George A. Romero got a raw deal.
Unquestionably one of the towering giants of the big-name horror directors, George A. Romero’s death in 2017 was met with well-deserved tributes and insightful appreciations of his decades-spanning work from fans, industry professionals, and entertainment critics alike.
It was also long overdue.
When he was alive, much like fellow legend Tobe Hooper—who we lost only one month after Romero—as years went by, it became increasingly difficult for him to find the financial backing to keep creating new films. For Romero, that went double for anything outside of his popular “Dead” franchise.
In 1968, in-between filming beer commercials, a young group of Pittsburgh filmmakers made history when their loftiest goal was just making some money on the drive-in circuit. Their Night of the Flesh Eaters became the copyright-stumbling Night of the Living Dead, reminding patrons of the well-choreographed suspense of Val Lewton-produced chillers.
After monster kids had to dine out on a diet of too many low-budget and low-passion horror pictures eschewing atmosphere and groundbreaking camera techniques for a quick turnaround amid the post-atomic genre landscape between the genre gems, this black and white powerhouse brought a new excitement, experimentation, and low-key but impactful commentary on humanity buckling under stress and lack of communication—plus plenty of gore and scares. Night knew that kids weren’t the only ones who enjoyed being terrified at the cinema, and it knew that every ticket holder deserved something both smart and ghoulishly exciting.
Like most successes that are based on the whims of the general public, Night’s triumphant holy trifecta of pleasing the audience, critics, and box office alike was both a blessing and a curse to Romero. His was always a career that, while it (for the most part) avoided being considered out and out unfashionable, was never anchored to a consistent critical reputation. Whether lauded or largely unnoticed by anyone outside of genre and indie film diehards until decades after its release (Martin, Season of the Witch), Romero always gave the appearance of a beloved man without a country. His interest in making films in other genres never took a firm foothold into actual production, and his horror films were still beset with budget and time constraints. Over the years, it seemed that any sandbox he played in was always charging him a toll.
The man who revolutionized both the horror genre and what an independent film could do both critically and financially when he was only in his 20s faced the classic challenges of a creative aging in the film industry while the landscape around him changed drastically. Romero had a great decade in the 1980s (Creepshow, Day of the Dead, Monkey Shines), a solid 1990s that included a feature film Stephen King adaptation (The Dark Half) and a horror dream team creation with Dario Argento adapting Edgar Allan Poe (Two Evil Eyes), and his work on both Tales from the Darkside’s motion picture and television show kept him shining bright in the eyes of horror devotees. Come the aughts, though, things got trickier.
Now in his 60s, Romero was facing interesting new terrain. A new crop of filmmakers who grew up on his films—less on the silver or drive-in screen but rather through television reruns and home video—were now the movers and shakers in Hollywood. Pair that with a freshly politically charged climate due to the tragedies of September 11, 2001, and it feels inevitable that Romero’s lens of using the undead to comment on the shortcomings of the living would make a comeback. Come 2005, American pop culture was enjoying the first crest of the modern zombie craze—that nice period between Shaun of the Dead and The Walking Dead comic book’s popularity but before the latter’s TV show started, when zombie fans were getting fed like rotting kings—but the trend’s cultural fatigue was still a fair bit of distance off from the horizon. Thanks to that, plus the success of the first of the Resident Evil films and the 2004 Zack Snyder/James Gunn Dawn of the Dead remake, Romero was given the greenlight and funding to return to the series—20 years after Day of the Dead.
Hail to the king, baby: George Romero fans greeted Land of the Dead with open arms while new fans were quickly schooled about his importance. While it lacked the preternatural timing and the room to grow in distribution the way its great-great-grandpappy enjoyed, Land achieved two important things that Night did: impressive box office and critical acclaim for his melding of the current political climate with classic horror tropes. While not a subtle movie, Land is effectively unnerving and, sadly, timeless in its portrayal of the foibles of greed and fear in both the political and social hierarchy of an unnerved America. It’s also pretty glossy for a Romero film, being the most robustly budgeted of the Dead family. Add Universal Pictures’ theatrical distribution power to the excitement of the franchise’s return, and you have an ideal storm to successfully revive a horror tentpole franchise.
As the adage goes, everyone wants to be the first to be second in Hollywood, and that maxim held true yet again once the receipts came back from Romero’s triumphant return to his undead form. Still and always staying true to his belief that the freedom to release the films he wanted to release is vastly more important than a studio’s monetary support, 2008 gave us Diary of the Dead, produced again by Romero’s own Romero-Grunwald Productions (a company born of Bruiser) and the independent studio Artfire Films. It had a small fraction of Land’s budget, and while Dimensions Films (only then a few years into its move from Miramax to the Weinstein Company) distributed the film, it was still a small affair that nonetheless made over double its money back from the box office, not to mention its incredibly healthy run on DVD sales and rentals.
“Survival? Who the fuck wants to survive in a world like this? All that’s left is to record what’s happening for whoever remains when it’s over.” – Survival of the Dead
Right off the bat, Romero hands the reins of the plot over to Jason Creed (Joshua Close), the film’s young wannabe director, who’s making his final project for film class a horror movie—though he longs to be a documentarian. The plot is pretty much the classic “run all night to different locations for safety” narrative, but its found footage and burgeoning social media framing adds interest. While it’s charmingly outdated now (hello, MySpace!), yet again Romero saw where the runaway train of modern culture was headed—straight into the hell’s currency of hits, likes, and the kind of virality that had nothing to do with flesh eating.
My favorite scene has always been the one in the deserted hospital. The combination of a place of healing and what should be a hub of hurried activity and updated information during a crisis that’s now only serving as a place to house a small number of zombies is both effective and a smart way to work with a small budget. One of Romero’s greatest strengths was his insight into how traumatic subversion affects people emotionally. A small choice made solely to avoid losing an everyday comfort can get a whole group of people killed, and George never sugarcoated that humans pull that kind of selfish idiocy constantly.
The deaf Amish fellow our gang runs into on the road was a pre-meme meme, and even those who didn’t love the film couldn’t ignore the charm of the simple man of the soil, Samuel, and his chalkboard communication device and zombie-ready dynamite. Footage of a clown zombie at a birthday party immediately follows his introduction, and this is where we’re keenly reminded of George’s morbid sense of humor. Until now, despite its found footage style, the tone most closely matched the pessimistic tone of Day of the Dead. With these fun little bits of humor sprinkled throughout, the audience (and the filmmakers themselves) were unknowingly getting prepared for the dry sense of humor in the follow-up.
“The villains are always the humans.” – George A. Romero
Magnolia Pictures unleashed Survival of the Dead onto international film festivals before rolling out onto video-on-demand platforms April 30th of 2010 before a limited US theatrical release on May 28. Where Land of the Dead’s arrival felt splashy and optimistic, by the time we got to Survival, the small-scale release firmly reunited the franchise with what had become the constant theme of much of Romero’s career: hard-scramble ingenuity that rarely got its due from those with money and power.
Romero noted that, while the previous entries had specific cultural touchstones that helped inspire each film’s subtext (the war in Vietnam; the explosion of easy, mindless consumerism; the exploitation of classism; the social profiteering from the internet’s mass communication…), Survival of the Dead started with a vague idea of centering itself on war and ended up commenting much more on decaying family dynamics. This lack of initial surety ended up being a bit of a blessing and a curse for the film. While it lacks that instant, recognizable impact some of the previous entries provided—check the top news stories around the time each of Romero’s films were in production and you’ll see a nearly inextricable connection between the breaking stories and George’s—it has picked up some unique charms on its wayward journey.
The problem is that Survival doesn’t have much to say—or at least it feels that way through much of its runtime. The dialogue lacks verve and nuance, too often relying on the kinds of cliché meant to be purged in a first draft. The film seems as though it’s constantly trying to have a deeper message when no new depths are being plumbed. The kitsch from Diary has been largely expunged, though the sixth and final entry in the film series does bring some nice, slightly drier humor to the table.
The pacing feels more accommodating to its characters than fervent; that and the attention to dialogue help the small island community feel even more intimate. The script’s move from focusing on our National Guardsmen characters (starring the first returning character to appear in a “Dead” movie, a great Alan van Sprang as Sarge “Nicotine” Crockett) to centering on ones directly inspired by The Big Country (William Wyler’s Technirama Western epic that had the biggest influence on Survival’s script) keeps the character journeys feeling fresh and varied. The first act of Land lightly channels the militaristic scenes from Day of the Dead, making it that much more of a relief when we hook up with the Irish-accented version of the Hatfields and McCoys on the small isle of Plum, just off of Delaware.
In Survival of the Dead, the thrust of the film is trying to keep family alive… even if they’re undead. Now, most of the zombies are docile, allowing themselves to “participate” in shackled facsimiles of their lost living lives. The main battle between the O’Flynns and the Muldoons centers around their respective beliefs in how the “deadheads” should be taken care of, and as usual, paranoia and fear steer things to their darkest timeline.
Survival of the Dead isn’t unwatchable by a long shot, and it’s rarely on any “worst horror movies ever” list. Unfortunately, that’s as much because it’s as unmemorable as it is competent. The island locations are evocative, and every scene involving a horse is beautiful and new until it’s tragic and terrifying. The actors all give sincere performances with just enough of an oddball bent to make them engaging to tag along with, and the wry humor employed throughout helps pull the audience closer to the action. Still, when they all come together, the movie often gives off the feeling of disjointedness and of a rushed narrative. We’re on a tiny island, sure, but too many main characters are given similarly heavy emotional weights without the time to really delve into how that affects them, and we’re left to want more in the worst way.
The use of CGI gore in Land, Diary and Survival is also disappointing, especially in a franchise that helped launch the careers of Tom Savini and KNB. Exploding eyes, a zombie head melting from acid… all left to some chunky graphics. To be fair, it was all a byproduct of shrinking budgets that led to vastly reduced filming schedules, and Romero always valiantly tried to include as many practical and hybrid effects shots as he could, but this was a man and film series constantly at war with the clock. That said, the physical SFX gags at the end of Survival are when the film feels the most alive: It’s a gorgeous, mean orgy of blood and guts that, in hindsight, now feels like Romero’s valentine adieu to the core fans.
Rewatching the films now, I can’t help but childishly wish the best parts of Diary and Survival were scavenged and put into one lean, beautiful coda of a film instead. We’d get a bit more thanks to Marvel Comics’ Empire of the Dead series in 2014, also scripted by Romero, but that was more of a solid and fun side exercise that, yes, brought vampires into the fray.
In a perfect world, the film industry would have realized what a unique and maverick talent they had in George A. Romero before showering him in money, time, and resources to make any kind of film he wanted. We all know that’s not the kind of world we live in, though, and sadly, many of our very best are left to clamber through red tape and politics for decades only to get reduced versions of their original visions out into the world.
As a whole, Romero’s career was as fascinating as it was uneven, and that also holds true for the closing number of both the “Dead” series and his directing career. I come neither to praise nor bury Survival of the Dead, but in revisiting its island of humanistic horrors, I was reminded of one of my favorite facets of Romero’s work. He was a deeply funny and kind man who saw the worst of humanity and didn’t hold it against us so much as he held the mirror right up to us and hoped it’d help us see the light. He found a way to balance social commentary with compelling scares without coming off as preachy or phony. When things did come off as uneven, they never lacked sincerity. George knew we’d need that too, and he left us plenty.
