Hollywood director who gave new life to zombies
George A. Romero 1940-2017
George A. Romero, who has died aged 77, didn’tinvent the zombie movie. The first film to feature zombies – figures from Haitian folklore – came out in 1932. But he revolutionised the genre by stripping the undead of their cultural context, and making his horror films social and political commentaries on contemporary America, said The Guardian. Released during the civil rights era, and when the Vietnam War was at its height, his big-screen directorial debut, Night of the Living Dead (1968), featured a bunch of misfits who, holed up in a house in rural Pennsylvania, come under attack from flesheating zombies. Filmed in black and white, to give it a newsreel quality, it featured in the lead role a black actor, Duane Jones, who survives the onslaught – only to be shot dead by a member of a redneck posse that has come to drive the zombies away. “The zombies, they could be anything,” Romero said in 2008. “They could be an avalanche, they could be a hurricane. It’s a disaster out there. The stories are about how people fail to respond in the proper way.”
Born in The Bronx in 1940, Romero was the son of a Cubanborn commercial artist, and his mother was of Lithuanian descent. A fan of horror comics, and a keen moviegoer, he studied drama and design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and started his career in television. That first film – made for just $110,000 – was originally titled Night of the Flesh Eaters. The word zombie isn’t in the script: the undead are referred to as ghouls. “I didn’t think of them as zombies,” Romero recalled. “Then people started to write about them, calling them zombies, and all of a sudden that’s what they were.” As for the fact that the lead character was black, that was “damn near a complete accident”. Jones had simply given the best audition. But his casting gave the film “extra resonance”, said the New Statesman, “which was exploited in shooting and editing”. Then, just before its release, Martin Luther King was murdered; at that point, Romero realised that they had caught the zeitgeist. In 1999, Night of the Living Dead was declared “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant” by the US Library of Congress.
Though panned by many critics, who objected to everything from its goriness to its shaky camerawork, the film was a box office smash. Yet fans had to wait ten years for the sequel, Dawn of the Dead. The highest grossing of the series, it had the zombies stumbling around a shopping mall. “It is gruesome, sickening, disgusting, violent, brutal and appalling,” said the critic Roger Ebert. “It is also… brilliantly crafted, funny, droll and savagely merciless in its satiric view of the American consumer society.” Day of the Dead came out in 1985; Romero described it as a “tragedy about how a lack of human communication causes chaos and collapse”. A flop, it was followed by Land of the Dead, in 2005, and Diary of the Dead, in 2007. By then, there were so many zombies about the place, Romero joked that he wouldn’t be surprised to see one on Sesame Street, teaching children to count.
His other films included Martin (1978), about a man who thinks he is a vampire, but who may be a serial killer, the biker drama Knightriders (1981), and Creepshow (1982), written by Stephen King. Romero’s own favourite film, the one that inspired him to make films, was Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffman (1951). He liked to recall travelling as a teenager to a distribution house in Manhattan, hoping to rent it on 16mm – only to learn it had already been taken out by a “kid” named Martin Scorsese.