Horror authors, filmmakers and fans alike responded to the news of George A. Romero’s death today – aged 77, of lung cancer – as they would the loss of a beloved uncle. I am among them. He was a lovely, lovely man.
Taller than you’d expect, and prone to puncture his sentences with the cheesy snap of a Borscht Belt comedian – a tic, I’m sure, from growing up in the Bronx – Romero was a sweet-natured guy who spent his days trying to give people nightmares. And though his creative output over the decades was wildly uneven, the highs more than made up for the lows.
If the only film he’d made had been Night Of The Living Dead, that would have been enough to ensure a legacy. Produced by Romero in his new home base of Pittsburgh as a way for himself and his industrial-filmmaker friends to make a quick buck on the drive-in circuit, the 1968 indie classic created the zombie as we now understand it – a ravenous, shambling corpse that existed only to consume to the flesh of the living and spread the mysterious virus that causes the dead to rise – and launched an entire genre of survival horror.
Night was a massive success, though Romero and his partners didn’t see much of a return: their failure to include a copyright notice on the release prints immediately put the movie into the public domain. It ran for years, chilling audiences with a compellingly flat, documentary-like presentation of its horrifying narrative – and hitting home in America through the allegorical tension in the power struggle that breaks out between two of its human survivors, a capable Black man (Duane Jones) and an arrogant white man (Karl Hardman) convinced he knows better than anyone else in the room.
Romero spent decades downplaying his film having a Black hero – he always insisted that Jones was simply the best actor who auditioned, and that was that – but there’s no denying how radical the decision was at the time.
The sequels that complete the Living Dead trilogy, 1978’s Dawn Of The Dead and 1985’s Day Of The Dead, also found women and Black men lasting the longest against the undead threat … though the zombie pictures Romero made towards the end of his career, Land Of The Dead, Diary Of The Dead and Survival Of The Dead, are pretty white.
I could go on about Romero’s zombie movies. They define his storytelling style and encapsulate his strengths and weaknesses as a filmmaker beautifully, transitioning from grim, affectless horror to mordant satire to didactic, stilted social commentary. But the fans (myself included) were always willing to line up for the next one, in the hopes of seeing a return to classic form. Eventually, though, they were just about finding new ways to kill zombies.
And if that’s all he wanted to do, well, the guy had earned it. Living in Toronto for the last decade, doing convention panels and sitting down for multiple documentaries, Romero was a genial fixture on the horror scene – an eminence grise who carried himself with good humour and endless patience for geeky questions.
I sat down with him when Survival Of The Dead played TIFF in 2009, and it didn’t matter that I didn’t like the movie we had a great conversation about horror history and his new Canadian citizenship and everything in between.
He did more than zombie movies, of course. Between Night and Dawn there was The Crazies, a satirical thriller about a small town overtaken by a plague that causes violent madness, and Martin, a kitchen-sink psychological thriller about a young man (John Amplas) who believes he’s a vampire and acts accordingly.
Between Dawn and Day there was Knightriders, a weirdly personal road movie starring a baby-faced Ed Harris as the charismatic leader of a strange medieval-combat troupe that joust on motorcycles, and Creepshow, a Stephen King-scripted salute to 50s horror comics that boasted a fantastic cast including Hal Holbrook, Adrienne Barbeau, E.G. Marshall, Viveca Lindfors, Fritz Weaver and Ted Danson.
And between Day and the last Dead cycle, we got Monkey Shines, The Dark Half and Bruiser, all of which have intriguing concepts and flashes of disquieting power, but don’t quite pack the punch of Romero’s earlier work. He also contributed a one-hour adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Facts In The Case Of M. Waldermar to the anthology project Two Evil Eyes, but I’d rather that one just sort of slide down the memory hole.
No, it’s the zombie movies that guarantee Romero’s immortality. His conception of the zombie was (and still is) the perfect modern monster, an inexpressive, implacable menace that can represent any perceived societal threat, from conformity to consumerism to fascism.
Hundreds if not thousands of films can be traced back to Night, among them an entire Italian subgenre of cannibal cinema. But there’s respectable stuff too: Dan O’Bannon’s punk apocalypse The Return Of The Living Dead, which argued that Romero’s film was, like, based on a totally true story, and also introduced us to the fast zombies who’d chase after the casts of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s knockout reworking of Dawn Of The Dead before Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg brought back the classic Romero model for their masterfully self-aware Shaun Of The Dead.
Since then it’s been a push and pull between old-school shamblers and raging runners, though Romero himself has always gone with the slow walkers. Which of course brings us to Robert Kirkman’s comic book The Walking Dead, itself the basis for the long-running cable series that plays like an endless game of What Would George Do?
Well, as long as there are zombies, we will know George’s answer: shoot ’em in the head. They’re dead, they’re all messed up.
I’ll miss the big guy. Our nightmares will be a little safer without him, and a lot poorer.
