Remembering George A. Romero, Master of the Undead

March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments

The next time you watch George A. Romero’s classic 1968 creepshow Night of the Living Dead, do your best not to look away. It won’t be easy, as the zombie-zeitgeist-defining shocker—filmed in stark black-and-white, and populated with terrifyingly dead-eyed human-hunters—still has the power to unnerve, nearly 50 years after its release. But take a closer look, and you might get a sense of just how much low-budget derring-do and luck was involved in making one of the most epochal horror films of all time. “There’s a copy of the script visible in one of the frames!” Romero told the New York Times last year. “I won’t tell where. It will be a little challenge for fans to spot it.”

Romero, who died Sunday at the age of 77 after a brief bout with lung cancer, directed several smart-schlock joy-rides during his decades-long stint as a director and writer, including 1973’s bio-shock thriller The Crazies, the 1978 blood-sucking drama Martin, and 1982’s lovingly yucky comics adaptation Creepshow. But his long-running career was always better off dead, thanks to a series of socially minded zombie movies that began with Night—which Romero and a bunch of friends shot in rural Pennsylvania at a reported cost of just $114,000. (The production was so commando that, at one point, a member of the film’s production team borrowed his mother’s car to shoot a scene, and wound up smashing the windshield; he repaired the damage before she could find out).

Romero didn’t invent the zombie movie, but he did reanimate it, using cheap-but-effective effects, patient camerawork, and amateur actors to give the movie an almost documentary-like urgency. As a result, Night went on to earn millions at drive-ins and college theaters across the country, making it one of the biggest independent smashes of the century, and a clear influence on everything from 28 Days Later to World War Z to The Walking Dead.

Still, it wasn’t just the movie’s eerily determined flesh-eaters that made Night of the Living Dead a hit; it was the suffocating on- and off-screen mood it captured. Released during one of the most divisive and paranoia-prone years of the ’60s, Night climaxed with a harrowing finale, in which an African-American survivor (played by Duane Jones) survives a bloody night of zombie-fighting—only to be shot dead by a white gunman. It was a savage bit of social commentary snuck into a midnight movie, and though Romero maintained that the movie wasn’t supposed to be a racial allegory, Night nonetheless proved that horror films were an ideal vessel with which to examine the nightmares of our real world. As Get Out writer-director Jordan Peele noted earlier this year, “the way [Night of the Living Dead] handles race is so essential to what makes it great.”

Romero would make five follow-ups to his shambling breakout, and though 1985’s barf-cajoling Day of the Dead and 2005’s Land of the Dead were both gross, groovy B-movie fun, his greatest work was 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, which followed a team of survivors as they hid out in a zombie-infested shopping mall. Dawn’s anti-consumerism message was a hoot, and the movie could have functioned as pure camp alone—except it remains downright terrifying, full of anatomically detailed gore (all hail gross-out king Tom Savini!), believably desperate heroes (and baddies), and hordes of lurching, formerly luxury-seeking zombies whose dead-eyed lust for more, more, more! seemed awfully human. Dawn comes to mind every time I drive by an empty shopping center, or gaze at a dead-mall photo gallery, and it proved that few other filmmakers understood our base desires—and their ruinous effects—quite as well as Romero. "When there's no more room in hell,” a character says in the movie’s most famous quote, “the dead will walk the Earth." Thanks to Romero, we all got to experience that hell from a safe, scared-brainless distance.