Director remade the zombie movie

Legendary filmmaker George A. Romero, father of the modern movie zombie and creator of the groundbreaking “Night of the Living Dead” franchise, has died at 77, his family said.

Romero died Sunday in his sleep after a “brief but aggressive battle with lung cancer,” according to a statement to The Times provided by his longtime producing partner, Peter Grunwald. Romero died while listening to the score of one his favorite films, 1952’s “The Quiet Man,” with his wife, Suzanne Desrocher Romero, and daughter, Tina Romero, at his side, the family said.

Romero jump-started the zombie genre as the co-writer (with John A. Russo) and director of the 1968 movie “Night of the Living Dead,” which showed future generations of filmmakers such as Tobe Hooper and John Carpenter that big scares didn’t require big budgets. “Living Dead” spawned an entire school of zombie knockoffs, and Romero’s sequels included 1978’s “Dawn of the Dead,” 1985’s “Day of the Dead,” 2005’s “Land of the Dead,” 2007’s “Diary of the Dead” and 2009’s “George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead.”

The original film, since colorized, has become a Halloween TVstaple. It also has earned socio-political points for the casting of a black actor in the lead role.

Romero wrote or directed projects outside of the “Living Dead” franchise as well, including 1973’s “The Crazies,” 1981’s “Knightriders” and episodes of the 1970s TV documentary “The Winners.” His last credit as a writer was for his characters’ appearance in 2017’s “Day of the Dead.”

George Andrew Romero was born in the Bronx in New York on Feb. 4, 1940. He attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and graduated in 1960.

In recent years, as the zombie genre had a resurgence, Romero wasn’t always a fan. He told a British newspaper in 2013 that he’d been asked to do some episodes of “The Walking Dead,” but had no interest.

“Basically it’s just a soap opera with a zombie occasionally,” he told the Big Issue. “I always used the zombie as a character for satire or a political criticism, and I find that missing in what’s happening now.”

Romero took an intellectual approach to his depiction of zombies, a view he found lacking in some of the work that came after him.

“I grew up on these slow-moving-but-you-can’t-stopthem (creatures), where you’ve got to find the Achilles’ heel, or in this case, the Achilles’ brain,” Romero told The Times in 2005, referring to the organ whose destruction waylays a zombie. “In (the remake), they’re just dervishes, you don’t recognize any of them, there’s nothing to characterize them. ... (But) I like to give even incidental zombies a bit of identification. I just think it’s a nice reminder that they’re us.” Romero