George A. Romero

           

           On February 4^th, 1940 George A. Romero was born in New York City.  From an early age he very much enjoyed movies.  One of his favorites was a film adaptation of a musical entitled The Tales of Hoffmann (1951).  He borrowed it from the library numerous times as a teen, watching it on his projector at home.  He has said that only one other person took that film out as often as he did – that person ended up being Martin Scorcese (IMDB).  Later in life Romero would cite Hoffmann as the film that inspired him to become a director.

            This early love of movies led him to start making movies of his own at the age of 14 with an 8mm camera.  When it came time to choose a college, Romero decided to attend the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.  At Carnegie Mellon George studied film, the arts, and theatre.  Following his graduation he and a group of his friend formed Image Ten Productions, a production company that made mostly industrial films, commercials, and even several bits for Mister Rogers Neighborhood (Biography). 

            In 1967 Romero and his colleagues from Image Ten each chipped in around $10,000 each and they produced Night of the Living Dead for a budget of around $100,000.  Written and Directed by Romero, the violent zombie flick was a smashing success.  The domestic box office took in $12 million, and it pulled in $30 million worldwide.  Their inexperience showed though, as the independent film makers failed to copyright the movie correctly, essentially forfeiting any post-box office rights and entered the movie into public domain.

            Following the enormous success of Night of the Living Dead, Romero released a series of films with only minor success.  Films such as There’s Always Vanilla (1971), Hungry Wives (1972), The Crazies (1973), and Martin (1976) all flopped on some level.  Martin was the biggest success of the bunch, chronicling a teenage vampire well before Twilight invaded our lives.

It was at this point that Romero decided to go back to the zombie bucket and he wrote and directed Dawn of the Dead.  Shot in a Monroeville, Pennsylvania mall during late night hours, the film had a budget of $1.5 million and was able to rake in an impressive $40 million worldwide. 

            The film was not initially coddled by the critics.  Famously, Roger Ebert initially panned the movie until changing his mind later in life and giving it a positive review.  Just as Romero’s first Dead film, Dawn of the Dead became a cult classic.  In 2003, Entertainment Weekly called Dawn one of it’s top cult films.  It was also regarded as an achievement in independent filmmaking.  As Edgar Wright states in Virginia Quarterly:

“When you study Dawn in detail, the ambition of the enterprise is staggering.  It’s not only a great horror film, but a peerless example of independent filmmaking.  The sheer scale of the story, the use of locations, the marshaling of extras and staggering number of set ups is an awesome feat for a low budget film.  Not only that, but Dawn goes far beyond the template of Night and many other horror films of its ilk, by setting the proceedings in the course of one long night.  Dawn flirts with being a proper epic in its timeframe alone.” (41)

Following Dawn of the Dead, Romero was not able to grasp the same level of success.  His most successful films after the Dead movies were the Creepshow series.  Additionally, he went back to the Dead franchise a total of four more times with the inclusion of Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead(2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009).  The only incarnation of this series in that had any level of success was Land of the Dead, which debuted at number one the week it opened in theatres. 

One interesting aspect to Romero’s films is that all of them reflect on an aspect of society in the era that it was made.  In his original classic Night of the Living Dead, he touches on the issue of racism during the civil rights era (Truitt).  Dawn of the Dead was about obsession with consumerism.  Land of the Dead was released a couple years after 9/11 and dealt with living with terrorism.  Day of the Dead looked at our obsession with solving all of our problems with guns, and Diary of the Dead observed citizen journalism and the emergence of modern media.   

A classic aspect of horror films is that the minorities and the females are the first to die at the hands of the evil.  Romero tends to buck this tradition, as he often has minorities and women as strong characters in his films.  Dawn of the Dead is a great example of this tendency, as the group in the mall consists of two white males, a black male, and a white female and the two white males are the only two who become zombie fodder.  This change from classical horror format could be seen as either a social statement or a way to play with the audience, challenging our expectations for what should happen in these types of films.  Romero insists instead that when he casts parts he doesn’t write race into the script, he just casts who he thinks fits best in that particular movie.

Although Romero was never able to recreate the success he had with Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, he will always be regarded as royalty in the horror genre for what he was able to do in transforming zombie movies from brainless splatter-fests into something that made the audience think and held a mirror to society.