Why the undead live on
Today’s zombies have filmmaker George A. Romero to thank for their evergreen allure.
The dead walk so freely across our screens these days that it can be hard to recall a time when their appearance was a shock — when the sight of a single rotting, reanimated corpse, let alone a slowly advancing horde of them, could deliver a genuine frisson of terror.
Or, for that matter, when this eerie spectacle still felt rich, even full to bursting, with metaphoric possibilities. From the ongoing “World War Z” movie franchise to the ever-popular series “The Walking Dead,” from the hilarious “Shaun of the Dead” to the rather less inspired “Zombieland,” screen zombiedom has become its own self-perpetuating epidemic.
Good, bad and indifferent, it’s all testament to the legacy of George A. Romero, one of a few filmmakers who not only shaped a storytelling tradition, he virtually breathed it into being.
And well before his death Sunday at age 77, Romero, a consummate independent filmmaker and natural-born Hollywood skeptic, was not exactly timid in expressing his disapproval of the zombie renaissance his work had inspired.
He lamented the “Hollywood-ized” feel of “World
War Z” and dismissed “The Walking Dead” as “a soap opera with a zombie occasionally,” noting that both works had made it nearly impossible to get an edgier, lower-budget zombie movie financed. He likened Zack Snyder’s proficient 2004 “Dawn of the Dead” remake to a “video game” and criticized its fast-sprinting zombies (in lieu of Romero’s famously slow, shuff ling ones).
Some might argue that, like most genre pioneers, this master of modern horror had only himself to blame. When you create something as perfect and unforgettable as Romero’s 1968 monochrome masterpiece, “Night of the Living Dead,” and follow it with five sequels over the next four decades, imitators of every kind are only to be expected.
“Night of the Living Dead,” which Romero directed, co-wrote (with John Russo), shot and edited when he was only 28, was hardly the first zombie movie; that precedent is generally credited to 1932’s “White Zombie,” starring Béla Lugosi. But it was the first to conceive of a zombie uprising as a kind of homegrown apocalypse, the first to summon the dead from the grave en masse and set them on a lethargic but tireless quest for human flesh.
In Romero’s hands, a creature once rooted in farflung exotic realms of voodoo and mysticism had suddenly materialized, with shocking immediacy and no warning whatsoever, in America’s backyards.
Filmed on a tiny $114,000 budget near Pittsburgh (where most of his movies were shot), with unknown actors and a bare-bones technical rawness that give it the feel of an unvarnished nightmare, “Night” offered an irreducible metaphor for a country swallowing itself alive. Its pitiless violence spoke powerfully to an era that, still reeling from the casualties of Vietnam and the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., President John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, had become all too inured to the reality of senseless killing.
The movie’s parting shot — in which its protagonist, a black man named Ben (played by Duane Jones), is mistaken for a zombie and gunned down by vigilantes — remains one of the most racially and politically charged moments in horror cinema, and one that has only gained resonance. It was, as it is now, a prescient reminder that whatever may come clawing at our boarded-up windows, there are few truer monsters than men armed with guns, an unexamined sense of supremacy and a seemingly righteous cause.
That a zombie plague can be a vehicle for social critique is no longer the stuff of revelation. Nor, for that matter, do zombies hold a horror monopoly on subtext, as evidenced by movies as different as “Rosemary’s Baby” (released the same year as “Night of the Living Dead”), this year’s “Get Out” and the dread-soaked thrillers of Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. But it is difficult to think of another filmmaker who has so consistently and ingeniously exploited the sociopolitical underpinnings of his chosen bogeyman, particularly within the context of a single film series.
He was, to some extent, the victim of his signature achievement. The “Dead” films inevitably overshadowed other projects Romero tried his hand at, including 1973’s “Season of the Witch” and “The Crazies” (both of which would later be remade) and 1981’s “Knightriders,” a rare nonhorror Romero film that was an eccentric and lovingly crafted drama about a motorcycleriding Renaissance festival troupe starring Ed Harris and Romero’s then-wife, Christine Forrest (with a cameo by fellow horror maestro Stephen King).
A few days before his death, he was unveiling details about his next project, “George A. Romero Presents: Road of the Dead,” which he gleefully pitched as “‘Fast and the Furious’ with zombies.” (He was planning to produce, with his longtime collaborator Matt Birman directing.) Whatever the fate of that in-the-works project, and the surely innumerable zombie movies and entertainments still to come, there is something pleasing about the idea that we still haven’t seen the last of George Romero.