Today we’re mourning the loss of Joe Pilato, most known in the horror world for pitch-perfectly playing the unforgettable antagonist Captain Rhodes in George Romero’s Day of the Dead. Pilato also had smaller roles in Dawn of the Dead and Wishmaster, but one thing you might not know about Pilato’s career is that he was at one point attached to From Dusk Till Dawn.

Actually, Pilato played the original Seth Gecko!

Way back in 1991, five years before the Robert Rodriguez-directed From Dusk Till Dawn was released, makeup master Robert Kurtzman tried in vain to get the Quentin Tarantino-penned project off the ground as a low-budget feature film, and it was Kurtzman who directed a promo trailer for the proposed project as a means of acquiring the necessary funds.

For that 2-minute pitch trailer, Kurtzman brought in Joe Pilato to play the vampire-slayer Seth Gecko, the character who went on to be played by George Clooney in the 1996 film.

“I came up with the Dusk as a directing vehicle for myself,” Kurtzman explained years back. “And in the late summer of 1991 at the tail end of shooting Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness I borrowed a dolly and some track from production (with Rob Tapert’s permission) and pulled in a favor from Panavision for a camera and shot a promo short for the film. I had no money and I built the sets at KNB using whatever I could find. I had to put up the set on Friday, shoot on Sat. and have everything cleaned up on Sunday so not to disrupt KNB’s work on Monday. The effects are crude as it was all posted on video and at the time CGI was a ways off.”

Shared by Kurtzman on Twitter today, you can check out that early pitch below!