Master film-maker added wit to the zombie genre

A once thriving central city is full of empty shops, Hamiltonians electing, like somany Romero zombies, to trek out to Te Rapa’s The Base.

As an adolescent in the early 1980s there were three films that I watched over and over again.

In an era before VCRS became commonplace, in a household where a video recorder was quite rightly seen as a luxury item beyond the budget, this was a difficult undertaking.

There were only two possibilities: either you took advantage of the regular Sunday night double features that played at The Majestic, Rotorua’s venerable fleapit theatre, or you invited yourself around to a house of a schoolmate whose parents enjoyed a greater income than yours did.

Majestic screenings accounted for multiple exposure to the first Star Wars (1977) film long before the subtitle ‘A New Hope’ became affixed. The fleapit also played The Warriors (1979), Walter Hill’s marvellously stylised ode to New York street gangs, on almost a weekly basis.

The third title on high rotate was made by a director who died earlier this week, George A Romero.

A friend had somehow acquired a pirate copy of Romero’s zombie classic Dawn of the Dead (1979). A group of us regularly gathered at this friend’s house after school or on weekends to watch it. Initially, the attraction was the violence. The undead were dispatched with gleeful invention.

Working on a grander scale than he did in his groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead (1968), Romero added colour and overt wit.

It was worlds away from the claustrophobia and seriousness of the first film. Black humour is the meat and drink of teenage life. A fiction in which authority figures were mocked and exposed as the fools they were was one we wanted to experience more than once.

The fact these fools had their brains blown out, in a variety of imaginative if basically cartoonish ways, was an added bonus. The more we watched the film the greater it seemed.

Romero was not a subtle filmmaker but he had a definite social conscience. Canadian-born, he had an outsider’s perspective on life in the United States. He understood racism and he understood the cult of the gun.

There was little difference in Romero’s worldview between the regular army, the gung-ho paramilitary, rednecked vigilantism or the brutality and casual misogyny of a motorcycle gang.

His zombie films were studies in masculinity, essentially black comedies that made their statements about American and western culture in the way society was seen to respond to the challenge of the undead.

In fact, the zombies themselves could be so secondary that they could disappear entirely. In The Crazies (1973), the film Romero made between Night and Dawn, they are replaced by living citizens driven insane by a biological weapon.

Dawn of the Dead is Romero’s masterpiece if for no other reason than its setting and the thematic possibilities that flow from it. The majority of the action takes place in a large supermarket mall.

The undead congregate there because shopping is their most salient memory, the one thing they dimly remember from when they lived and breathed.

Zombies shuffle around the stores and mall space in a grotesque if hilarious parody of their former consumerist selves, an effect enhanced by the continued playing of cheesy muzak on the public address system and the occasional prerecorded announcement of sales and specials.

When Romero made the film, mall culture was unknown to us Rotorua schoolboys.

For a generation who grew up outside New Zealand big cities Dawn of the Dead was a prophetic satire.

Today Rotorua’s CBD is grossly distorted, with a large shopping complex at one end of town, a collection of restaurants and pubs within sight of the lake and almost nothing in between.

In Hamilton, where I currently reside, the same trend is apparent. A once thriving central city is full of empty shops, Hamiltonians electing, like so-many Romero zombies, to trek out to Te Rapa’s The Base and wallow in the muck of crass consumerism. Even the muzak sounds the same.

It would be fair to say that much of what Romero did after Dawn of the Dead was disappointing. However, very few filmmakers could legitimately claim to have done what he did: invent a new genre.

The significance of Romero goes beyond the fact that his original zombie trilogy was remade or even the numerous parodies and homages it inspired. No subsequent director who has worked in his genre has approached it with anything like the master’s ambition.

Like all great artists, Romero threw a mirror up to society, exposing the capitalist nightmare.