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[Cultural Attachment]

Fillmmaker George Romero made the undead relevant in the real world

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Romero brought the dead to life.
Photo: Amy Sancetta / AP Images
Smith Galtney

After a “brief but aggressive” battle with lung cancer, filmmaker George A. Romero died in his sleep on July 16. Some artists loom larger than others in our culture. Thanks, in part, to his wildly influential zombie series, beginning with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead and ending with Survival of the Dead in 2009, Romero cast a long, dark shadow we’re all living under.

My first encounter with Night of the Living Dead came at a campfire in 1981. After my campmates and I had exhausted our reserve of cheesy ghost stories, our movie-buff counselor proceeded to terrify us with detailed, ultra-graphic plot synopses of Halloween and Friday the 13th. While the latter sounded particularly creepy (Camp Crystal Lake shared an acronym with ours, Camp Country Lad), my spine shivered most when he explained the opening scene of Night, in which a brother taunts his sister during a graveyard visit by moaning, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara.” The counselor delivered that line with particular gusto, denying me a proper night’s rest until 1986 or so.

Technically, the first Romero movie I caught was Creepshow, an anthology of Stephen King-penned shorts inspired by the EC and DC horror comics of the 1950s. Although it featured the most repulsive death I’d ever seen (if you’ve got a thing about cockroaches, proceed with utmost caution), it still couldn’t prepare me for Dawn of the Dead, my first full-on Romero experience. Dawn was made by a company whose logo I hadn’t seen before, it starred actors I didn’t recognize, and to this day, it’s still the only movie that makes me want to throw up. In the time before Sundance and the indie-film explosion, a truly independent work like Dawn made you uneasy. Who are these sickos? How did they even make a movie? I don’t feel safe here!

It would take some time for me to fully appreciate the subtext at work in Romero’s zombie apocalypse. Night featured a black hero, and as A.O. Scott recently noted in The New York Times, “[That character’s] death could be read as a prophecy of Barack Obama’s presidency: A calm and competent African-American saves the white people from their own rashness and stupidity (as well as from zombies) and is destroyed.” Dawn’s setting—a shopping mall—was outright satire that cast “the ghouls as the ultimate conformists/materialists, converging on a mall out of a flickering memory of the American impulse to shop till you drop,” according to Vulture.com this week. Subsequent targets in the Dead canon included the military and the class system. As Romero told Time in 2010, “If there’s something I’d like to criticize, I can bring the zombies out. I can get the financing that way.”

In the final year of his life, Romero received perhaps his greatest tribute in Get Out, the blockbuster racially-charged horror flick that, while not a zombie film, tipped its hat to Night of the Living Dead. Director Jordan Peele repeatedly praised Romero in interviews, telling the Times, “The way that movie handles race is so essential to what makes it great. All social norms break down when this event happens and a black man is caged up in a house with a white woman who is terrified.”

Three days before he died, Romero shared the first post for his next Dead chapter: Road of the Dead, described as “Fast and the Furious with zombies.” Even if that never sees the light of day, Romero’s undead afterlife is sealed. As a Facebook friend of mine joked, “Decided on my Halloween costume: Zombie George Romero.”

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