Pitch Notes

Full Pitch Treatment

Night of the Living Digital Dead is a feature-length digital horror satire about a future that is already beginning to arrive: corporations using AI, archival media, voice models, likeness rights, and grief markets to keep the dead commercially active. The title is playful, but the premise is sharp. The dead are not crawling out of graves. They are being uploaded, animated, licensed, looped, and monetized by systems that treat memory as inventory.

The opening hook is immediately personal and disturbing. Zara, an ethics investigator, sees a pop-up advertisement hijack her screen. The ad features her grandmother—young, animated, and forced into a grotesque commercial performance. The horror is not gore. It is violation. Someone has taken a person Zara loved and turned her into a sales asset without consent. That single moment gives the story its emotional core: the dead cannot defend themselves, so who owns their image, voice, personality, and dignity?

From there, the script expands into legal thriller, tech exposé, and haunted-media satire. A rogue tech worker helps reveal the resurrection pipeline: scanned performances, reconstructed voices, scraped social media, synthetic bodies, contract loopholes, celebrity estates, advertising agencies, and platforms that profit from emotional confusion. The story can move from private grief to public outrage as ordinary families realize that famous actors are not the only victims. Anyone with enough digital residue can be reanimated.

The central question is wonderfully marketable: do the dead have rights? More specifically, can consent survive death, can families revoke a simulation, can an AI imitation become legally distinct from the person it imitates, and can grief be regulated once it becomes a subscription product? The courtroom dimension gives the film structure. The horror dimension gives it atmosphere. The satire gives it bite.

For competition positioning, this should be sold as Black Mirror meets Night Court by way of The Social Network and a ghost story. It is a feature screenplay, not a book branch, and the page should make that distinction clear. The pitch notes can emphasize both the entertainment hook and the policy relevance: this is about AI likeness rights, digital estate law, celebrity exploitation, deepfake commerce, and the coming industry of synthetic resurrection.

The project’s long-term value is strong because it connects with E-Citizen without duplicating it. E-Citizen asks whether synthetic beings can become citizens. Night of the Living Digital Dead asks whether synthetic copies of dead people can be property. Together they form a legal-cultural AI frontier, but this feature stands on its own because the emotional trigger is universal. Everyone dies. Everyone leaves traces. And in this world, the dead do not rest unless someone wins them the right to do so.

Submission Boundary

Source package: Night of the Living Digital Dead.pdf
Boundary note: This page describes the screenplay submission branch only. It is not the full book, not the full master universe bible, and not a rights transfer. It is designed as pitch-facing context for contest, fellowship, representation, or development review.