Grandfather of the Dead: A George A. Romero Retrospective
by Stephanie Scaife
You can’t very well have a celebration of the zombie movie without talking about George A. Romero, the undeniable master of this eminent yet oft maligned horror sub-genre. Although the zombie in various incarnations had been a firm fixture in horror and exploitation films since the 1930’s it wasn’t until Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) that the zombie we all know and love today was officially born.
Romero’s zombies were cannibals, with a seemingly insatiable appetite for human flesh. They weren’t monsters in the traditional sense or controlled by some sort of voodoo magic, they were your friends, neighbours and loved ones. This idea was heavily influenced by Romero’s love of Richard Matheson’s seminal post-apocalyptic novel I Am Legend and it offered something fresh and new to how zombies were portrayed on film. It was firmly grounded in very real and tangible fears and when combined with a cinéma vérité style of filmmaking and convincingly naturalistic gore effects (made using real offal that was supplied by one of the actors who also worked as a butcher) it was unlike anything the cinema going public had witnessed before. This wasn’t a Universal monster movie or the outrageous excesses of Herschell Gordon Lewis. This was decidedly more authentic and the fact that it was so ordinary and relatable to real life was what made it all the more terrifying to the viewer.
There were also the obvious socio-political overtones to Night of the Living Dead, another factor hitherto unseen within the horror genre, but with a backdrop of the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King and the public consensus particularly amongst the young of disillusionment with the American government it’s no surprise that Romero and other young filmmakers, such as Wes Craven with Last House on the Left, chose to use horror in the films they made as a statement about the real life horrors surrounding them and in the media at the time. Yet another first for Night of the Living Dead was that the central protagonist, Ben (Duane Jones), was portrayed by an African American actor, which in 1968 was almost completely unheard of. Although, Romero has said in the past that Jones was cast purely for giving the best audition, it’s hard to deny that it doesn’t add a certain amount of gravity of the final scenes in which he is killed by local police and rednecks, especially against the backdrop of the civil rights movement at the time.
Night of the Living Dead was a huge success for Romero, something that he would struggle to regain over the ten years following. Although never achieving much in the way of financial success during the early 70’s Romero did produce some of this best work during this period, including pseudo-zombie film The Crazies (1973) about a virus created for biological warfare named that gets into the water supply of a small town, turning the inhabitants into homicidal maniacs. Then later came my favourite of Romero’s films, Martin (1977) and ambiguous vampire film that is also notable for being Romero’s first time working with Tom Savini, who had previously worked as a combat photographer in Vietnam before getting into special make-up effects which perhaps helps explain his hyper realistic approach to gore and viscera.
Not wanting to get typecast as a director of zombie movies (oh the irony!) it wasn’t until 1978, a full decade after making Night of the Living Dead that Romero returned to the genre and made Dawn of the Dead, which would become his most critically and commercially successful film to date. It is set in a world that, despite the difference in time period, is apparently in the immediate aftermath of Night of the Living Dead where the zombie epidemic is on a much larger scale and has spread across America. It is also far more humorous than its predecessor, even including a few slapstick moments such as the biker zombie cream pie fight, despite upping the ante as far as the gore was concerned.
Dawn of the Dead centres on a group of survivors who end up taking refuge in a large shopping mall, it was shot in the Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania which had provided the initial inspiration for the film when Romero was given a tour by a friend who owned the development company. After writing the initial screenplay for the film Romero was unable to secure funding in the United States, wind of this made its way to Dario Argento, Italian master of giallo and fan of Night of the Living Dead who offered to help Romero secure the funding in exchange for the European distribution rights. Romero completed the script whilst staying in Rome at the request of Argento who also re-edited the film for the European market, removing a lot of the humour and adding the requisite Goblin soundtrack. This was the start of a friendship between the pair that would see them working together on Two Evil Eyes (1990) and the recent announcement that Romeo is currently working on a remake of Argento’s Deep Red (1975).
Dawn of the Dead retains Romero’s preoccupation with using the horror film as a critique of modern society and its problems. With Night of the Living dead there were obvious parallels with the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, and then in Dawn of the Dead it was big corporate companies and their encouragement of consumerism, along with the gleeful abandon with which it was embraced in the late 1970’s. Dawn of the Dead is perhaps the quintessential zombie film; it is widely accepted as a classic within the genre, spawning innumerable imitations over the years as well as a remake in 2004 and it remains a firm favourite amongst fans.
Romero concluded his trilogy of the dead in 1985 with Day of the Dead which is my personal favourite of the three as well as being, unfortunately, the last truly great film that Romero has made. It also features one of the greatest opening sequences of any film I’ve seen. This time around the zombies have almost entirely taken over and they are far more decrepit and decayed than in the previous films, the first zombie you see is missing his jaw and shuffles along with his distended and bloody tongue lolling around to gruesome effect. It is a clear step up in the special effects from the panda eyes of Night of the Living Dead and grey painted faces of Dawn of the Dead. By this point Tom Savini had well and truly honed in his skills and firmly cemented himself as a kind of gore maestro within the horror genre.
Day of the Dead is Romero’s most nihilistic film in the trilogy, despite the uncharacteristically upbeat ending. It centres on a military-supported scientific team assigned to study the zombie outbreak in the hopes of finding a way of curing or reversing the process. As was the recurring theme of the trilogy, the protagonists are trapped (literally and metaphorically) in an increasingly hopeless situation, Night was in a house, Dawn was in a shopping mall and Day was set in a cavernous and labyrinthine underground military bunker. Day is also notable for the inclusion of Bub, who in an interesting twist is both a zombie and they most sympathetic character in the film. Bub is a zombie who has been “trained” to be docile and seems to remember certain things about his life before. There is something very childlike about the character and the audience is encouraged to root for him, begging the question; what sort of society do we live in where the living dead become more human than the survivors? Inhumanity is the central conceit to Day of the Dead, where we see infighting amongst the survivors who are beginning to realise just how hopeless and futile their work has become, not to mention some of the grotesque experiments that have been carried out on the living dead.
Irrefutably the pioneer of the contemporary zombie film, Romero changed the face of horror cinema and pushed its boundaries to the extreme. His films were proof that horror films didn’t need to be perfunctory or play solely to the lowest common denominator, he showed that they could be smart, socially and politically aware and achieve critical acclaim, something for which all connoisseurs of the genre should be thankful for.
