Zombies. The living dead. The Undead. Infect. These are terms we have heard countless times throughout or lives in movies, TV shows, computer games, and every other form of medium. It has even gotten to the point now where people roll their eyes at “another zombie movie/show” or the obligatory “Zombie Mode” that every computer game has to have now (or some variant of it). Like the virus or plague itself, zombies have spread across the media like an epidemic, and they have done since they were first properly brought onto our screens in 1968 with George A Romero’s; Night of the Living Dead.


As you may have heard over the weekend, George A Romero sadly passed away at the age of 77. Now George has been regarded as the Father of the Dead, as it was he who brought the undead into the spotlight. Although Zombies have been about in films previous to 1968, it was Night of the Living Dead that really caused people to pay attention. Now the film itself is incredibly dated, so when I was born and old enough to understand and watch the film, it was pretty laughable even to me. The old black and white film has some cheesy lines and some questionable acting in it (as well as the strange moment when the little girl becomes a zombie and kills her mother with a trowel), but you can imagine that in the 60’s, this would have been a terrifying film to watch. It was because of this film that George became well known.

After this I believe that he and the other people he was working with on this film, went their separate ways due to some disagreement. The others took the part of the title “of the Living Dead” and went on to make a load of god awful zombie B-Movies (that told a story of some space gas that caused the epidemic, eventually leading to robot zombies), and Geroge continue on making zombie films (that were pretty much B-movies looking back, but they were much better done) with the title “of the Dead”.
So for the next 30+ years we were flooded with movies starring the undead. Of course because of how famous Night of the Living Dead had become and how it defined the zombie horror genre, many other film makers decided to use zombies in their films. Before Night of the Living Dead, Zombies had not yet been properly established. To be fair they are not really now, but people nowadays have come to expect a certain standard of what their typical zombie is.
Zombi 2 is one of the bet non-George A Romero zombie films that existed before modern media milked the undead as much as they could.

Originally the term Zombie was used in Voodoo when they used to bury people alive and when they dug them up again, they were an obedient slave (most likely because of the brain damage due to the lack of oxygen), and so older films with undead in them were all over the place and had no established lore or continuity (often shouting the word “Brains!”).
Night of the Living Dead made them shambling flesh eaters who groaned and clawed at the walls of the farmhouse, eager to get inside and feed on all who dwell within, and could only be killed properly by severing the head, or destroying the brain. This became the backbone of the zombie lore that we know today.

After Night, George created The Crazies. Although this is not a zombie film, the feeling of it is very similar to the genre. A small town is infected with a virus that causes them to be hostile to anyone they come into contact with. Think of 28 Days Later, as that film features “Infected”, who are not actually reanimated corpses.
Note: a zombie is a dead person who has come back to live, where as an Infected is a person infected with a virus, and thus (depending on the virus type) can be killed as you would a normal person.
Although The Crazies is not a very good film either, the remake with Timothy Olyphant, isn’t actually that bad. Remakes of George’s films are something we will come back to throughout our history lesson.


So, back to it!
The next zombie film that George A Romero created was “Dawn of the Dead”. This was a brilliant film once again at its time, but now it looks a little dated and the effects are not that great. Of course this does add a little bit of charm to it. This film followed a group of survivors, during a zombie apocalypse, holding up in a shopping mall. It was this film that created the very idea that shopping malls were the place to be in these situations. Capcom created the game Dead Rising years later, which is set entirely within a shopping mall, taking inspiration from this film.
There is something about Shopping centres that just make you automatically think of zombies; hundreds of shuffling people aimlessly staggering around. Well it was thanks to George that we feel this way about them.
Thinking back on it, Dawn of the Dead is still a good movie, if not a little dated and maybe, at times, a little silly. The remake of it is one of the few good remakes, but once again the creators can’t help but throw a little silliness in there as they did in the original version. For example, in the original version of Dawn of the Dead, there is an entire pie throwing scene, where as in remake, you have the zombie baby. Both terrible ideas that just make you roll your eyes.
I think it was because of scenes like the pie throwing, as well as the flood of “of the Living Dead” B-movies, the zombie genre began to fall out of the horror category and stumble a little into comedy or sometimes just plain silliness. This was why it was easy to make actual comedy films based around zombies years later (Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Cockneys Vs Zombies, etc). Most of them being actually quite good films in their own right, which utilising the foundations that George and his films had laid for us years earlier.
After Night of the Living Dead, zombies could have easily stayed in the horror section, but now they seem to appear in anything and everything, so I guess we have Geroge to thank for that, but I can’t seem to appreciate it. Personally I would love to see a horror film that really made people scared. The Spanish film “Rec” did this quite well, but then pissed around with the sequels and made it more of a demonic possession series, rather than zombies.

Going back to George himself, Day of the Dead came next, and although the sub-plot about training a zombie to remember how to be human again (Bub) was terrible, the film itself, I would say, is the pinnacle of George A Romero’s undead series. This was before he moved into CGI blood and gore, and after he had moved away from bright red fake blood that just looked… well fake. Day of the Dead has the best zombies from any film, and the story is dark and grim. It centres around a group of scientists and military soldiers living in a bunker underground. It is a year or so after the world has ended and everywhere is infested with the dead. The scientists aimlessly search for a cure that is far too late, and the soldiers are getting restless.
Although Dawn of the Dead is the classic film of the series, Day of the Dead is my personal favourite.
A fucking terrible remake came out years later that tried to replicate what the remake of Dawn of the Dead did, but this one was absolutely awful. This has zombies climbing along the ceiling… just because, and as you can imagine, flopped massively, and it was released straight to DVD.

A few years passed with George helping out remaking his old films, such as Tom Savini’s; Night of the Living Dead (which I think is better than the original, and it is in colour), as well as writing for Dawn of the Dead remake mentioned earlier, before his own next “of the Dead” film came about; Land of the Dead, released in 2005.
Land of the Dead was set years after the zombie apocalypse and the last surviving humanity was held up in new post-apocalypse city, dealing with life in the new world, complete with Dennis Hopper (RIP).
Unfortunately the film used far too much CGI rather than practical effects, and now, only 12 years later, the CGI looks terrible, and will only get worse, not to mention it is not a particularly good film.

His next film was Diary of the Dead, and this was about a group of teenagers who were filming themselves during the early days of the outbreak. This was shot around the Cloverfield time when shaky camera horrors were all the range, and what modern horror film doesn’t unofrtunately feature teenagers? It was clear that he was trying hard to get into the core horror demographic with this picture. This was another CGI jobby and the last of George’s cinema releases, most likely because the film was pretty poor.

Lastly we have Survival of the Dead, which I only managed to watch maybe two years ago. This was a budget straight to DVD B-movie. The effects were back to being more practical, but the film was low quality. It followed a group surviving on an island, but naturally the dead come and ruin everything.
It was at this point that George moved into other areas. He produced a comic book series titled; Empire of the Dead, as well as worked at producing various other films. One film that was announced only a few weeks before his death was “Road of the Dead”, so it will be interesting to see if this is any good now that it will only use George’s influence, rather than his directing capabilities, as he would have been dead a few years before this one sees the light of day.

As you see from what I have written above… George A Romero isn’t an overly good director. I know it is a strange thing to say in an article dedicated to him, but it is the truth. Most of the films mentioned above are “Good, or, Okay, to Mediocre”. Only a couple of them really stand out, and that was because they were the first. In this day and age we have been overrun with zombie films and TV shows (not to mention every other form of medium), so we can be fussy.
Film like 28 Days Later, World War Z, Zombieland, Shaun of the Dead, are all top quality films with big name cast members and high production costs, but at the end of the day, none of them would have been made without the groundwork that George had laid years before. If it had not been Night of the Living that made us originally frightened of your neighbour or a family member being turned into flesh eating corpses, or the gore that Day of the Dead brought us when a horde feeds upon a victim, then the world of zombies in the media would be completely different, if it would exist at all.
While George was ultimately the cause of the undead’s demise and allowing them to be milked and turning the genre from true terror, to a little campy and humorous, his influence and imaginative thinking created a genre that would spawn so many of today’s favourite zombie related things.

The Walking Dead is a great example of this. It is a fantastic comic book series, computer game (Telltale’s version anyway) and TV show that is known throughout the world. Its very foundations are built on George’s work. The Zombies in The Walking Dead are exactly the same as they are in Night/Dawn/Day/etc of the Dead films. This is the same for Resident Evil. The entire first few games have a very Romero feel to it (that is even the term that some people use!), and even the first Call of Duty Zombies mode you were locked away in an old farmhouse as the dead tried to break down the barriers and get inside, all reminiscent of George’s work.

Other games and films have modified the “undead” slightly to mix it up a notch. The Last of Us changed the zombies to a fungal virus that drove the attackers to spread it as much as they could (a similar concept used in 28 Days Later, and its sequel, as well as the game Left 4 Dead). While different, these all still echo the classic zombie style, all of which would not be possible if he and the rest of the people involved in Night of the Living Dead did not create such a unique form.

I know that I would not be the same person without his influence. I have always been a huge zombie fan. I grew up watching the original “of the Dead” films on my old 10inch fuzzy TV, recording them off of Channel 5, and fast forwarding through the adverts. Or when I first saw Resident Evil on the PS1 and refused to play it because I was too scared. I have collected the entire Walking Dead comic series, seen nearly every zombie film ever made, read a ton of zombie related books, played amazing zombie themed table top games (Dead of Winter or Zombicide, Dead Panic or The Last Night on Earth), and computer games (Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, Dying Light, State of Decay, or spending countless hours on Call of Duty: World at War, or Black Ops’ zombie mode), as well as written my own zombie-esc story of survival; Before Dusk, which is about a group of people trapped in a farmhouse (intentionally drawing inspiration from the original Night of the Living Dead).
I love the whole zombie apocalypse scenario where a group of average Joes must band together and fight to stay alive (whilst losing/holding onto their humanity). I also love the idea that they do not know what caused the epidemic (which is how George had his films), and so the story is focused around the people and their struggle for survival.

And now George A Romero has passed on. Hopefully he does not become what he originally created himself and return to the earth to feed upon the flesh of the living, but it would be quite poetic if it was his death that starts the whole thing off.

So thank you George for everything that you have brought us and your legacy that will continue to live on for decades to come. I look forward to seeing what undead horrors await for us beyond the next horizon.

Rest in peace.

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