In George A. Romero’s coruscating, seminal 1968 debut, The Night Of The Living Dead, two groups of people barricade themselves into a Pennsylvanian farmhouse to fend off reanimated cannibalistic hordes of the recently deceased. Despite the best rallying cries of Duane Jones’ smart, black protagonist, the panicked occupants’ inability to get along ultimately hastens their zombie Waterloo. Then, after all the grand guignol, comes the sucker punch – the hero survives the night only to be killed by a passing pick-up posse of good ol’ boys. Made for $114,000, much of which went on the slabs of beef and chocolate sauce that would double for human flesh, it’s not surprising that few knew what to make of it upon its initial release.
Romero’s groundbreaking use of gore, his unsettling claustrophobic, framing and his rather unflattering portrait of contemporary America ensured that the film was not afforded the warmest of critical receptions.
Reader’s Digest, that well-known oracle of cultural enlightenment, ran a feature condemning it’s depiction of cannibalism and even called for a ban.
The film would find an audience however. The Living Dead’s air of malaise and out-there premise would attract the same discontented brood that made Easy Rider an unlikely money-maker when released the following year.
On its 20th anniversary, J. Hoberman would write: “To a degree that becomes ever more apparent, this was the quintessential movie of its era. Not for nothing is one dazed character, traumatized by the attack of a ghoul in an American flag-bedecked cemetery, forever mumbling, ‘What’s happening?’ It was the question of the hour.”
Over the course of the decade that followed, Night Of The Living Dead became a great midnight drive-in classic, a horror standard and, finally, the most influential zombie film ever made. It even found its way onto the National Library of Congress register in 1999.
“That was so amazing,” recalls Romero when I spoke with him at the Edinburgh Film Festival. “I don’t mean amazing as in awesome. I mean I was actually amazed. Are you sure? We talking about the same movie? It was out of sight.”
If one weren’t familiar with his output, it would still be fairly easy to peg George Romero as one of the good guys. His speech carries the imprint of ‘60s radicalism – men are still ‘cats’ and important men are still ‘The Man’.
He’s also super nice, with something of the eternal teenager about him. Romero is gangly looking at 6’3", despite his years, and is given to chuckling away to himself. Even before I’m scheduled to meet him, he obligingly comes to my rescue.
When he’s the only person I recognise after I somehow contrive to get lost in the hotel (three floors, very confusing), he escorts me along with impeccable bell-hop manners (“The weather here sure turns quick, don’t it? You need help with that bag?”).
Nor indeed is it every 65-year-old director, who’ll leap to his feet during an interview and say “How’s about a whiskey to go with that Marlboro, kid?” while sparking his third cigarette in 10 minutes. (“I heard about that smoking ban you got,” offers Mr. Romero. “Now there’s a reason for revolt").
As horror legends go, one suspects he’s a good deal more amiable than, say, Mr. Hitchcock may have been.
Night Of The Living Dead spawned innumerable imitations, an entire Italian horror industry, several inferior remakes and three officially sanctioned, Romero-helmed sequels.
In 1978 Dawn Of The Dead saw the consumer-turned-zombie – and vice versa, of course – milling around a shopping mall between droll Looney Toons pratfalls.
A group of human survivors, led once again by a resourceful black guy (see children, Scream movies aren’t always truthful) take refuge amidst the muzak, luxury goods and messed up would-be predators – caked memorably in make-up by former Vietnam combat photographer, Tom Savini – until marauding human bandits attack.
By 1985 and Day Of The Dead, the reanimated flesh-eaters have swarmed all but a military bunker in Florida, where scientists conduct experiments on the corporeally impaired to the chagrin of unhinged army men. Suffice to say that things do not end well or without a good deal of squishing.
Romero, who directed commercials and industrial films until he scraped together funding for Night Of The Living Dead, remains an underrated filmmaker between his zombie masterpieces. Indeed, the director’s own favourite works are Martin (1978), in which a sexually confused and alienated Pittsburgh teenager acts out his vampire fantasies and his recent corporate satire, Bruiser (2000), a film partially inspired by working with a tin-pot German producer on a Resident Evil adaptation that didn’t quite come to pass.
“Oh, you should have seen this guy. I had been hired to write and direct Resident Evil and I was happy with the script,” he says. “Loved it even. The games company loved it. But the film company who bought the rights – a German company called Constantine – was this company run by one guy.
Constantine was, almost literally, a one man operation, he says. "I mean this guy changes the toilet paper in the building. And he didn’t get the game and he certainly didn’t get my script. So it’s the first time I was ever fired.”
The frustrations of that experience were a mere dry run for Land Of The Dead, Mr. Romero’s latest lob from the counter-cultural trench.
Having taken bloody swipes at the expense of American Diaspora, consumer capitalism and the military-industrial complex, the director planned to tackle AIDS, homelessness and disenfranchisement with his ‘90s instalment of the Living Dead. After the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, however, financing fell apart and the director’s political target shifted.
“I’ve always thought of the Dead films as my platform”, explains Romero. “Why else do it? That’s what fantasy is for. You can count on one hand the horrors that work in a simple conceptual way. Alien for example is a great movie. But I don’t work that way.”
He adds: “With me, I’m standing in the shower and I’ll think of something that’s happening in the world and that becomes my focus.
Unfortunately, the nuances of his work are often lost on 'The Man'.
“When we were negotiating a development deal, the money guys bring me in and ask me what Land Of The Dead is about. I tell them it’s about social problems and ignoring social problems and they sit there scratching their heads going ‘The zombies do what now? What’s the plot?’ I’m like, I can do 50 plots. The money guys love my pitches. It’s all Meet The Fockers to them.”
This relentless march of the suits upon his industry, has, Romero believes, reduced film to an endless conveyer belt of high-concept mush.
“The last film I was really excited about was Darren Aronofsky’s Pi. Before that, it was probably Eraserhead,” he says. Even the great respected filmmakers are cutting to fit. “You look at Clint [Eastwood] and his very literally minded literary adaptations,” he says. “Who should take the credit for something like Mystic River? I think it’s the guy who wrote the fucking book. You look at Spielberg. He peeks through a door at the holocaust. He doesn’t even leave it ajar. It’s just the backdrop for the love story in Schindler’s List. I don’t know, It’s all been downhill since Duel for that cat.”
All told, it took seven years to get Land Of The Dead off the ground and into cinemas.
“See, everyone assumed I had made a trilogy and that was that because I dropped off the radar for so long,” he said. “But I do like the idea that there’s time between the films. So I missed the ‘90s – circumstances beyond my control. I finished the original script three days before 9/11, you know, because timing is everything. Maybe I’m on some government watch list with Michael Moore.”
He continues: “Suddenly, everybody wanted soft lollipop movies so I put the script back in my drawer. The main theme was already there. It was about ignoring the problem – homelessness, the vanishing middle classes. But when I went back a couple of years later, certain images worked their way in. That’s why there’s an armoured vehicle driving through a small village, mowing everybody down, then wondering why everybody’s pissed off.”
He suddenly bursts out laughing. “But with me, it’s all under the radar. I think if you showed George Bush Land Of The Dead, he’d probably say ‘Damn, that was a good movie’ or ‘Damn that was a piece of shit. Liked the shooting.’”
Ironically, the same period that saw Mr. Romero scraping around for funding, proved a boom time for the undead.
There have been, as those who care to quote statistics will tell you, 13 zombie films since 9/11, including Shaun Of The Dead, which impressed George greatly, and a shiny Hollywood remake of Dawn Of The Dead that he was rather less taken with.
He says: “I’m cynical enough to think that it's all purely by accident and of course, that figure includes 28 Days Later, which isn’t strictly a zombie film."
The Dawn Of The Dead remake was better than he thought it would be, though it was, he says, a video game rather than a film.
"My feeling is that this wave was kick-started by video games like Resident Evil. But the fast zombies thing – I always say my zombies will take out library cards before they’ll join a health club. They will never run. They can lunge. For reasons I can’t entirely explain, they can move deftly if they’re coming out suddenly from behind a door.
Romero's slow-moving zombies were, he says, inspired by the monsters he grew up with.
"And I suppose there’s a bit of The Mummy coming through there. He was my favourite monster cat. I liked that lumbering basic motor function and that he’d just keep on coming at you.”
It is quite gorgeously fitting that George would eventually find backing for Land Of The Dead at The Mummy’s old stomping ground, Universal Studios.
With a lovely sort-of-homecoming touch, this fourth part of the Living Dead saga kicks off with the classic Universal logo of the '30s when monsters were their business and business was good.
“I’m not quite old enough to remember the original Lon Chaney era, but I did see all the re-issues, so I love that logo," he says.
He had to fight – "a little"– to get the logo. "There’s this weird legal stipulation that the Universal logo must be onscreen for a certain amount of time and the old logo was too short. I had to take it to the CGI guys and ask them to make it 17 frames longer. That’s why the plane is moving so slowly. But I got it. Let’s you know right from the get-go that this is an old-fashioned zombie movie.”
Land Of The Dead takes us into a world overrun by zombies, where the surviving humans have subdivided along class lines. In a fortress city, Dennis Hopper’s impressively swinish capitalist runs and inhabits Fiddler’s Green, a luxury development for the privileged few.
Outside, yet within the city’s gates, the human swarm must survive by serving the rich. Simon Baker, the film’s nominal hero, must wearily police the area in the souped-up anti-zombie tank, 'Dead Reckoning' (imagine a mobile cavalry western). Meanwhile, more sordid industries thrive. The crooked John Leguizamo merrily plunders on behalf of the elite, Asia Argento’s goth-hooker is thrown, gladiatorially, into a zombie pit for the slum inhabitants to bet on while an Irish activist rouses the rabble.
“Oh yeah. I had to have an Irish guy. I had priests beating the crap out of me at school for having a Spanish surname, instead of an Italian one. So I know how tough you people are.”
True to form, the political subtext is cocked and loaded. At one point, Hopper maniacally denounces Leguizamo as a terrorist. Later he cackles about keeping “the people off the streets with vices and games”.
“I’m pissed off,” declares George. “The people capable of seeing this stuff – the intellectuals – if you can call them that, don’t vote. So many people I know just take the line that casting a vote is futile. I suspect there would have been a very different outcome in the last election if it wasn’t for that apathy."
This, he believes, is the result of successive generations cleaving to the status quo. Not that he thinks a change in the White House would necessarily have made any difference.
"I’m not saying that I thought John Kerry would have been all that different or wonderful," says Romero. "I happen to know about him through Teresa Heinz, who is a Pittsburgh icon. I’ve known her for many years through her first husband, John. And I thought, you know, she’s such a good guy, he can’t be bad either. Boy though. What a dud. Him and Al Gore. Can’t they run no candidate next time? They’ll do better with it.”
How, I wonder, did he manage to get along with the notoriously Republican Mr. Hopper during the shoot? Is it by accident that Romero cast him as 'The Man'?
“Well, I don’t like labels," he responds. "I’m really trying to understand why we’re all so fucking tribal when we live on this little speck. But jeez – Dennis. It’s funny because we hadn’t met before we worked on this and he’s this complete fucking Republican. He’s way over on the right. I’m like ‘What man? Easy Rider’s wearing plaid golf pants. No chance’."
Hopper was "very sweet" reports Romero. "I mean, we throw pies at each other, but we don’t shoot, if you know what I mean."
That's not to say they didn't agree on things. "He’s no less pissed off about the '60s than I am. We thought we were looking at real reform, at a real change in consciousness. But wait a minute. It’s still all the same cats in office. It’s Nixon’s cats”.
While brilliantly entertaining and cunningly subversive, at the heart of Land Of The Dead lies an intriguing Darwinian notion. As humans devolve, the zombies are forming a loose-limbed society. It’s been coming. Even by the end of Day Of The Dead, Bub, the first ever zombie to win a gunfight, takes the moral centre of the movie with his famous ironic salute. In Land, the idea of the zombie as hero is far more pronounced. As the humans casually lay waste to the endlessly shuffling corpses, Eugene Clark’s reanimated gas attendant Big Daddy (Romero’s latest African-American leader) moans his dead brethren into full-scale revolution. Though Simon Baker is a perfectly pleasant protagonist, Mr. Clark is clearly the most noble creature onscreen.
“You got it”, nods Romero. “I think he is too. In the film’s world, we, as a species, had our shot. We fucked it. It’s just like the end of the '60s. Where’s Michelangelo when you need him?"
The director says he wanted to put on a twist on his previous Dead movies.
"I’ve always had African-American leads in the other three. So this time out I decided I’d switch sides. I do have an idea that in the next one, the humans will be even nastier while the zombies will be more human. That’s if I live long enough to make it.”
When one considers Mr. Romero’s body of work, listens to him speaking about matters of craft or his boundless admiration for Britain’s one-time film laureate, Michael Powell (“my main cat, no doubt about it”), one can’t help but wonder if his career might not have been easier had he upped sticks and joined his old friend and colleague, Dario Argento. in Europe.
Earlier this year, Romero received a 10-minute standing ovation at Cannes. It may be a hopelessly romantic view, but this is the sort of continent where folks will chip in when Bela Tarr’s producer kills himself during the making of their latest eight-hour Hungarian epic. America, meanwhile (sniff), is surely no place for an auteur.
“Yeah, but I’m a Pittsburgh guy. And if I moved to Europe I wouldn’t have so much to complain about," he says.
Characteristically, he laughs off Land Of The Dead’s botched US release. “I thought this movie would get the usual crappy reviews and make lots of dough. But I’ve blown away by the reviews."
Releasing the film at the height of blockbuster season, between Batman Begins and War Of The Worlds, gave it little chance, he feels.
"I mean, give me a break guys. We’ve made some dough, but what did I tell you earlier about timing? But bottom line, I’m happy. I wasn’t sure when I walked off set if I quite had it, but I had a great editor and we glued it together. I’m not sure where it’ll stand with me in terms of the pantheon in years to come. But I feel good about it right now.”
As I’m walking out the door of his hotel suite, George Romero summons me back for his trademark farewell.
“Stay scared”, he grins.
Yes sir, I will.