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Return of the Living Dead: A Profile of George A. Romero

As Zombies: Dawn of the Dead receives a rare UK screening, Tony Earnshaw assesses the legacy of ‘zombie king' George A. Romero.

The most upsetting element in the blood-spattered, severed limb-littered remake of the modern horror classic that was 2004's Dawn of the Dead was not its Grand Guignol gore nor the frenetic pace of its plotting.

Instead it was the giveaway credit “Based on a screenplay by George A. Romero”. It should have been a good thing – Romero is, after all, the highly skilled and imaginative filmmaker who made the daddy of all pulse-pounding zombie flicks with Night of the Living Dead back in 1968.

Few have followed him since but those that have – among them John ( Halloween ) Carpenter and Tobe ( Texas Chain Saw Massacre ) Hooper – have been cast aside. Like Romero, they can't get arrested these days, yet studios are queuing up to remake their pictures.

New Yorker Romero, now 65, has made 13 deeply unsettling films, but the discomfort they cause stems not necessarily from their horror or gore content, but from the dark underbelly of human unease that exists at their cores.

The man who turned the horror genre on its head in 1968 with the release of Night of the Living Dead has much to answer for, not least the unequivocal demolition of the cosy Hammer-style horrors the world had come to rely on for its frights.

The emergence of Night forced a major re-evaluation of horror, and moviegoers and critics alike began a swift retreat away from florid, puffy-faced vampires and wild-eyed mad scientists into another world in which the monsters were still monsters but where the real villains were ordinary men and women thrust into extraordinary situations beyond their comprehension or control.

Romero made his name with his ‘Zombie Trilogy' of Night of the Living Dead , 1979's Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead , released in 1985, but his patchy career has also produced a back catalogue of rarely seen movies that are also worthy of more than just a casual video rewind.

Those people ignorant of Romero and his work view him from a distance as a hack horror director, the man who made a living from turning out, every eight years or so, a splatter film in which shuffling legions of the living dead are used as mobile target practice by trigger happy humans.

That aspect is, admittedly, part of the set-up of all Romero's zombie films, but all three have that essential mood of panicky dread and creeping disquiet which is more frightening than any of the shock effects or scenes of bloodletting.

Of the three films, Night is the most negative. Its protagonists are holed up in a wooden farmhouse, surrounded by ever increasing numbers of the living dead. One by one they are whittled down until, in a fine shock finale, the film's hero is mistakenly shot dead by gung-ho human vigilantes clearing up the countryside of flesh-eating ghouls.

In Dawn , four friends flee the disintegrating social order of Philadelphia and seek refuge in a giant rural shopping mall, where the only consumers are hundreds of zombies. Their initial plan is to rest; stock up with supplies and move on, but they are seduced by the riches on offer. They take over the mall, dispatch its wandering inhabitants, and begin a new life of strained ‘normality'.

Their idyll is destroyed by an invasion of Hell's Angels culminating in a pitched gunfight in which the only real winners are the omnipresent zombies.

In Day society has irretrievably broken down, and the story centres around a disparate group of soldiers and scientists hiding deep underground in a military bunker. With hordes of zombies on the outside, tensions inside reach crisis point, climaxing in a stand-off between the survivors as the base is overrun by the living dead.

Romero's message in his films is an allegory based around the destruction of one society and the formation of another. The living dead and their human antagonists are merely the hook on which the allegory is hung.

The best example of the three films is Dawn of the Dead (aka Zombies: Dawn of the Dead in the UK), a colourful and outrageous, often cartoonish, combination of visceral gore effects and graphic violence but which is also a wickedly funny satire on American consumerism.

The zombies in Dawn gravitate to the places they found important in life: shops, schools, offices. In the mall they stare mindlessly at shop windows full of goods now pointless and meaningless. They flail around on moving escalators, going nowhere.

“Why do they come here?” asks one character. “Memory. Instinct. What they used to do. This was an important place in their lives,” comes the reply. “They're after the place,” says the hero. “They don't know why, they just remember – remember that they wanna be in here. They're us, that's all.”

The most telling aspect about Romero's approach to his horror films is in his choice of leading players. In Night and Dawn , the main characters were intelligent and resourceful black men – the late Duane Jones and Ken Foree, respectively - while in Day the voice of reason went to white actress Lori Cardille.

The heavies, notwithstanding the zombies, were predominantly white males – a racist coward in Night , a redneck SWAT trooper and assorted Hell's Angels in Dawn and a psychotic army captain in Day .

Allied to the good guy/bad guy dynamic is the characterisation and casting – all Romero's best (i.e. cult) films featured unknowns, while his more recent, commercial (and largely unsuccessful) vehicles have been deliberate in their use of recognisable character actors.

One trial Romero has faced with all his horror movies has been censorship. In 1979 the Motion Picture Association of America released Dawn of the Dead without a rating and it survived in its original form; in the UK the British Board of Film Classification trimmed ten minutes of gruesome footage including an early scene of a head blown apart by a shotgun blast, a decapitation and a zombie's head cleaved in two by a machete-wielding biker.

The movie was also affected by the draconian 1980s ‘video nasty' crackdown, and when it was re-released to video some years later it had been sanitised even further.

In the 20 years since Day of the Dead was released, Romero has drifted through endless seas, seemingly lost. In those two decades he has directed just four features - the most recent, a bizarre thriller entitled Bruiser completed in 2000, remains unreleased in Britain.

During that period his films have been given the remake treatment. Night of the Living Dead was remade in colour in 1990, and Dawn of the Dead was lovingly ‘re-envisioned' last year.

Yet while his output was being reworked – a British spoof/tribute, Shaun of the Dead , hit cinema screens last summer – Romero had the script of a fourth zombie film, Twilight of the Dead , up his sleeve. Re-titled Land of the Dead , the $15 million film began shooting in Toronto last autumn with Dennis Hopper, John Leguizamo and Asia Argento in the leads. In it the legions of the undead have taken over the world, with the last remnants of humanity living under siege in a giant walled city.

Romero's name has also been linked to three new projects: The Ill , The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and Diamond Dead , all slated for production sometime in 2005.

Thirty-seven years after Night of the Living Dead , George A. Romero looks set to emerge from semi-retirement. In terms of biting, intelligent horror movies, it can't happen quickly enough.

George A. Romero - Films as Director

1968 Night of the Living Dead
1972 There's Always Vanilla
1972 Season of the Witch
1973 The Crazies
1977 Martin
1978 Dawn of the Dead
1981 Knightriders
1982 Creepshow
1985 Day of the Dead
1988 Monkey Shines
1990 Two Evil Eyes
1993 The Dark Half
2000 Bruiser
2005 Land of the Dead

In preparation

2005 The Ill
2005 Diamond Dead
2005 The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Official website: www.georgearomero.com