Living Dead Weekend will celebrate everything George A. Romero and beyond

This weekend, a Pittsburgh horror legend — the zombie — will be celebrated at Living Dead Weekend in Monroeville.

Over Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Monroeville Mall, the legacy of Pittsburgh-based horror creator George A. Romero will be celebrated by fans with a movie screening, cast meet and greets, vendors, tours and more.

“It’s to celebrate the Pittsburgh-based films that George Romero directed. His whole library of work, but specifically the ‘Living Dead’ series,” said Kevin Kriess, founder of Living Dead Weekend and The Living Dead Museum, which is also located in Monroeville Mall.

He founded the museum about 15 years ago. One of Romero’s films, 1978’s “Dawn of the Dead,” was filmed in the mall, so it’s a perfect place to honor Romero’s legacy and to hold cast reunions.

“We bring the cast and the people behind the scenes who made the films to the locations where the films were made,” Kriess said.

The organizers try to come up with new themes for each year’s weekend. “George Romero made a movie called ‘Creepshow’ with Stephen King, and there are sequels and a TV show that continues to this day. This year was a leap year, so we were trying to come up with something clever for a theme, and we decided to call this year’s theme ‘Creep Year,’” Kriess said.

Cast members from “Creepshow” and “Creepshow 2” will make appearances this weekend. Greg Nicotero — who is the showrunner for the “Creepshow” series, which debuted in 2019 on streaming service Shudder and currently has released four seasons — will also be in attendance.

As a bonus — “to add some more creep to the theme,” as Kriess put it — they will feature the cast of a 1986 horror film called “Night of the Creeps,” as well as a screening of that movie on Friday night at the Cinemark Theater with an introduction by cast members.

The director, Fred Dekker, as well as many of the actors, will attend this weekend’s event.

“It was just tagged on as an extra thing, but that movie seems to be generating the most excitement this year, that particular cast reunion,” Kriess said. “That was a little bit of a surprise, it’s a little bit different from what we’ve done before.”

Fans can purchase photo-ops with the casts of movies like “Creepshow,” “Night of the Creeps” and “Dawn of the Dead.”

Living Dead Weekend’s VIP check-in begins at noon Friday, with general admission check-in opening at 2 p.m. It will occupy several storefronts and the courtyard space on the JC Penney end of the mall.

Vendors will be set up throughout the weekend, and tours of the mall — with an eye on “Dawn of the Dead” filming locations — will happen once a day.

Lawrence DeVincentz, George Romero historian and memorabilia collector, will be running those tours.

“I love these films and love learning about them and studying them, everything about them. And in doing that, I’ve become an expert, a historian, when it comes to George Romero’s films. In particular ‘Dawn of the Dead,’ because it’s my favorite of his films,” he said.

His three-hour walking tour takes fans through filming locations around the mall — some of which are accessible to the public, and some of which are more behind the scenes.

“Over the years, there have been major renovations to the mall, and it has changed drastically since the filming of the movie,” he said. “You do need a tour guide like me who has studied every inch of the movie and the mall and compared them and can tell you where everything took place.”

He even takes fans to the control room from the movie, as well as the back hallways where some scenes from “Dawn of the Dead” were filmed and the stairway to the characters’ hideout in the mall.

“I provide a program for the tour that everybody holds onto and they can compare the scenes from the movie, and then when I point out a certain thing, they can match them up and see, right there in their hand with the program, what I’m talking about,” he said.

There are tours at 6 p.m. Friday, 1 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Sunday. “I give the fans all the information that they could possibly want to know about the movie because I do this as a fan,” DeVincentz said. He has led these tours for Living Dead Weekend since its inception.

Kreiss is fascinated by Pittsburgh’s place in horror history. He is also a native of Evans City, where the original “Night of the Living Dead” film was shot.

“A lot of what I initially loved about it was that it was literally in my backyard,” he said. “I was a child in the ’60s and the cemetery where they shot ‘Night of the Living Dead’ was my family’s cemetery. … I was fascinated that someone made a movie there.”

Then, as zombies permeated more and more of American culture, he thought it was important to recognize where they came from. “The whole movie monster idea of a zombie didn’t exist in the early part of my life. There was no such thing as a horde of zombies craving human flesh, growing and chasing people. … That happened in my lifetime. There’s a whole new movie monster archetype that was built right here. I just thought somebody should be celebrating it, and nobody was, so I did it,” he said.

Tickets for Living Dead Weekend can be bought online or at the door. To learn details and get tickets, visit thelivingdeadweekend.com.