Meet Tina Romero, the New Queen of the Dead

If anyone’s going to survive the zombie apocalypse, Tina Romero thinks it’s queer people. 

“Queer people have been surviving with each other forever, that’s what we do every day. The community is so strong, the roots are strong, the family is strong. There’s a fighting spirit amongst the gays that’s unlike any other.” 

And it’s that communal fighting spirit that the lesbian DJ and daughter of the late horror icon/zombie pioneer George Romero has poured into her debut feature, Queens of the Dead, the newest, and most fabulous, entry into the zombie canon–– not to mention boatfulls of glitter, vats of fake blood, and buckets upon buckets of shimmery lime green paint.

The film, which won the audience award for its premiere at Tribeca this week and whose production Romero lovingly called “family style,” follows a team of queer party organizers (including among others Katy O’Brian, Jaquel Spivey, and Jack Haven) getting ready to throw a resurrection-themed Easter bash in a Brooklyn warehouse. Things are looking rough enough as dancers flake (one of the queens derails their plans by taking a bougier promotional gig), straight influencers descend, and balloons threaten to blow away, when to top it all off, the dead begin to rise. What happens next is a mash. It’s a monster mash. 

Modeled after Romero’s experiences DJing for Hot Rabbit, this ragtag team of drag queens, DJs, and party promoters has to survive the night, take care of their own, and get the hell out of Bushwick, by razor scooter if necessary. Romero has described this playful, lighthearted tale of queer friendship, survival, and solidarity as her “big gay zombie movie,”  and it’s a breath of fresh air that celebrates the girls, the gays, and the goreheads alike. 

For someone who “sat on a zombie’s lap before ever meeting a mall Santa,” Romero never thought she’d make a movie about the undead. “I didn’t think I should ever touch zombies unless I had an idea that was really authentic to me,” she told Film Inquiry over coffee in the East Village. The forty-one-year-old director spent her young adult years studying film at Wesleyan and NYU, making music videos for the likes of Shirley House and Zeta Galan, and DJing at queer parties and high-end corporate events (“corporate’s really where you get the paycheck”). 

“It was so interesting to witness the difference between those two kinds of parties, one that’s full of life and heart and magical energy, versus these corporate brand influencer parties that have all the money and absolutely no heart. Plus, over the past decade and a half these big brand parties often like to go for the queer talent. They want the drag queen they want, the gay DJ. There was something about the poaching of queerness and putting it in a corporate space that I was interested in.”

But the idea only really came together one night when drama derailed a party she was DJing: A Hot Rabbit promoter created a rival party nearby scheduled for the same time, siphoning off their guests. “Pretty shitty form,” she quipped. The whole flap reached its climax when the original promoter finally took to social media, asking “when will the queer community stop devouring its own?” 

“It just hit me. I was like, ‘Oh, this could be my entry to the zombie genre,’ this world I know is full of rich, colorful characters and make-it-work energy” shot through with competing incentives between family, community, and personal financial strain. “That was really the lightning bolt moment for me.” 

With that kind of specifically queer party drama at the film’s core, Romero also knew these zombies would need a look all their own: “No more butch zombies,” the director confirmed, “Hyper realistic, rotting flesh, ripped flannel, ripped denim zombies, to me, that’s like, been done enough.” While the director has a penchant for denim herself, sporting an Ozzy Ozbourne t-shirt and dark jeans to our interview, she wanted a distinctly femme look for this film. “[During development] I was pulling a lot of imagery from the artist Marilyn Minter, who does a lot of work using saliva and pearls and goo and like, it’s this mixing of kind of viscous, grotesque fluids, but she makes it really beautiful. I knew I wanted to do something a bit different with the gore. Like, how can we invite people into the gore of this movie who maybe aren’t big on blood? How can we give the blood a little bit more sparkle while also being viscerally gross?” 

Indeed, her “glam gore” zombies are glimmery and ethereal even when they’re tearing someone’s flesh out in chunks. The acid green color, selected by head of makeup Christina Grant, was also inspired by the green zombies of Dawn of the Dead (tied for first in her ranking of her father’s zombie films alongside Survival of the Dead). 

As for costumes, about half of the central characters are drag queens (and yes, this zombie movie features a makeover montage). That’s not a coincidence, according to Romero: “There’s transformation inherent in both” drag and zombies. “Even after the makeup transformation, too, you’re presented with this fantasy. They’re both kind of over the top, and both of them are a rich arena to say something with. You can make your point with zombies, you can make your point with drag, and you’re able to do it in this way that’s entertaining and delightful and campy and fun.”

That’s not the only layer of drag in the film, though. Shot over twenty one days with a “95% queer cast and crew,” the film’s genderplay is easy, casual, and affirming across the board without ever needing to explain itself. “We knew that we wanted to explore the full spectrum” of queer presentation, she explained. For example, Jack Haven is a standout here in an against-type high femme role. “It was very important to me that [this character] Kelsey was a high femme young lesbian, you know a girly girl who loves women,” Romero said, pausing for the first time in over half an hour of conversation to sip her latte. “Jack and I had a conversation before, and I was like, ‘Are you down to do this? Like, are you down to shave your legs? Are you down to go super femme?’ And Jack was like, ‘Yes, put me in. I have an alter ego drag queen that sometimes comes out. She’s a blonde Russian performance artist. I’ll channel her.’” 

Drag shows aside, though, there’s also a traditionalism to her zombies that’s drawn from her relationship to her father. “I love the Romero zombie specifically, probably because I just idolized my dad, and I feel like his zombie has a little bit of his spirit in there,” she said with a smile and a ruffling of her bleach blonde bouffant. “Fast zombies are a different animal. My dad was this tall, gentle, hilarious, silly, goofball who believed in aliens, and his zombies are silly, slow moving–– there’s some humanity inherent in his zombies, you can still kind of get a sense of the humans they once were.”  

This same humanity is transferred over to Queens of the Dead. Its easy handling of questions of queer experience and identity elevates this horror comedy. Whether the characters are musing on trying to get pregnant as a lesbian couple or bickering about where to lock up a zombie in their midst (with killing their own off limits, they settle on the gogo cage), the whole film has a comfortable feeling of lived-in-ness. 

Of course, that includes more serious themes as well. Romero wanted to highlight some of the real issues that face the gay party scene, and the opioid crisis is part of the backdrop. “I know I’m not alone in saying that my life has directly been impacted by people who I’ve lost because of fucking tainted drugs. It sucks. It sucks so bad. It can be one pill. Just one decision can end a life that you know has no business being ended. It’s a huge issue, and especially as we were writing [in 2020 and 2021], this was happening a lot.” In the film, zombies aren’t the only killer at the venue: A bad batch of Oxy is floating around the party. “I think all kinds of addiction–– phone addiction, opioid addiction, social media addiction–– these are all part of the tapestry of human suffering,” she explained. “‘When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth,’ and I wanted to suggest that those addictions might be part of why there’s no more room in Hell.”  

The feeling of intimate familiarity at the heart of the story, then, comes both from Romero’s personal, sometimes painful experiences with this milieu, as well as from the closeness of her cast and crew. “We all ate every meal together. When you have your cast on set and they know your second AC by name? That’s unique. Absolute heart and blood and grit and sweat and tears went into this production from every single person who worked on it, and we did have fun too.” 

Ultimately, with Queens of the Dead, fun was the name of the game overall. Written in collaboration with queer novelist, comedian, and playwright Erin Judge (Vow of Celibacy, The Meaning of Wife) throughout the worst months of the pandemic, humor was their guiding force. “We were like, the world needs a little levity right now. And here we are in 2025 and I still think the world needs a little levity and escapism and fantasy and a good laugh.” A self described “edgy cheeseball,” Romero cited Gilmore Girls as a central inspiration for the ensemble cast, quick dialogue, and affectionate vibe of Queens of the Dead. “I grew up on movie musicals, but I also grew up walking by terrifying movie posters on the wall and all this dark ass imagery all around me. So I love that shit, too. I think that my creative spirit is a mash up of those two things.” 

For Romero, that community spirit was the takeaway. “We felt that we wanted more people to survive than not [in the film], because that’s what it’s all about: When you stick together, you’re gonna survive. The thing about levity, I think, is that in this particular time, there’s room for the feeling of walking out of a movie theater with a little pep in your step.”  

With such a successful premiere at Tribeca now under her belt, the director is feeling pretty peppy herself. “I feel like I’m on cloud nine,” she grinned, reflecting on the yearlong sprint that led her to this moment. “I think that one of the things I’m taking away from this is that there’s magic money can’t buy, you know? As many budget challenges as we had, I’m almost grateful for them because we had to be creative. That’s the spirit of punk rock, rock and roll. And it’s interesting, because that’s how my dad got his shit done early on, too. It had to be a group effort, we had to roll up our sleeves and figure out how to sell this fantasy. Making movies is just about getting it done with the power of people and the power of creative community. It’s just amazing what you can do.” 

And if the zombies come tomorrow? “I’m getting on the back of my girlfriend’s motorcycle with a baseball bat and we’re gonna get the fuck out of the city,” she laughed, not missing a beat. 

Barring the apocalypse, though, she’s got her eye on a shark movie next. “I love to see people get torn apart by animals,” she shrugged. “As long as there’s a big tub of popcorn.”