to begin with. Can you tell me a bit about the process of going through those changes?
TR: Absolutely! I love working with Erin. We started with a script that was like ten times the scope. There used to be three different parties. There were zombie fights that were ambitious and over the top: but we told ourselves to write whatever we want, and then we'll scale it down. I actually think that the number of years that we worked on it as a script meant that we knew our characters well enough that when it came time to strip it all away, we were able to hang on to the to the core of each character and understand what we needed to keep in order to tell their story.
I think that that's what, what is successful about this is that each character, even though it's a big ensemble, I think we can kind of glom on to everybody, like we care enough about everybody, and we kind of get who they represent. That was the science of the writing, you know, like figuring out what, how to balance the equation there.
Then, of course, came shootability. We were rewriting even in production. Budget issues come up and we had to figure out a new way to kill certain characters. You know, these things happen and then a production rewrite happens. I was, of course, tired and frustrated with it all. But at the end of the day, every single change that we had to come up with; like shortening certain scenes, cutting certain scenes, it all, it all worked out great.
I love the changes that happened. I owe thanks to my editor, Aden Hakimi, who was the perfect match for me. We got each other right away. Aden is an actor as well, and I think that what this brought to the table was someone who had a very keen eye for performing. Aden had to watch so much footage and so many crazy coverage takes, and weave together this ensemble story, and know when throw attention to a reaction shot versus seeing a piece of dialogue on screen, how to time the jokes, how to make it funny. That's all him. We worked very closely together. But he nailed it. His sense of humour and his background as an actor are what really informed why this edit came together so wonderfully.
I would say, like top to bottom, my collaborators have just been a dream. This crew was perhaps the queerest crew that's ever existed. I would say we were like a 90% queer crew. And it there's something to that, because there's just something about, like the determination, the fighting spirit of the gays coming together to get something done.
It was kind of meta. You know, it's like the on screen was very much about the community surviving something crazy, and off screen was very much about the community surviving something crazy. We rolled up our sleeves and said, “We're going to figure out how to get this movie done together, whatever it takes.”
Off screen the queens were like, “We are going to make sure they look good!” Our looks on set had every little hair tucked every. Every costume was steamed, and the night they go through is crazy, but everyone goes through it and looks fabulous the whole time.
I was going to say, even your zombies are kind of hot. They've got this kind of glittery look to them.
TR: The zombies needed to be fabulous, we needed to make them a little fab. I wanted to go back to the Dawn of the Dead thing, where they just painted those zombies green. Because why not? It's a pretty easy way to signify a zombie. Aesthetically, I am not particularly drawn to the hyper realism of rotting flesh and ripped up flannel and in my world, they're in Bushwick, in their Saturday going out looks so like, what are they wearing? Let's make them green, but with a little shimmer. Christina Grant, our head of makeup, got what I wanted immediately. She got right to work, mixing glitter in the blood, mixing shimmer with the paint. She really nailed the look of the zombie, which is why it is so cool that Fangoria put her work on the cover, because it's, it's pretty exciting to have an all-female led makeup team featured on the cover of Fangoria magazine, a magazine that means so much to most makeup artists out there. She really did a phenomenal job, especially given her budget and resources, she was able to make hordes of glam zombies.
Glam zombies leads me to circle back to one of the themes of the film which is the corporatisation of queer culture. Yasmine (Dominique Jackson) has to dump YUM for a higher paying gig where she is there for the “Pride Month” aspect of a product.
TR: I'm glad you picked up on that. That's another thing I wanted to explore. In my work as a DJ, I have DJ’d many of the nightlife parties. I've also DJ’d many of the brands, the corporate parties where and the difference could not be more stark. The queer parties have no money. They have nothing, no bells and whistles, but the energy is real and raw, and you can play whatever you want, and people are dancing, and people are sweating, and they're having fun together. The brand parties are like, they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the decorations, and everything is tricked out to the nines, and everyone is just on their phones, no one's talking, no one's dancing.
It's so creepy to me, and I've found that there's a cache to being queer, and the brand parties, more and more want to hire the queer talent, because it's cool now. I was interested in touching on the corporate poaching of queer talent. And that's the whole sort of sideline Story with Yasmine, who ends up leaving the YUM party because she's going to get paid much better by Glitter Bitch. And you know, there's nothing wrong with that. We gotta make your money. We want everyone to make their money. But there's just something soulless about what goes down at those brand parties as well. At the end of the day, Yasmine comes crawling home to her family, and they take her in, because that's, that's what we do.
In America, you're dealing with a kind of political zombie apocalypse 24/7 in a huge manner that's going to impact people's ability gain access to healthcare (this is something in the film too), employment, information, and essential resources.
I think that you really do kind of find the only “solution” to that in in a lot of ways, which is talk to each other, just get to know each other, be there for each other, expand your ideas of family. And get off the algorithm.
TR: I would argue that big tech is the big is the main villain of the film. You know the phones are really what keeps us apart, keep us nervous, and keep us like in our different lanes. I'm personally very freaked out by what it's doing to my brain, and I have been for a long time, which is why, from the beginning, Erin and I knew that the phones were going to be a thing like the we wanted to keep all the zombie mythology traditional Romero so like slow no running, one bite turns you, you got to kill them by taking out the brain.
Then we wanted to add on this little bit, which I think my dad would approve of. Which is that they're still responding to their devices. You know, what is that? What is that sort of last thing from being human that the zombie can remember? And it's this like instinct to pick up the phone, which, which makes a lot of sense, I think, in 2025 and going back to the thing about my dad is he made his films with so many years in between that they end up being these interesting time capsules of the era that he made them in. It feels like I almost feel a responsibility to take it into 2025, and say, “You know what, the Romero zombie can still exist.” Because the Romero zombie, spiritually is something I really understand, because it was so much my dad. His personality and spirit was in Bub from Day of the Dead. That was a part of him. I know that guy so well.
I hope that people can feel that in this movie, his spirit is in me. I hope they can feel him while at the same time feeling like this it is not a George Romero movie.
It’s definitely a Tina Romero movie. And I mean, as you said, you're in in your dad's sandbox, but you're building an entirely new and glittery castle that, I think, is very welcoming and open.
TR: Even speaking to and from the queer community saying we have to expand the notion of family too. There is a way out of the apocalypse in the film, but a character says it’s only for family. The truth is that family is everyone there at the club.
Tina, I know that everybody asks you this, with Queens of the Dead being such a high energy film, what do you want people to feel coming out of it? Do you want them to ride that high, or do you want them to be a little bit contemplative? Or both?
TR: I love personally, when I walk out of a movie theatre, like, with a little pep in my step, because the credit music is fun, and I feel energised and like I'm covered in popcorn, and I just had a great time. And I hope that people walk away from this movie feeling uplifted with maybe a glimmer of hope, and of course, contemplative.
I really hope that they feel like I went on a great ride and feel their heart is open to this community and these characters in a bit of a new way. I want everyone to feel invited to this party. You know, this is very much a film by the queer community about the queer community, but I do think it is a party that everyone is invited to. It is not exclusively for that audience. I really want everyone to feel welcome in this movie.