At work on his latest low-budget masterpiece, the zombie guru says his movies aren’t really all that scary. But that short film he once made for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood? Now that was frightening

By Christopher Frey

Rumours of George A. Romero’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Internet message boards are buzzing with word that the zombie auteur recently collapsed on-set, he has been hospitalized, and production on his latest film has been postponed.

The spry sixty-six year old man in front me, rail thin at six-foot-five, briefly flutters his arms and shuffles his feet in a mock dance to prove otherwise. “Look at me, I’m in the hospital,” he said in his trailer on a local film set. “I passed my insurance physical to do this movie, so that’s fine for me, man!”

Mr. Romero is not dead, or undead, he is merely living in Toronto. He has taken the trail sought after by so many of the embattled survivors in his tetralogy of zombie films, beginning with Night of the Living Dead (1967). “I’m heading north, to Canada,” the protagonist will always say. “Where there’s no people.”

The longtime Pittsburgh resident has lived here since 2004, but still gets ribbed about the “no people” line. “People took that the wrong way in Land of the Dead. What I meant was somewhere way up north.” But he’s no Democrat fleeing the Red State hordes. The old team he used to work with in Pittsburgh has dispersed to New York and Los Angeles, casualties of that city’s shrinking film industry. After already making two films in Toronto, he said he has found a new family, a new production team, good restaurants and the right economic incentives. And there’s another thing: “Here, I have a girlfriend.”

Diary of the Dead, presently shooting at a downtown warehouse-cum-soundstage and in the suburban backwoods of Markham, is a return to Mr. Romero’s independent, low-budget roots after the Universal Studios financed Land of the Dead. Following a group of student filmmakers heading into the bush, it is also a return to the franchise’s origins. “In this story we’re back to the first night,” Mr. Romero said. “To when the shit first hits the fan. It’s really going all the way back and telling a different story with a new group of people.”

There’s another pragmatic reason that Romero is returning to the Dead franchise. When the distributor changed the tail of Night’s original title from Flesh Eaters to Living Dead, the copyright ‘bug’ that should appear next to film’s name went missing in the final print. The film, which Variety said “raised doubts about… the moral health of moviegoers”, has ever since been in the public domain; Romero receives no royalty from its sale on video or DVD. And he has no ownership in any of the subsequent Dead movies. Making Diary is his way of re-asserting copyright, and he has a stake in the production.

It’s fitting, in a way, that Night of the Living Dead should belong to all of us. The sheer primitive pleasure of watching stilted and stumbling versions of ourselves noshing on the tasty tissue of human brain is one thing. The more disturbing implications of watching how humans behave, collectively and individually, in a state of crisis is another. The walking undead have proved to be a rather enduring and pliable metaphor for aspects of the modern condition-from conformity and consumerism to social chaos and disease. Romero always played ironically with the socio-political subtext in his films, most notably Dawn of the Dead’s critique of consumerism, zombies wandering aimlessly through a Day-Glo shopping mall. (”They come here because they remember it was important to them,” deadpans one of the survivors.) In the post 9-11 world in which Mr. Romero wrote Land, he riffed on issues of homeland security; Dennis Hopper based his portrayal of Kaufman, the despotic administrator who lords over a fortified city, on U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

“You can read whatever you want into the zombies,” said Mr. Romero. “People who write film treatises about these movies have them representing just about anything. In my mind, it’s just been about some sort of revolutionary sea change in society. I don’t care what they represent. They’re evolving, a new species taking over. It’s about adaptation and our ability to either adapt or find some way to co-exist, or not. That should be the driving force. But all the different characters in all the different situations try to maintain life as it was, without acknowledging life is no longer what it was.”

Mr. Romero remains surprised that his premise has had so much gas. In the past four years, his work has spawned a gaggle of new zombie flicks, from 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, and the upcoming Canadian feature Fido, in which zombies figure as pets. While Romero is a big fan of Shaun, he’s less enamoured of 28 Days, picking on the fact that its undead do not lurch and stumble, but run. Which, he sighs, just isn’t right. When asked once how do you direct a zombie, he said “loll your head as if it’s a little too heavy and the muscles have begun to atrophy.” He promises a few in-jokes about it in Diary.

There’s a flip side, however, to Mr. Romero’s influence-no other director’s films have been remade so often. Even his little seen 1971 film The Crazies is slated for an updating. But he hardly blinks about it.

“I’m just this funny guy over here making movies, not paying much attention to what’s going on over there. Stephen King is often asked how do you feel about Hollywood ruining your books, and he says ‘They didn’t ruin my books, they’re right here on the shelf behind me.’ So I figure my movies are mine.”

For one of the icon’s of American horror cinema, the progenitor of an entire subgenre, it’s surprising when Mr. Romero says that none of his film’s since Night of the Living Dead are “really scary,” and even that one he’s not so sure about. He admits that in the past ten years he has viewed all his old films again, and sees instead the constant evolution of his craft.

“I’ve relied on tricks,” he said. “I’ve never really had an idea that was believable enough to lend itself to [being scary]. Monkey Shines (1988) has a few jolts, a few creepy moments. I think Alien, for example, is a really scary movie, very well-crafted. There are other obvious ones, like The Exorcist, that really get to you on a different level. But first you need some dough, then you need some time, and have an idea able to make the audience completely suspend its disbelief. Then you can just work on crafting it. But that takes time. And so, what you do with my kind of shit, when you don’t have that kind of time and money, is rely on the old jumps and tricks, and bah! It’s about all you have time for.”

With its low-budget friendly premise of student filmmakers in the woods, Romero dismissed comparisons to The Blair Witch Project.

“Blair Witch was trying to be much more desperately realistic. It was hyperreal. It was just viscerally experiential. This is not. This is still a bit arch, a bit theatrical, and it’s just the style that is more subjective.”

“We’re going to have fun with it. When I look at my films what I see most is me learning to use the pencil, if you know what I mean. They say John Ford made, what, 250 flicks? I made fifteen. I don’t have all them tricks in my pocket yet. It’s one of the things that keeps me going when I have an idea that I’m hungry for. You got to find something. I guess it’s why fishermen keep fishing.”

No, Mr. Romero is not in a dire state, he appears rather revitalized by the new surroundings and the fact that now even his most obscure films have found a second-life on DVD. Before returning to set Mr. Romero reflected fondly, when asked, about the television program where he got his first break: Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Little known is that Romero, for a period, shot the educational shorts that Fred Rogers showed on his “Picture, Picture” machine.

“We made little movies like ‘How do they make lightbulbs?’, or something about wheels. That was my first job. It was anything that came into Fred’s head, including ‘Fred Rogers Gets a Tonsillectomy’.”

He laughs. “Now that’s one of the more frightening films I’ve made.”