GEORGE A. ROMERO
GEORGE A. ROMERO CREATED THE ZOMBIE MOVIE AS WE KNOW IT AND INSPIRED OTHERS TO FOLLOW IN HIS BLOOD-STREAKED WAKE. BUT BEHIND HIS TRIUMPHS WAS A RESTLESS ARTIST, UNEASY WITH THE MONSTER HE’D BIRTHED
An eye-opening peek at the work — and the what could have been — of the original don of the dead.
GEORGE A. ROMERO had never intended to make a horror movie. In 1967, at 27 years old, he was a recent graduate of the Carnegie Institute Of Technology in Pittsburgh and an increasingly successful advertising director in what had become his hometown. He shot beer commercials (“Duke Beer, the natural beer for the natural man!”) and occasional inserts for children’s programme Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which then filmed in the city. The most terrifying thing he had ever directed, he used to tell people, was the episode ‘Mister Rogers Gets A Tonsillectomy’.
But the movies’ siren call had always been a strong one for him. In his childhood, in The Bronx, he had been a self-confessed film fanatic, slowly working his way through the classics. (He once tried to borrow a print of The Tales Of Hoffmann, only to find it already checked out — “M. Scorsese”, read the library register.)
So it was not surprising that his original idea was for an arthouse movie of some kind. But as notions were thrown around among the group of fellow advertisers and film fans Romero assembled, the idea of doing a horror flick, something with at least some hope of a release, emerged. Working with friends and a cast assembled from pretty much whoever was keen and available, he shot for seven months whenever they had the time and the film stock, mostly at weekends. Evans City Cemetery, about 30 miles outside Pittsburgh, provided the setting for the film’s iconic opening scenes; an abandoned house, conveniently close by, would form the backdrop for the bulk of the movie. Chocolate syrup doubled for blood, a trick Romero had lifted from Hitchcock’s Psycho, while mortician’s wax was used to model wounds. “One of the investors was a butcher,” Romero remembered shortly after the film’s release. “That’s where we got the intestines. He brought them over to the set and I said, ‘That’s great!’”
These days we’d instantly recognise this ragtag band of inexperienced, enthusiastic cineastes as guerrilla filmmakers, but back then, Night Of The Living Dead was, even the kindest observer would admit, anything but a promising project.
When it was finally released in 1968, though, the film exploded like a hand grenade. Shot in black-and-white, it had none of the campy tone of the monster movies that its title invoked. Instead, it was an unremittingly bleak picture of a society unravelling, one as decayed and rotten as the ghouls that stumbled through its graveyard. Early audiences, who turned up expecting a giggly shlock-fest, found themselves confronted with a slight but gruelling tale of a group of terrified ordinary people, bickering as around them the dead rose. It was shockingly immediate, the grainy shots of distorted, dismembered bodies reminiscent of the footage Americans were witnessing on their TV screens of the Vietnam War. The still-devastating ending, in which the film’s Black hero is dispatched not by zombies but by trigger-happy rednecks, was a lightning rod for the country’s anxiety about race, then
fevered after the assassination of Martin Luther King. This was a world coming undone, literally consuming itself, right here, right now.
A year later, in 1969, Easy Rider would crystallise the message, but it was Romero who was first to mainline the news to America: the Age Of Aquarius was most definitely over. (And, by the way, we’re fucked.)
“GEORGE LOVED SHAKESPEARE and classical music,” Suzanne Desrocherromero, the director’s widow, tells Empire from the couple’s long-time home in Toronto.
“The surprising thing is that George really didn’t love horror so much. He really loved classic movies, he introduced me to many of them. And then with the zombie movies, he was put in this box, and like all artists when you get put into that little box, it’s frustrating. I think at the end of the day he was grateful for the opportunity for a good life and career. But, yes, he would have liked to be doing more diverse things.”
Romero’s immediate output after the success of Night Of The Living Dead shows a director reluctant to surrender to the inexorable gravity of his first big hit, instead making the kind of movies he had possibly always intended. There was There’s Always
Vanilla (1971), an admittedly faltering romantic comedy. Season Of The Witch (1972), a feminist drama about suburban sorcery. And there was Martin (1977), a complex, beautifully directed and finally unnervingly moving tale of a crazy mixed-up kid who may, or may not, be a vampire.
But the year after Martin was first released, the pressure to return to the world of the recently deceased became irresistible.
Dawn Of The Dead expanded Romero’s universe, with its budget, at $1.5 million, well over ten times the amount Night had cost, allowing him to paint on a larger canvas. The setting shifted from the confines of the abandoned house of Night to the cavernous interiors of the Monroeville shopping mall, owned by a friend of the director (and as of earlier this year, the location of a bronze bust of him), where Romero staged his first real action scenes. Tom Savini, a former Vietnam combat photographer turned make-up artist, with whom Romero had recently worked on
Martin, pushed the gore to new, grisly heights, most memorably with a scene in which a zombie has the top of his head sliced off by a helicopter rotor. But Romero’s abiding idea, that the living were more deadly than the dead, remained intact and to the fore.
“I vividly remember the talk in the playground about Dawn,” says Simon Pegg, who along with Edgar Wright penned a billet-doux to Romero in 2004’s Shaun Of The Dead. “Everyone was talking about ‘the machete scene’ and ‘the helicopter-blade decapitation’. But it was so hard to get hold of. I finally saw it, I think, when I was 19. It was a revelation, everything I had hoped for.
I loved it so much. Without any explanation, you’re dropped into it and you’re not sure why everything’s in chaos. There’s something about the camaraderie that builds between the four leads, and the idea of having a shopping mall to yourself, which is a kind of fantasy anyway. It’s just such a beautiful movie.”
Greg Nicotero — the make-up-effects supremo behind dozens of seminal shockers including Army Of Darkness, Scream and
Hostel, and a major creative force behind
The Walking Dead — was another immediate convert. “I remember going to the theatre in downtown Pittsburgh to see it,” he tells
Empire. “Afterwards, I was instantly obsessed with zombies. It just pulls no punches.”
Day Of The Dead (1985) was intended to be a dramatic expansion of his universe — “the Gone With The Wind of zombie movies”, as Romero described it. But a fight with the financiers led to him giving up half the budget, and the intended scale of the movie, in order to retain control. “The original budget was $8 million,” says Nicotero. “But suddenly the distributors said, ‘We can’t finance this movie with an X rating. It has to be an R, otherwise we’re limiting the number of theatres that will show the movie.’ George stuck to his guns.
He was a fighter. He said, ‘If you’re not going to give me the money, I’m going to rewrite the script.’” Despite the reduced scope, Day Of The Dead still contains some of his most striking imagery: a nightmarish sequence in which zombie hands burst through a plain brick wall is as shocking now as it was 35 years ago. And with ‘Bub’, a zombie in the process of being domesticated by the US military, Romero hammered home his central belief, that zombies aren’t the worst guys in the room: we are.
As his career wound on, he poured energy into countless projects that had nothing to do with the undead. “It’s insane just how much output he had; he must have been writing constantly,” says Ben Rubin, custodian of the George A. Romero Archival Collection at the University of Pittsburgh, where close to 300 Romero screenplays are stored. “There are a lot of Westerns. There are adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe. He was working on an opera. There’s an adaptation of a Carl Hiaasen comedy novel.” But ultimately most remained unmade. And when they did get off the ground, the likes of Monkey Shines (1988) and The Dark Half (1993) were frustrating, the experience of working with studios a disconcerting one for a director who prized his independence above all else.
“I think Creepshow did a lot for George to help him get away from the zombie genre,” says Nicotero. “And then there was Two Evil Eyes (co-directed with Dario Argento) and The Dark Half. But sadly those films just didn’t have the same universal appeal as the ‘Dead’ movies. He was trying to break away, but it was hard for him.”
ROMERO HAD AN almost aggressive modesty about his own achievements. “He was an utterly charming, sweet, modest man,” remembers Pegg, who met him when he and Edgar Wright were invited to make zombiecameos in Land Of The Dead (you can catch them chained up inside a zombie photo booth). “There was George Romero Day in Pittsburgh when Land came out and Edgar and I flew out there. We’d got him a Foree Electric badge with ‘George’ on it and he wore that the whole time. Whenever Edgar and I started waxing devoted, he’d immediately change the subject back to us. But I could tell there was a slight sense of sadness that he’d never really been given his dues, even though I don’t think he particularly craved Hollywood validation.”
Romero returned to the universe he had created with a second trilogy: Land Of The Dead, Diary Of The Dead and Survival Of The Dead, all made in Toronto — a city he had relocated to after he married Suzanne Desrocher — in a burst of activity between 2005 and 2009. But by 2013, five years before his death and, uncoincidentally, the same year Brad Pitt’s World War Z was released, his attitude to the genre he had created had finally, apparently irrevocably, soured. “I’m trying to avoid zombies now. All of a sudden the whole world is zombified,” he sighed in an interview. “I could never sell a zombie movie now unless I promised to spend $250 million and filled it with the most amazing CG effects. That’s all they’re buying. You just can’t get a small movie off the ground.”
Influenced by shoot-’em-up video-game series such as Resident Evil and The House Of The Dead, zombies on screen had transformed, from Romero’s shambling monsters — whose motion he said reminded him of the early Universal Frankenstein and Mummy films
— to scuttling sprinters. The change saddened him, as well as his disciples. “The fast zombie removed the tragedy from it,” says Pegg, whose Shaun Of The Dead is always careful to stay within the rules set by the genre’s creator. “What was compelling about George Romero’s idea was that the zombies were victims, in a way. There was a genuine pathos to them. You have Hare Krishna zombies and the nun and a zombie still in his baseball kit. All that pathos is lost when they all start screeching and running like velociraptors.”
Romero was diagnosed with lung cancer in early 2017 and died in July of that year. He was 77. “I don’t know if he really ever understood the mark that he and his films made on the world,” says Nicotero. “He stayed in Pittsburgh and was able to retain creative control, but he really suffered because often he couldn’t get the money to realise his movies in the way they needed to be. I remember him saying once, ‘You know, at
one point I was the only kid in the sandbox, and it was my sandbox. Then all these other people turned up.’ Frank Darabont and I offered him an episode of The Walking Dead in the early days of the show. It was out of reverence for him. But he said, ‘You know, you guys have your zombies and I’ve got my zombies, let’s leave it that way.’”
But despite Romero’s own (rarely publicly voiced) disenchantment with the way his creation had been co-opted and changed, his legacy is unarguable. “When we knew George was passing, he said to me, ‘I don’t want to talk about business. At all,’” remembers Suzanne Desrocher-romero. “I said, ‘Okay, no problem.’ But one day — we were big Scrabble players, and we were playing — I did decide to ask him what he thought his legacy would be. ‘Ach,’ he said, ‘nobody really cares.’ I have to tell you, I still can’t get over it. After he passed it haunted me.
I thought, ‘That can’t be true.’ And that’s what really propelled me to set up The George A. Romero Foundation.”
Despite the challenges Romero’s fiercely guarded independence created for his career, his influence is incalculable. His model, of horror movies set not in Gothic castles or outlandish laboratories but in ordinary, recognisable places and shot on a shoestring, became the template for contemporary horror. There’s a direct line between Romero grabbing footage in a Pennsylvania graveyard and the makers of The Blair Witch Project decamping to the woods of Montgomery County, Maryland. He pointed the way for young genre directors, proving that if a horror movie, even one with no stars or budget to speak of, captured something of the zeitgeist it could have an impact way beyond its modest means. Almost every low-budget horror flick that aims to grab your attention, to prod, gleefully, at that raw nerve, from
The Hills Have Eyes (1977) to Get Out (2017), shares at least some DNA with Romero’s founding masterpiece. And inadvertently he helped shape modern Hollywood. The notion of the cinematic universe, now the powerhouse behind almost every major studio’s business model, in which unlinked stories share the same fictional world, has its roots in Romero’s zombie movies, which linked successive films without sharing characters or delivering endless sequels.
Even if the cadavers in the latest zombie movie to arrive, Zack Snyder’s Army Of The Dead, aren’t quite the sad monsters, the us that Romero had championed, they are still, at their cold, unbeating hearts, their direct descendants. George A. Romero might, sadly, no longer be with us, but his thousands of shuffling children, the eternally grateful dead, are still going strong.