Zombies walked the earth in cinema long before George A Romero got round to populating his movies with them. But they never had a cheerleader like this influential horror director, who has died aged 77 from lung cancer. His counterculture hit Night of the Living Dead (1968), which he also co-wrote, got the ball rolling.
The simple scenario – a group of misfits holed up in a farmhouse defend themselves from a zombie attack – suggested Rio Bravo with added putrefaction. Ironically, the word “zombie” isn’t mentioned in the film; Romero even contested this description of the story’s monsters. “I didn’t call them zombies and I didn’t think they were,” he said in 2013. “Because the traditional Haitian voodoo zombie is not dead. And I thought I was doing something completely new by having the dead rise. The recently dead. They’re too weak to dig themselves out of graves. They’re too weak to eat brains, because they’ll never crack the skull.” In spite of these objections, Romero is seen now as the godfather of a genre that is alive, or rather undead, and kicking.
It was not a lucrative corner of cinema when Romero made that first film, originally called Night of the Flesh Eaters, for only $114,000. But even now, its haunting black-and-white cinematography (modelled on Orson Welles’s Shakespeare films), detailed makeup and ingenious suspense lend it a chilling seriousness. “I wanted that stuff to look like newsreels, everything from the race riots in the south to police coming out with dogs,” Romero said. “I wanted it to look like all-American crisis footage.”
Much has been made of the casting, unusual for its time, of an African-American actor, Duane Jones, in the lead role. His presence as one of the besieged humans gave the picture an extra tinge of social commentary, particularly in light of the despairing ending, which sees the character mistakenly shot dead. The film became a popular fixture on the midnight film circuit, though Romero lost out financially when the distributor altered the title: the copyright pertained only to the original one.
There was a dramatic change of tone for Romero’s next zombie outing, Dawn of the Dead (1978), an anti-consumerist black comedy in which the undead plod through a huge shopping mall where a group of humans are hiding out and living it up in a materialistic fervour. Asked why the zombies are congregating there, one character replies: “Some kind of instinct. Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” The film was drenched in a sly, knowing humour – the incessant muzak seemed to be instrumental in keeping the zombies in their somnambulant state – and it was impossible not to notice that, give or take the decomposing flesh, the picture depicted what looked like a normal day in any American mall.
It was filmed in a functioning shopping centre near Pittsburgh. “We shot every night from 11pm until 7am, when we had to clear out,” he said. “We had a regular assembly-line established to make up the zombies, and there was a lot of competition among our extras about who would get a ‘special wound’, or get to be killed in a spectacular way, or get to eat human flesh. The shopping mall had one of those machines where you get four photos of yourself for a dollar, and there was always a line outside it; zombies taking their pictures.”
In contrast to its predecessor, Dawn of the Dead had a cultivated blandness that extended its satirical commentary into the realm of the visual. “With Dawn, I wanted to bring out the nature of the shopping centre, the retail displays, the mannequins. There are times when maybe you reflect that the mannequins are more attractive but less real – less sympathetic, even – than the zombies. Put those kinds of images side by side, and you raise all sorts of questions.” The film was remade, not to Romero’s liking, in 2004. He contributed a further four instalments to his own zombie cycle – Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2009) – though none had the impact of those first two.
Son of George and Ann, Romero was born in New York City, where his father was a commercial artist. He studied art and design at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, and continued working in that city for most of his career. After graduating, he and a group of friends started the production company Image Ten Prods, and made commercials and shorts. It was with the help of those friends that he rustled up the budget for Night of the Living Dead and paid for initial print and cinema hire costs.
After the success of that film, Romero made the drama There’s Always Vanilla (1971), Season of the Witch (1972), about a suburban witches’ coven, and the biological horror The Crazies (1973). His favourite among his own movies was Martin (1978), a strangely tender horror film which thrived on an intriguing central ambiguity: despite plentiful references to vampire lore, the lonely title character appears to be a serial killer with delusions of vampirism.
In between zombie movies, Romero also made Knightriders (1981), about travelling entertainers who stage jousting events; Creepshow (1982), a larky Hammer-style portmanteau film written by Stephen King; the tense Monkey Shines (1988), arguably his most frightening work, in which a quadriplegic man develops a dangerous psychological bond with the primate brought in to help him; and The Dark Half (1993), adapted from King’s novel about a writer whose pseudonymous alter ego takes on a malevolent life of his own.
Despite the part played by zombies in his success, Romero was reluctant to be associated too closely with that genre. “My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines. I don’t care what anybody else does.” Nevertheless, he was frank about any pop-culture phenomenon seen to be following in his footsteps. He likened the hit TV series The Walking Dead, which he had turned down an invitation to direct, to “a soap opera with an occasional zombie”.
He is survived by his third wife, Suzanne, and by three children, Tina, Andrew and Cameron.
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