12/3/2022 0 Comments Road of the dead george romeroRomero’s zombies are our future, if not our present they are metaphors for a humanity living in the end times. These were no longer just reanimated corpses, craving the flesh of their former kin, they were the very start of a new society. Romero created monsters that blurred the line between human and zombie. They developed aspects of the zombie narrative that have been further explored and continue to be exploited by contemporary films, TV shows, novels, and even books on topics as varied as neuroscience and the economy. In 2005’s Land of the Dead, for example, features the character Big Daddy, a black gas station owner who leads a zombie revolution against the privileged humans who live in the Fiddler’s Green outpost.ĭespite following a similar formula to Romero’s first film – a group of survivors trapped by zombie hordes they must fend against – the sequels that followed “Night” were very different. But the closing images of Ben burnt on a pyre alongside the zombies he has been mistaken for is indicative of a social and racial awareness the director would expand on in later films. It is well-known now that the casting of black actor Duane Jones as lead character Ben in Night of the Living Dead was a fortuitous event, and not necessarily an attempt to politicise the film. More expertly, perhaps, than any before him, Romero managed to use the horror genre to tune into social issues. These were creatures that were more than mere flesh-eaters, Romero’s zombies communicated and made plans, and would eventually learn to think and feel. It also kick-started the career of a director who would contribute many other gems to the horror canon, from the bio-weapon nightmares of The Crazies (1973) – remade in 2010 – to the psycho-sexual backwater vampire in Martin (1978), and Stephen King’s screenwriting debut, Creepshow (1982).īut, more importantly, it refashioned the shuffling, possessed zombie of the 1930s and 1940s as a cannibalistic, unstoppable “force majeure” a monster more in tune with the late capitalist times. Produced with little more than US$100,000, the film went on to gross millions, and totally reshaped the landscape of independent film-making in the process. At one point in the series, the group manage to ironically make a home in an abandoned prison, while zombies press against the fences outside. And even more violent shows like The Walking Dead demonstrate ways that zombies can be controlled, or manipulated, while humans attempt to live some kind of normal life. US televison series iZombie, for example, which features a sentient zombie medical examiner, Olivia Moore, distinguishes between its thinking zombies and those who revert to primal, brain-eating beasts, affectionately referred to as “Romeros”. These days, the zombie has turned from the shuffling, flesh-guzzling monsters that first roamed the streets on that fateful night in 1968, to less gory, almost human creatures. ![]() ![]() It is a testament to the legacy of Romero’s “dead” series – which started with “ Night of the Living Dead” in 1968 – that the zombie figure, which has a long and troubled history, going back to slavery in the West Indies, has come to be associated so strongly with one man’s oeuvre. ![]() Romero was a true master of the horror film, and has often been credited as having created the modern zombie genre.
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