Movie Eater

Is George Romero the most influential filmmaker?

By D.K. Holm

A onetime obscure Pittsburgh commercial filmmaker, George Romero may end up being the most influential filmmaker of the past century. His eerie low budget horror film from 1968, Night of the Living Dead (itself unofficially inspired by the even more obscure regional horror film Carnival of Souls), sparked a new enthusiasm for more realistic and truly scary movies. It’s arguable that Romero’s films kicked off the mania for zombie movies that held Italy in thrall for most of the 1980s. Almost all of John Carpenter’s horror films are unofficial remakes or variations on the zombie tale as told by Romero. And about every seven years, like a Disney re-release, Romero is discovered again, either through remakes (Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later in 2002, Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead in 2004), or by getting to make a film of his own (Land of the Dead, 2005). Most horror films these days, regardless of their ostensible theme, are really zombie movies, such as the Resident Evil series.

His influence is almost invisible to mainstream culture, however. Most of what Romero does is off to the sides. He writes a lot of graphic novels (formerly known as comic books). He makes webcasts and games and helps other filmmakers with their projects. But he is not popular among ordinary moviegoers. His constituency is the horror and fantasy specialists who have grown in force since the 1970s. Outsiders at heart, they have no interest in the well-made Hollywood film, in weekly product or the grosses. They are captivated by regional horror filmmakers whose visual crudeness is a symbol of their honesty and integrity. Fanzines such as Fangoria

cater to their extreme tastes in horror and violence, and with the rise of the Internet and the power of the San Diego and other comic book conventions, they have become a unified (if internally contentious) force. Thanks to certain powerful websites with insider cachet that cater to their tastes, these fans can now have a modest (if exaggerated) impact on their favorite directors and genres and in getting attention from the studios. They can band together and get cancelled TV shows resurrected. Eli Roth and other young directors are also the beneficiary of this 30-year build-up of a fan base. Except for the recent mainstream revulsion from what it decided to call “torture porn” (which is easily found on DVD anyway if you really want to indulge in it), young directors such as Roth and Snyder have been mainstreamed. The zombie movie has evolved into something else, a flagship genre of horror and a template for all others.

The first zombie movie was White Zombie with Bela Lugosi back in 1932, and besides I Walked with a Zombie, it is probably the only truly accurate onscreen portrayal of zombies, since it is really about living people zombified into slave-like states to be controlled by others. This notion didn’t catch on. What really excited people, apparently, was a dull-witted monster slowly chasing a rent-garbed damsel through a moonlit misty wood. Romero’s fashion in zombies (in his definition, corpses reanimated as consumers and zombifiers of the living) harked back to the 1930s, and the bumbling march of Frankenstein and the slow limping gait of the Mummy. Both slow-walkers eventually managed to catch up to their prey. 28 Days Later (which is about a rampaging disease) introduced a new variant—superfast zombies who move faster than human beings. Day of the Dead (one of the at least two zombie movies slated to come out in March) has added a new skill: the ability to crawl along the ceiling, like possessed beings in Exorcist-influenced movies.

Both these new zombie movies are Romero-influenced. Spring 2008’s Day of the Dead is a remake of Romero’s 1985 third leg of his ad hoc then-trilogy. He is credited as screenwriter, but it is not clear how much he contributed to the text of the script, which has little to do with the original Day of the Dead, which showed the military studying the zombies as a phenomenon. The second film is Diary of the Dead, which, as it’s directed by Romero, adds a fifth film to his personal zombie series. Yet, it is as up-to-date as any other zombie film, coming in vid-diary form that on the surface was probably inspired by the end moments of Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, but which is going to remind people of Cloverfield or Blair Witch Project.

Romero’s ambition as a social commentator almost disguises the fact that he is terrible director. Though on the one hand he wants to point out the invisible ironies of racism in moments of crisis, he cannot direct actors. He aspires to reflect on America’s addiction to consumerism, but cannot shoot a film above the pedestrian level. He wants to decry military intervention in daily life, but cannot adequately light or record the sound for such scenes.

Also, if one steps back from that fascination with Romero’s zombies that one may have had since adolescence, one is confused by what the zombies are supposed to “mean” (or how their meaninglessness is meaningful). It doesn’t seem that Romero’s vision becomes more coherent through five films, but that simply he comes up with new social comments to make and new innovations for his monsters. In Diary of the Dead, Romero desperately wishes to make some kind of meaningful comment on the media (with even some meta-criticism the media’s past variations on the zombie genre he invented), but he has made not much more than another teen horror film, tricked out with the latest self-promoting technology. Presented as assembled found-film, it’s more like De Palma’s latest, Redacted. We can no longer make films. We can only make films about films. We have all become Godardians now.

Day of the Dead is a more conventional horror film, with direction credited to Steve Miner, an old hand at ‘80s slasher films. Much like other similar films we’ve seen lately, a group mixing military and civilian people, led by soldier Sarah (Mena Suvari), attempt to get out of a quarantined city that is zombifying. Much of the film takes place at night, so we don’t get much of a good look at anything anyway. The film is up-to-date. About 25 minutes in, a CSI moment shows how a human being is biologically converted to a zombie. Its only connection with the original Day of the Dead is Sarah’s interest in a zombie who seems to have some form of sentience (perhaps because he was a vegan in real life).

The assumed reason for going to a horror film is to get scared, presumably on the grounds that the experience is cathartic. But when horror film after horror film is produced today just as the fans of thirty years ago accused Hollywood films of being produced—as cookie-cutter films with no imagination—then the horror nerds have become what they saw. If zombie films are supposed to coast on their thematic concerns, then the complete breakdown of society (or the haves versus the have nots) isn’t particularly evocative or original. Iraq, or any war during the era in which a zombie film was made, is an obvious analog: horror films have a tradition of commenting on social problems before the major studios do. But contemporary audiences don’t seem to be particularly interested in Iraq. The zombie film may be an example of a horror genre that not all that many people are truly interested in, but which keeps getting offered up to us because of the power of fans to promote their making. These fans’ obsession, yearning, advocacy, and mania of such films is zombie-like itself.