The not-so-quick and the dead
Posted on Sunday, June 8, 2008
George Romero has a bone to pick with the competition.
The question is: Can a zombie run ? They’ve been quick on their fetid feet in several movies lately. But Romero says no, “the dead can’t run,” and he ought to know. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968 ) created the modern subgenre of movies about the walking dead. His zombies shamble the way he insists a ghoul should. They lurch through all five of the zombie movies that Romero has made so far, including the latest, Diary of the Dead (2007 ), new on DVD. But his gruesome vision has given rise to many other zombie pictures by other grasping hands. The computer-generated dead go like rabid rabbits in last year’s I Am Legend.
A “rage virus” puts the zoom in zombie in 28 Days Later (2002 ), and they tear through the sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007 ). Romero says don’t believe it. “Their ankles would break,” is Romero’s stand. “It doesn’t make sense to me.” He sets things straight with a, well — running joke in Diary of the Dead. Live people discover they have some advantage over the rotted, just in being able to hustle their heels. “The dead move slowly,” Romero directs. “But they keep coming.” Romero, 68, hardly looks like he’s out to get anybody. His glasses are the big, black-frame kind that made people think of Clark Kent as mild-mannered. His hair is grandfather white. But he pals around with horror novelist Stephen King.
“I go to [horror ] movies with Stephen King,” he says, “and the gore stuff — the stuff that has people [throwing up ] in the aisles — we’re giggling.” The two collaborated on Creepshow (1982 ) and The Dark Half (1993 ), based on King’s stories. Romero’s other movies include Knightriders (1981 ), with Ed Harris as a modernday knight on a motorcycle; and Monkey Shines (1988 ), about a jealous simian with a razor. His zombie movies, though, are as movie critic Roger Ebert described the work years ago: “something else.” Each is Romero’s comment on changes in the cultural landscape — a 40-year history of America as seen through dead eyes, and punctuated by the crunch of zombie teeth on people’s toes. “It’s a bit of a morality tale,” Romero says. “It’s a bit of taking a sociopolitical shot at what’s going on.” FIRST BITE Romero learned his trade from making TV commercials in Pittsburgh. He and some friends scraped up $ 100, 000 to film the black-and-white shocker, Night of the Living Dead, for the fun of it.
The idea came from Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, I Am Legend, Romero admits. “I ripped off Night of the Living Dead from the original novel.” Matheson’s novel is about the last man in a world of vampires. The story has been filmed three times — as The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price (1964 ), The Omega Man with Charlton Heston (1971 ), and the latest (2007 ) film with Will Smith.
“It’s never been done properly,” Romero says.
Romero came up with his own monsters in place of Matheson’s neck-nippers to avoid a “direct knockoff.” But he stuck with the general idea of isolated, ordinary people on the run from their worst nightmares — not through the cobwebs and creepy castles of an old-fashioned horror show, but in present-day suburbia.
A radio newscast tells the situation “There is an epidemic of mass murder being committed by a virtual army of unidentified assassins,” the announcer intones in Romero and John Russo’s screenplay. “The murders are taking place in villages and cities, in rural homes and suburbs with no apparent pattern nor reason... We have some descriptions of the assassins. Eyewitnesses say they are ordinary-looking people.” Later, a news reporter asks the sheriff if the ravagers are walking corpses.
“Yeah, they’re dead. They’re all messed up,” the sheriff answers, and goes on to recommend: “Shoot ‘em in the head... Beat ‘ em or burn ‘ em. They go up pretty easy.” The 40 th-anniversary DVD edition of Night of the Living Dead is another new release. The film is a cultural keepsake, enshrined among the classics in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry.
It still scares. But few of today’s home viewers are apt to imagine how deeply it terrified yesterday’s movie crowds. The film’s grainy look called to mind TV news coverage of the bloodshed in Vietnam. The zombies looked like people dazed by changing times. Friends bit friends as if to show that you can’t trust anybody. Romero seemed unaware that even a horror movie was supposed to turn out OK.
Reader’s Digest ran a warning from Ebert to keep children away from Romero’s idea of fun.
“I don’t think the younger kids really knew what hit them,” Ebert wrote. “They’d seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else. This was ghouls eating people up — and you could actually see what they were eating. This was little girls killing their mothers. This was being set on fire. Worst of all, even the hero got killed... I felt real terror in that neighborhood theater.” (Ebert added later that he “admired the movie itself.” His essay wasn’t a review, he said, but a description of the movie’s effect on crying children in those days before Hollywood’s rating system. )
BACK FOR SECONDS Romero says Night of the Living Dead was the only time he meant for his zombies to scare the living daylights out of people. Other times, other zombies, “I see it more like Raiders of the Lost Ark,” he says. “It’s meant to be fun. It’s not meant to get into your gut.” Want a scary movie ? He recommends Alien (1979 ). But the idea that dead people in search of a bite to eat aren’t so bad, after all, is apt to come as news to anyone who ever cringed through one of Romero’s picnics: In Dawn of the Dead (1978 — 10 years after the original ), people take refuge in a shopping mall, but the mall itself attracts the dead. The survivors debate why.
“Some kind of instinct,” is the answer. “Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” In Day of the Dead (1985 ), people have to live underground. Zombies have taken over the surface world, and they’re getting smarter. The zombies aren’t a plague, but worse — a revolution. In Land of the Dead (2005 ), the zombies seem to have won. The few people left don’t stick together — they break into social classes. The poor get eaten first.
Who wants to see the last living bone crack ? Not even Romero.
His latest zombie rampage, Diary of the Dead, “goes back to the first night by choice,” he says. It’s back to the same idea that nipped him in the first place: What would you do if the dead walked the earth right now ? The newest movie’s answer is that people would take pictures of the carnage. Detached from everything but their electronics, they would keep the camera going to the last moment, when truth and teeth sink in.
DESSERT A “making of” feature attached to the Diary of the Dead video shows that Romero runs a happy set. People beg him to be zombies, and he presides over his slavering hordes like Santa Claus over the elves. He appears on his way to becoming a respected figure — beloved, even. “I hope not,” he says. “I preferred having Roger Ebert throwing knives at me.” He tells his cast and crew, “It’s only a movie,” but he keeps in secret a plan of how this just-amovie is going to look. It’s something else when the scene cuts, and you don’t see the zombie and his victim share a laugh as they get up from the fake blood.
“It really comes down to somebody having a vision — somebody steering the ship,” Romero says. “Like in comedy, you need to be a funny guy.” Romero’s vision has been as infectious as a zombie’s chomp. Night of the Living Dead (1990 ) is a remake he approved, and Dawn of the Dead (2004 ) is a remake he calls “the biggest sin” for its walking dead that run.
Shaun of the Dead (2004 ) is a parody. Marvel Zombies is a comic-book series in which Captain America and Spider-Man turn into zombies. Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a bestselling novel. And now showing in most obscure houses, Poultrygeist: Night of the Living Chicken is anybody’s guess.
Romero looks back to Night of the Living Dead, the start of it all.
“All I see in the film now is all the little mistakes,” he says. “I was going for a mood of creepiness.” Maybe It could have been creepier.
He has made much more expensive movies since then, and better-crafted movies, and if the deal comes together, pretty soon another zombie movie.
Still and all, “I have never recaptured the innocence of the first one,” he says.
What ? — what ? — innocence ?
“Artistic innocence,” Romero says. “You can’t ever get back to that.”
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