George Romero

• Born: February 4, 1940
• Place of birth: New York, New York
• Died: July 16, 2017
• Place of death: Toronto, Ontario

American film director and screenwriter

George Romero was one of the most influential filmmakers and editors in the American film industry of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As a young, struggling director of independent films, he managed in Night of the Living Dead (1968), which he both directed and collaborated on the script for, to revolutionize horror films, redefine the mythic monsters frequently depicted in such films, and restructure the tropes of the genre.

Early Life

George Andrew Romero was born in the New York City borough of the Bronx on February 4, 1940, to a Cuban-born father and a mother of Lithuanian descent. For his fourteenth birthday, he was given an eight-millimeter (8 mm) film camera, and soon he was writing and directing short films that he showed to relatives and neighbors. After completing high school at Suffield Academy in Connecticut, he moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which would long be the center of his creative activities, to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). Upon graduating from college in 1960, Romero remained in Pittsburgh for several years, making commercials and short films. He was given his first real job in the film industry by Fred Rogers, star of the popular children’s television program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, who hired him to shoot a number of short film segments for the show. Romero would later joke that the segment in which Mr. Rogers has to have his tonsils removed was the scariest film he had ever made.

Eager to work on feature-length films, Romero banded together with several like-minded friends, among them screenwriter and director John A. Russo, to form a production company, Image Ten Productions, in 1968. The company’s first production was Night of the Living Dead (1968), based on a screenplay by Romero and Russo and produced by two other members of the Image Ten team, Russell Streiner and Karl Hardman, both of whom also acted in the low-budget film. Night of the Living Dead was financed with money from the writers, the producers, and various friends and associates of theirs. It soon became one of the most popular and influential horror films of all time.

Life’s Work

When Night of the Living Dead premiered in Pittsburgh in early October 1968, it drew little critical attention, and most of the reaction was negative; reviewers criticized the film’s ghoulishness, literally and figuratively, and its graphic gore, which was remarkably intense for the time. Soon, however, the film began to draw huge crowds, due in large part because of word of mouth among young people. By the early 1970s, it was considered a classic and analyzed repeatedly in articles in cinema journals and in discussions in college film studies classes. By the end of the 1970s, it had earned about $15 million dollars in the United States and twice that amount internationally.

Romero filmed fairly consistently throughout the rest of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. His first few films after the breakthrough success of Night of the Living Dead were not as successful critically or financially. The first, There’s Always Vanilla (1971), follows the attempts of a typical young couple of the era as they experiment with drugs, free sex, and revolutionary politics. His next film, Jack’s Wife, which in later release was called Season of the Witch (1972), deals with social issues of the time, but with the addition of supernatural elements similar to those in Night of the Living Dead.The titular wife, angered by her abusive husband and disrespectful daughter, experiments with witchcraft as a means of empowerment.

Romero’s next two films earned him a modicum of success. The Crazies (1973), which was thematically similar to Night of the Living Dead, depicts a neighborhood in which suburbanites become violently homicidal as a result of environmental pollution. Romero followed up with Martin (1978), about a murderous young sociopath who imagines himself to be—or pretends to be—a vampire. Martin became popular on the art house and independent film circuit and drew critical acclaim.

Nevertheless, major success eluded Romero until he returned to the genre he had all but created, the contemporary zombie film, with Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985), the immensely popular sequels to Night of the Living Dead. Further sequels followed over the next few decades: Document of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2008), and Survival of the Dead (2010). Romero also wrote, but did not direct, two remakes of his first two zombie films, Night of the Living Dead (1990) and Dawn of the Dead (2004).

Aside from his zombie films, Romero’s most commercially successful works were ones on which he collaborated with horror writer Stephen King: the anthology film Creepshow (1992), directed by Romero from a screenplay by King that he based on some of his own stories that he and Romero felt reflected the lurid horror comics of the 1950s that both men had loved as boys, and The Dark Half (1993), directed by Romero from his own screenplay based on King’s best-selling 1989 novel of that title.

From January 2014 to August 2015, Marvel Comics published a limited series of comic books titled Empire of the Dead, written by Romero. A production company announced in May 2015 that it would be adapting the comics for television, but in later interviews Romero expressed frustration that big-budget studio films such as World War Z (2013) and television shows such as The Walking Dead (2010–) made it difficult for him to make any more films in the style and tradition of his originals. Still, he was able to work on a restored version of Night of the Living Dead sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation.

Romero died of lung cancer on July 16, 2017, in Toronto, Ontario. He was seventy-seven.

Significance

With Night of the Living Dead, George Romero rewrote popular folklore and thereby revised the tropes and conventions of the horror film. He inadvertently created a new subgenre, one that was quickly emulated by other directors, including Spanish filmmaker Amando de Ossorio in his Blind Dead series (1972–75), and spoofed in seriocomic films such as Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Zombieland (2009). The hugely popular television series The Walking Dead, based on the comic book series of the same name (2003–), also built on his work. The reinvigorated zombie subgenre as redefined by Romero spread to horror fiction as well, inspiring the novel Cell (2006) by Stephen King, the most popular and well-established horror writer in American history. Romero also demonstrated how the horror film could not only offer its viewers the traditional chills and thrills but also effectively treat political and social issues.

Bibliography

Conradt, Stacy. “When Mr. Rogers Gave George Romero His First Paying Gig.” Mental Floss, 23 May 2016, mentalfloss.com/article/80353/when-mr-rogers-gave-george-romero-his-first-paying-gig. Accessed 11 Aug. 2017.

Gagne, Paul R. The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh: The Films of George Romero. Dodd, Mead, 1987. Entertaining, popularly oriented history of Romero’s career through the late 1980s.

Romero, George. "George Romero Says Nobody Will Finance His Next Zombie Movie and Night of the Living Dead Wouldn’t Get Made Today." Interview by Eric Kohn. IndieWire, Penske Media, 27 Oct. 2016, www.indiewire.com/2016/10/george-romero-interview-night-of-the-living-dead-zombies-1201740739/. Accessed 22 Mar. 2017.

Romero, George. “10 Questions for George Romero.” Time, 7 June 2010, p. 4. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=51087768&site=ehost-live. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017. Brief but meaty interview in which Romero addresses the relationship between his zombie films and sociopolitical concerns.

Russell, Jamie. Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema. Fab Press, 2005. Detailed overview of zombie films before and after Night of the Living Dead.?

Salam, Maya. “George Romero, Father of the Zombie Movie, Dies at 77.” The New York Times, 16 July 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/07/16/movies/george-romero-dead.html. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.

Twitchell, James B. Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror. Oxford UP, 1985. Pages 266 through 271 contain concise analyses of Night of the Living Dead and Martin, including a pithy assessment of how Romero combined elements of various folkloric creatures to reinvent and reinvigorate the zombie film genre.

Williams, Tony. The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead. 2nd ed., Wallflower Press, 2015. Similar to Gagne (see above) but a bit deeper and more scholarly.