GEORGE A. ROMERO’S SERIES OF THE DEAD:
WE ARE WHO WE EAT

“What scared me was the idea of somebody dead walking around”
-George A. Romero

Zombies. What’s the deal with zombies anyway? More importantly, what’s so great about George Romero’s zombies (or ghouls, or stenches)? There have always been zombies in movies. From White Zombie (1932) to I Walked with a Zombie (1943) zombies have always lumbered across our movie screens. These zombies, however, always operated as mindless servants and henchman who were manipulated and controlled by a master of some sort. While this always entertained Romero it was the notion of how you could control such creatures and more importantly what would happen if these creatures decided not to “take out the trash” that fascinated him even more. This idea coupled with Romero’s admiration of the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend led Romero to develop a new type of “zombie” picture that to this day is the blueprint for all zombie pictures to come. The formula was simple:

-For some reason recently dead humans start getting up and walking around again
-Zombies are autonomous. They act on instinct and are not controlled.
-Zombies rapidly increase their numbers by killing living people.
-Zombies partially eat the living.
-Zombies are tenacious. They don’t stop.
-How the human characters interact in their reaction to the zombies creates the suspense and drama.

So what is it about the zombie that makes Romero’s films so important and revolutionary?  The last point seemingly is the key. For Romero the interaction of the human characters in relation to the zombie/ghoul ultimately serves as the dramatic force of the story.  So, it ultimately boils down to the zombie and how that zombie interacts with the characters and the audience itself. The symbol of the zombie then becomes extremely important. It is their state between human and non-human. They possess no special powers, except the ability to be alive when they shouldn’t, so that makes them more human than monster and in turn more problematic for the audience. This makes zombies more terrifying than other monsters in that the resemblance of zombies to humans never fully goes away. Dracula can turn into a bat, a man into a wolf, but a zombie is still a human with rotten flesh.

The very idea of the “living dead” is one that is particularly intriguing and gives us our most valuable clues to the dichotomy of the zombie. For while it seems plausible that the “living dead” could refer to the ghouls of those who were dead but have now risen, they most certainly cannot be thought of as alive or living? It is the humans of the films who are the true “living dead”. They are living, but will one day be dead…they ARE the “living dead”. This helps underscore the very nature of the duality of the monster/human in all of these films and helps create a clearer understanding of the allegorical and metaphorical underpinnings of Romero’s “Series of the Dead”. If we are the “living dead” and the seminal film in the series is Night of the Living Dead, who is the picture and ultimately the series about?

 

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)
Screening in the retrospective-Friday, Feb. 20th

“You know the neighbors have turned into ghouls, that kind of stuff”

Barbara and her brother, Johnny have driven many miles at the behest of their mother to honor their dead father by placing a wreath on his grave. Johnny reminisces about how he used to frighten his sister when they were children. "They're coming to get you, Barbara!" he intones ominously in his best Boris Karloff voice. Though now grown up and mature enough not to be affected by such juvenile scare tactics, Barbara is still unnerved by her brother's creepy performance. Johnny sees an odd-looking fellow wandering unsteadily in the distance. "Look, there's one of them now!" The fun and games abruptly stop, however, when the man savagely grabs Barbara. Johnny leaps to his sister's defense but he's knocked down by the maniac and apparently killed. Barbara gets away and runs to an old farmhouse where she is soon joined by Ben, a young black man. Ben informs Barbara that the recently dead have been returning to life to eat the living. He sets about fortifying the house by nailing boards over doors and windows and preparing to settle in for what proves to be a hellish night.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) may be the most psychological film ever made. Through the use of its stark black and white photography, claustrophobic intensity, documentary feel, exploration of social taboos, and extreme violence, for the day, Romero had successfully ripped up the American psyche and thrown the contents out into the fields and farmhouses of rural Pennsylvania. While the film tackled serious taboos of cannibalism and horrific exploitation it was the documentary style and its claustrophobia that give the film its feel and tone. It was also a sign of its times, both the era of the Vietnam War abroad and social upheaval at home, in which good does not triumph over evil, and likable people die just as brutally and unexpectedly as the monsters. The violence, which reflecting the very horrors Americans were seeing each night on the evening news, and values and institutions are depicted in a critical and thoughtful manner. The film and its images told the truth of what was going on in the day in a way that no other film of the day could or was able to. What is happening in the world had successfully crept into Romero’s work and been processed out as a new society attacking and devouring the old. In the end the humans may still have some control over their society but Romero carefully offsets that control with a series of images that may be some of the most devastating and powerful images in American history. The black and white zombies of Night of the Living Dead had devoured an America distraught over race riots, assassination, and war.

 

DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)
Screening in the retrospective-Sunday, Feb. 22nd

“Everybody was out dancing in those days”

In Dawn of the Dead the recently dead are still returning to life and eating the flesh of the living but the phenomena has spread to nationwide if not worldwide proportions. Ross, an employee of a local television station, and her boyfriend Emge, a traffic helicopter pilot, decide to try to escape the madness in a helicopter accompanied by two SWAT team cops, Reiniger and Foree. They eventually land atop a shopping mall. Once they clear out the zombies, the four decide to remain in this shoppers' paradise where they get to live out their wildest consumer fantasies and create new social familial order. That is until they are forced to defend themselves from marauding bikers who want to crash their party.

Dawn of the Dead (1978) ostensibly picks up where Night of the Living Dead ends. A brutal and violent police assault on a minority housing project that occurs early in the film expands upon the conclusion of Night with shocking urgency. We see that in the eyes of the law, there is little difference between political radicals, innocent bystanders of color, and carnivorous zombies. The film though takes on a more tongue-in-cheek feel though as it runs it narrative course. This helped ground the film in its cultural context of the freewheeling, fun truckin, disco 70’s. With a larger budget, but still no major stars, better special effects and higher production values Romero hit a nerve with his commentary on 70’s American life. In the 70’s the stark black and white zombies had turned into rich colorful zombies awash in a world of urban poverty, abortion, fuel crisis’s, and shopping malls. The film at its heart strikes at a scathing indictment of American consumer culture and its perverse effects on our culture as a whole. Our heroes find utopia in the mall, but it doesn’t last and only brings the same death and destruction as everywhere else. It is, according to Romero with this film, not the bite of a zombie that turns us into zombies, but the addiction of culture to consumerism and materialism. The banal things that we “need” to satisfy our animal instincts. In the Dawn of the Dead, and in the 70’s Romero seems to say that “They’re us” and they want their Orange Julius!

 

DAY OF THE DEAD (1985)

“Day…That got a little darker because I think times are getting a little darker again.”

The third chapter in Romero's "Dead" series is set almost entirely in a huge underground storage facility that has been converted into a laboratory and barracks. The military has been assigned to protect and assist the group of scientists who are working to develop a solution to the zombie epidemic. Experimenting on zombies who have been herded into a holding pen seemed like a good idea at the time. One scientist, Liberty, nicknamed "Frankenstein" by the soldiers, tries to modify the zombies' behavior so that humans can train them like dogs. One zombie, whom Liberty calls "Bub," seems to be the missing link between animal instinct and civilized human behavior and shows signs of consciousness of his former life, a potential breakthrough. The operation, however, has taken its toll on the soldiers, and especially their commander, a near psychotic, who tries to take over the project and put an end to all this zombie business once and for all.

In a way Day of the Dead, marks a return to Romero’s first zombie film Night of the Living Dead. A claustrophobic character study that goes less for the gore and focuses instead on the psychological dimensions of the epidemic. Romero stating that the need to exploit the horror of the situation has passed and instead concentrating on its implications and a possible solution. What arises then becomes a conflict between science and the military with distinct political overtones being the chief cultural motif for the film. The film relying not on the campy playfulness of Dawn of the Dead, but returning to a more somber, and oppressive grimness. One thing becomes clear in Day of the Dead, the zombies are here to stay, and humanity must adapt to them in order to survive, or maybe it is time for humans to let go and let the next society take over?

 

LAND OF THE DEAD (2005)

“They’re innocents. They’re just infants. They start to learn how to do things and that’s what screws them up.”

Some years after the first corpses rose up to eat the flesh of the living; the zombies or "stenches" as they called have inherited the Earth. The living humans cluster in safe areas like downtown Pittsburgh, protected on two fronts by natural barrier, a couple of rivers, and on the third by soldiers, electrified fences and makeshift barricades. The rich live in a luxury residential/retail complex Fiddler's Green, under the despotic reign of Kaufman, while the less fortunate occupy the streets below, numbed by the drugs and honky-tonk entertainment Kaufman cannily supplies. Troublemakers, like budding revolutionaries with homegrown ideas about equal distribution of resources, simply disappear. Professional scavengers Riley and Cholo forage outside for goods in a super-rigged tank dubbed "Dead Reckoning," but after Cholo has a falling-out with both Riley and Kaufman, he commandeers the heavily armed vehicle. Riley and a small crew must retrieve it before Cholo reduces Fiddler's Green to zombie-ridden rubble. Meanwhile, Riley has made the unsettling observation that as the living become ever more casually cruel, abusing the undead for amusement, certain zombies, like “Big Daddy” a gas station attendant, are exhibiting an unfamiliar flicker of consciousness and have decided to make their way to the human city for a little payback.

Land of the Dead, coming after a 20 year break from the zombie genre, again shines a light on the current would we live in. It also acts as a prolonged ending to Day of the Dead. Taking many of the ideas of the previous film and expanding them with a clearer cultural answer. This time it is a gloomy post 9/11 worldview that grabs our attention. The critique of our consumer culture remains strong in this film, but pointed at both the consumers and commerce as a whole. Kaufmann as the ultimate representation of how commerce equals power and how that power can control and manipulate the masses. It is interesting to think how this idea plays on the Post 9/11 concepts of fighting terrorism by “buying things”.   What is truly fascinating about Land of the Dead though is Romero’s evolution of the zombie. The film constantly puts the audience in the zombies shoes. The zombie for the first time is given character traits and identification for audience (although we did see some of this in with ‘Bub’ in Day of the Dead). Romero it seems, in this film, tries to purposely make the zombies of Land increasingly more and more human in manner and thought. From their ability to remember pieces of their lives (Big Daddy still goes to pump gas every time someone rigs the bell) to the clear revenge walk of “Big Daddy” as he makes his way to the human fortress to make them pay for the pain and suffering caused by Kaufmann and his cronies. In this film, Romero creates zombies who in some ways are less scary and repulsive and more sad and lonely. The dehumanization of the living and the sinful nature of the living by endless zombie killing, the heedless arrogance of the haves and festering resentments of the have-nots are also played out to their logical and gruesome ends. In the Land of the Dead, sympathy for the living has decreased and perhaps the lesson of the pessimistic last scene is simply that we all belong dead or that hope is dwindling fast.

 

DIARY OF THE DEAD (2007)
Screening in the retrospective-Saturday, Feb. 21st

“In my mind they personify human potential, which is first just savage and depends on what they learn.”

University of Pittsburgh student Jason Creed's "The Death of Death," begins with a bootleg news clip: A local reporter doing bored stand up, cops hanging, EMTs removing the sheeted bodies of an immigrant family from a non-descript apartment building. Then the bodies get up: Bullets, torn and bleeding flesh, chaos… the footage never aired, but the cameraman uploaded it on the sly. Narrator Debra (Michelle Morgan) tells us that she finished Jason's film; the footage is all real, but she cut it and goosed it with spooky music and sound effects to scare you. Cut to Jason directing a mummy movie in the dark, late-night woods as the radio crackles with reports of reanimated corpses. It has to be a joke, but it's creepy and if something's going on they don’t want to be around when it happens. They pile into their battered RV and hit the road. Cell networks are crashing, mainstream news outlets are clogged with official denials and the same old rumors of radiation and viral strains. Fanatics rule the radio airwaves and the blogosphere seethes with footage of shambling zombies and panicked survivors. In the chaos of information overload, aspiring documentarian Jason finds his mission: To make sure the truth – about the dead, the marauding National Guard, the looters and hoarders, the redneck survivalists and the compete and utter failure of global government -- gets out there, no matter what the cost.

Diary of the Dead is a the return to the roots of Night of the Living Dead some 40 years earlier. Shot on a smaller budget than any of the previous three “Dead” films and featuring a documentary style the film becomes a meditation on life and death in the infinitely mediated world of blogs, file sharing and incessant virtual connection. But while Night used documentary style and news footage to make commentary and equate itself with the political and social issues of the time, Diary uses these devices to comment on the very notion of media and the information explosion that the internet and viral video has created. With Diary of the Dead Romero takes a look directly into the narcissistic and boundary free culture that now exists in the world of camera phones, computers and Youtube. The movie boiling itself down as a series of questions about the mass media our need for and our creation of it and how it should ultimately be managed. For Romero just because you have a camera may not mean that you should use it and if you use it that does not mean CNN should air it.

 

MARTIN (1978)
Screening in the retrospective-Saturday, Feb. 21st

“There’s no real magic. There’s no real magic ever”

Martin is a shy, alienated 17-year-old who thinks he is vampire. Aboard a train, Martin accosts a female passenger, injects her with sodium pentothal, and, while she is in a stupor, violates her. Not having the needed vampire fangs, he then cuts her wrist with a razor blade and drinks her blood. When Martin arrives at his destination, he is confronted with an elderly Old World relative, Tata Cuda, a religious zealot who is convinced the boy is an 84-year-old vampire, the product of a family curse. Martin has no friends in his new life; he only gets to experience a sense of community by becoming a regular caller to a radio talk show. He spills his guts (over the air but the host assumes he's just another colorful kook. While Martin tries desperately to achieve some sense of normalcy in his relationships, Tata is determined both to save the boy's soul and the only way to do that is to destroy him.

In Martin, Romero takes his first and only crack at his beloved vampire lore. Although in Romero’s world it is not so much a study about a vampire as monster but using the vampire as a catalyst to comment on the complexities of industrial working class backgrounds and towns, especially within the young. Martin is shown at times to be a severely troubled teen with deadly psychosexual problems, a nightmare version of the kid down the street. His only way of relating to women by drinking their blood. A downtrodden boy who has no sense of his own identity and worth. Martin is sad, filled with longing, and a lack of fulfillment in his life. Is he a vampire because he is troubled and as a way of acting out his psychotic tendencies? Or does his oppressive and dominant religious family impose this fantasy unknowingly on him? The film combines the well-worn elements of countless horror films as Romero creates a lyrical film that works both as insightful social commentary and as a fascinating rumination on the conventions of the genre.

 

HUNGRY WIVES (1972)
…aka Season of the Witch
Screening in the retrospective-Saturday, Feb. 21st

“She’s got everything she could possibly want, except a life””

Joan is a bored middle-aged housewife whose marriage to her uncommunicative businessman husband is on the verge of collapse. Watching her daughter blossom into womanhood and lead an active sex life further frustrates her. She slowly begins to retreat into a bizarre fantasy world. While visiting a local witch for a Tarot reading, she becomes intrigued by the occult and buys a copy of How to Become a Witch, A Primer. Finding herself attracted to her daughter's young college professor, she conjures up a spell to attract him, and soon the two are engaged in an affair. Believing that she has become a witch, Joan sinks deeper and deeper into her new life until the line between fantasy and reality blurs.

Season of the Witch is Romero’s blunt reminder of the hopes and failed dreams leading into the seventies 1970s.  A supernatural story taking place in the banality of American relationships, all centered around the female wife and mother. The female caught up in the sexual craze of the 60’s, the feminist movement of the early 70’s, and the attempt to move out from under the frustrations of a patriarchal society. Romero’s real breakthrough here is his striking empathy towards the main hero, Joan. Joan’s descent into witchcraft and her dreams then becoming a fantasy inversion of her own disempowerment and patriarchal dominance she has suffered.  It is not her, the “witch”, that is the real monster, but the husband who uses violence and dominance over her. Romero, however, cautions the audience with her tale, her new freedom and her new powers. In the end, this element of her new strength, the witchcraft, becomes just another oppressive and dangerous element in her life. Ultimately, Joan lives a real nightmare and her escape, through dreams and magic, from those everyday horrors is not possible.

 

THE CRAZIES (1973)
Screening in the retrospective-Sunday, Feb. 22nd

A secret Army cargo plane carrying an untested chemical virus crashes near a small town in Pennsylvania. Since the virus, which causes its victims either to die instantly or to become homicidal maniacs, is top-secret and has no cure, the government dispatches the Army to isolate the spread of the virus by quarantining the entire town. Without warning, soldiers dressed in white, bacteria-proof suits and gas masks, armed with automatic weapons, invade the small town and scare its citizens by herding them into a local school. A small group of people not yet affected by the virus attempts to escape from the military and get out of town, while scientists work around the clock to find a cure.

The Crazies (1973) is a nightmarish look at a government control and paranoia that probably seemed all to real to an early seventies audience, specifically only three years after the Kent State shootings. Cold and bureaucratic, nameless and faceless, the film asks some hard questions as Romero paints a bleak picture of a bureaucracy that has nothing but contempt for the lives of private citizens. A theme echoed later in the opening tenement scene of Dawn of the Dead (1978) In the film, the government harbors a whole lot of secrets, and this gives unbelievable power to a basically incompetent military. As the government attempts to control the virus and the town, it becomes clear that they violence they will inflict on its citizens is just as brutal as the violence an infected townsperson would unleash. Then, the chaos, the paranoia and the social collapse runs rampant. The community and citizens do not get off the hook as easy either in the film. Romero, like he did with Night of the Living Dead, creating an interesting look at what happens to a community when it collapses under an oppressive and violent takeover. A look at not just a familial but also a social disintegration. When you can’t tell who your enemy is, the government or the guy down the street, where can you turn and how do you survive?

 

REFERENCES

 Dawn of the Dead (film review) http://www.tvguide.com/movies/dawn-dead/review/112275

Day of the Dead (film review) http://www.tvguide.com/movies/day-dead/review/112297

J Hoberman & Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies. Harper and Rowe Publishers, 1983

Alan Jones, Horror Movies: A Rough Guide. Penguin Group, 2005

Maitland McDonagh, Land of the Dead (film review) http://www.tvguide.com/movies/george-romeros-land/review/191125

Maitland McDonagh, Diary of the Dead (film review) http://www.tvguide.com/movies/diary-dead/review/292320

George Nickenlooper, Reel Conversations. Citadel Press, 1991

Night of the Living Dead (film review) http://www.tvguide.com/movies/night-living-dead/review/107526

Kim Paffenroth, Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth. Baylor University Press, 2006

Gregory Waller (Ed), American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. University of Illinois Press, 1987

Robin Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond. Columbia University Press, 1986