Born: February 4, 1940
Died: July 16, 2017
GEORGE A Romero, who has died aged 77, can lay claim to have reinvented the horror movie genre in the late 1960s with his debut film, one of the most influential movies of the last half-century.
His 1968 film Night of the Living Dead was a cheaply-made, gory, black and white movie that played in drive-ins, but its radical edge and its willingness to ignore the Gothic window dressing of the genre offered a new model for the genre.
His films not only gave the genre a shot in the arm, they also proved that you didn’t need Hollywood budgets to find an audience, inspiring generations of film-makers including Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Britain’s Edgar Wright and Jordan Peele, director of this year’s biggest horror success Get Out. “It’s fair to say that without George A. Romero, I would not have the career I have now,” Wright, the director of Sean of the Dead and Baby Driver, wrote yesterday.
Born in the Bronx, Romero moved to Pittsburgh to go to university and after graduating began his career as an industrial film-maker shooting commercials. He and a group of friends set up Ten Productions in the late 1960s and Night of the Living Dead was his first feature film. It cost $114,000 and made $50m (not that Romero saw much of that). Critics wrote it off as blood and gore and nothing more. “Unrelieved sadism,” one review argued, “which casts serious aspersions on the integrity of its makers.”
The story of a group of people trapped in a house surrounded by zombies (called “ghouls” in the film), it was a film that certainly didn’t stint on bloody mayhem. But it also offered a sly and angry take on the politics of 1960s America. By making its hero a black man Romero’s film was a response to the violent, at times deadly, fight for civil rights in the US and the ongoing Vietnam conflict.
“We were Sixties guys and we were injecting anger into the film, particularly in the final scenes,” Romero once told the Daily Telegraph. “A group of us was driving to New York when it came in on the radio that Martin Luther King Jnr had been assassinated. We thought we’d be in trouble because we had a black guy in the movie [played by Duane Jones] who gets shot.”
It took him a decade to make a follow-up, Dawn of the Dead, and if anything, it was even more radical. Set in an abandoned mall, it was effectively an all-out attack on consumerism as zombies returned to the place they knew best when they were alive.
It was also even more violent than its predecessor. Deliberately so. “If nobody walked out, it wouldn’t be the movie I wanted to make,” Romero said.
The politics were hard to avoid even amidst the violence and by the time of the third film, Day of the Dead, Romero’s sympathies were firmly with the zombies.
Film critic Robin Wood, one of Romero’s most outspoken advocates said of the director’s zombie films: “It is perhaps the lingering intellectual distrust of the horror genre that has prevented George Romero’s ‘living dead’ trilogy from receiving full recognition for what it undoubtedly is, one of the most remarkable and audacious achievements of modern American cinema, and the most uncompromising critique of contemporary America (and, by extension, Western capitalist society in general) that is possible within the terms and conditions of a ‘popular entertainment’ medium.’”
Romero was, to some degree, a victim of his own success. His attempts to break out of the horror genre – most notably the 1981 film Knightriders, about a medieval re-enactment troupe starring Ed Harris, failed to find a significant audience. As a result, despite a couple of flirtations with Hollywood, he remained an outsider film-maker.
He did write and direct other horror films, most notably The Crazies, remade in 2010, and Martin, perhaps his best film, a potent, disturbing, painful character study about a lonely, deluded young man who thinks he’s a vampire. There was also the anthology horror film Creepshow, written by Stephen King, and something of a tribute to the 1950s EC Comics.
But it was his zombie films that were to be his legacy.
Between 2005 and 2009 he made a further three zombie films, none of them as effective or as successful as the original trilogy. None of them as innovative either. Diary of the Dead (2007) saw him playing with the found footage approach popularised by The Blair Witch Project.
But by then his original films had thoroughly infected the genre anyway. Without Night of the Living Dead there would have been no Sean of the Dead or 28 Days Later. It was Romero who did more to strip away the cobwebby trappings and locate the genre firmly in the here and now. Speaking of his approach to monsters, he once said, “all I did was I took them out of ‘exotica’ and I made them the neighbours.”
Romero is survived by his wife Suzanne, his daughter Tina, his son Andrew and, from his earlier marriage to Christiane, his son Cam. “He died peacefully in his sleep, following a brief but aggressive battle with lung cancer,” his family said in a statement. He was listening to the score of The Quiet Man at the end.
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