LUCIDMEDIA

George A. Romero: Stuck in a Good Place

Written by Barrett Hooper Friday, 30 October 2009 14:35

When there’s no more room in hell, the dead shall walk the earth. Or, at least, downtown Toronto and not just at Halloween. Twice in the past two months, zombie fans have lurched, lumbered, moaned and bled their way through the city’s core. The first time was to celebrate the world premiere of Survival of the Dead, the sixth film in writer-director George A. Romero’s unending undead series. The second was to celebrate the Toronto Zombie Walk, and a Romero-inspired double feature of Night of the Comet and Zombie. Romero, of course, started the zombie craze with 1968’s no-budget classic Night of the Living Dead.

Admittedly, zombie movies aren’t everybody’s cup of Grand Guignol, but Romero isn’t your typical gore-obsessed cult filmmaker either. In fact, Romero is a lot like the wily old codger who lives next door. He’s a grandfatherly 69-year-old ex-hippie who got his start working on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. He was inspired to make horror films when he shot a segment in which the cardiganed kiddie show host got a tonsillectomy.

“I’m stuck in a good place,” says Romero of being pigeonholed as ‘that zombie guy.’

But beyond his resume there’s actually very little about Romero to indicate that he’s “that zombie guy.” There’s nothing even vaguely creepy about him, which is kind of disappointing, actually. He likes to have a pint at the local pub, go to the movies – Casablanca, Dr. Strangelove, High Noon and North by Northwest are among his favourites – and play board games. He’s been married twice and has two children. He’s incredibly tall, well above six feet, and he has thinning silver hair, a neatly trimmed beard, large Swifty Lazar-style glasses, and he smiles. A lot.

“None of us horror filmmakers – Wes Craven , John Carpenter – there’s not a weird guy in the bunch,” he says with a laugh. Stephen King, who wrote Romero’s Creepshow and The Dark Half, says that “we’ve all given our nightmares away and that’s why we’re so normal,” Romero continues. “It’s funny, man, people expect that I walk around in a cape and fangs and sleep in a coffin or something, and whenever I do a photo shoot for a magazine they always want to do it in a cemetery. It’s like they can’t separate the films from the filmmaker.”

For the past five years Romero has made his home in Toronto near the Distillery District, which provides him with “all the sophistication and advantages of New York and Chicago, while also being friendlier and more charming,” he says. It’s also the ideal city from which to spin his tales of the zombie apocalypse. “It’s the best filmmaking experience I’ve ever had working here.”

Romero grew up in the Bronx, “a poor Cuban kid getting beat up by the Italians, very West Side Story,” he says. He went to university in Pittsburgh, where he made his home for years and set his first three zombie movies. “When we started we were just a bunch of duffers with a few thousand dollars making a movie on the weekend,” he says of Night of the Living Dead. “We were children of the ‘60s and didn’t even know how to load the film in the camera. It was real guerrilla filmmaking. I’m still blown away that those early films are still so popular.”

On this last point I’m not sure if Romero is being genuine or unnecessarily modest. Anybody can throw blood and guts in front of a camera and call it horror. Romero focuses on telling stories. He makes socially conscious horror films, the Dead series in particular.

Buried beneath the basic “they’re us, we’re them” theme you’ll find bloody bits of metaphoric frisson: Night Of The Living Dead held a funhouse mirror to the societal turbulence of the Vietnam era; under the rotting flesh of Dawn Of The Dead was a pointed jab at the rampant consumerism of the 1970s; Day Of The Dead reflected the militaristic Reagan era. Romero, it turns out, is a social satirist whose medium just happens to involve decomposing cannibals. Yes, his films have brains.

“As movie monsters go, zombies are the most human. So we are confronted with ourselves in a way, which is much more frightening and disturbing. And the Dead films allow me to talk about things that a drama, say, won’t,” says Romero. “Dawn Of The Dead, which was set in a shopping mall, is on one level about consumerism; Land Of The Dead was a response to George W. Bush; Diary of the Dead was about the proliferation of the media into everyday life. It would be very hard to get funding for a drama that dealt directly with those issues, and audiences might not be as receptive to it. But horror films allow you to put these other layers into the story and be entertaining.”

Sure, it might be easy to dismiss his movies as mindless gore. And they may be ghettoized to the back shelf at Blockbuster. But among horror fans he’s Orson Welles. And in cinema circles he’s one of the most-influential filmmakers of the last 40 years.

Remember how after Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction came out every other movie was about pop culture-riffing gangsters and hitmen? Well, how many zombie movies have their been? Most of them put more effort into their titles than what came after – Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town, Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead – but a few have risen above the dregs: the relentless thriller 28 Days Later, the zombie rom-com Shaun of the Dead. Peter Jackson, an Oscar winner for Lord of the Rings, started out in zombies (Dead Alive), ditto Spider-Man’s Sam Raimi (Evil Dead). David Cronenberg’s exploration of the “new flesh” can be traced to the Dead films. Even Quentin Tarantino, the most-imitated director of the last 20 years, slips an extended zombie homage into Kill Bill Vol. 2 by burying Uma Thurman alive and having her claw her way out of the grave.

There are zombie video games, comic books and novels (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I kid you not). There’s even a documentary called Zombie Girl, about a 12-year-old in Austin who wrote and directed a feature-length zombie movie of her own. And most recently, Woody Harrelson went on an undead killing spree in the roadtrip comedy Zombieland. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Romero should be highly embarrassed by the attention.

Romero’s latest, Survival of the Dead, is a western-inflected zombie parable about feuding clans on an isolated island over-run with the undead. At issue are the zombies themselves: one family believes the dead should stay dead, while the other keeps their re-animated relatives chained up in the hopes of finding a cure. Entering the fray is a band of rogue soldiers trying to escape the zombie apocalypse in the outside world. Beneath it all is an undercurrent of growing sympathy for the plight of the zombies. “While I want audiences to find their own meaning in the stories, this one certainly has something to say about war and conflict, about what’s going on in the Middle East and North and South Korea,” says Romero, who never discusses his movies in terms of body counts or bloody special effects.

Yes, zombie movies are as unstoppable as any army of the undead. Likewise the godfather of gore, who continues to put his bloody, decomposing stump, er, stamp on the genre he helped create with the (literally) groundbreaking Night Of The Living Dead.