The horror of modern life: in memory of George A. Romero

I’m new to zombies. Not new as in I’ve only just heard of them. New in the sense that I’ve never paid attention before recently starting to watch the Walking Dead, and becoming fascinated by what it can tell us about our own conception of the societies we live in.
Previously I’d not really not been all that fussed. I’d thought of these films as a bit corny, not all that scary and a low budget alternative to genuine psychological chills. I’d never entertained the idea of zombies speaking to more. In so far as they were cultural commentary it didn’t seem to offer much more incisiveness than the first year Politics student we all remember at college who spoke defiantly but one-dimensionally about power of ‘The Communist Manifesto’. You could see there was something different from other horror sub-genres in that it was about a social ill, a mass, an existential threat…but really you didn’t need to watch a whole film to get the point. Eventually this biological terror that humanity had accidentally or intentionally brought into the world was going to literally eat everyone alive. Or it would convert you into an iteration of itself. Or it would eat you a bit and convert you. That seemed the worst outcome, to me anyway.
George A. Romero made zombies into something beyond the undead hive-mind we unflinchingly watch on our screens today. We’re somewhat immune to the spectacle now. Its not counter-cultural anymore. The Walking Dead – which over the last two years has become a fascinating cultural artefact for me and my co-collaborator, Jacob Naish, to mine – is now the most watched terrestrial TV show on the planet. Trump’s campaign spent millions advertising in the commercial breaks of it. It’s on FOX for Christ’s sake.
Romero was the antecedent of all this. And he did some incredible things that were novel and game-changing. There are some unique qualities we can point to immediately in Romero’s work which you don’t need a bachelor degree in a social science to notice, or discover. We’ll look at a few of the more superficial ones before the more complex social consequences of his work.
Trailblazer
He was, almost, the first. He was certainly the first to bring the idea of an actual Zombie apocalypse to mainstream audiences. ‘Night of the Living Dead was made in 1968. Nineteen sixty-eight. This was before the American rating system for movies was fully in place, which meant children were admitted to watch it (imagine the impact on a 7 year old walking out of those theatres into quiet streets late in the evening, in rural American towns).
It made huge financial returns, grossing $30m despite being made for just over $100,000.
Romero had tapped into something latent in society: a fear of incomprehensible contagions, and a revisiting of biblical apocalypse. In so doing he sparked a commercially successful and somewhat critically acclaimed franchise of movies and a genre in its own right (though he was frustrated during his life at the industry’s inability to see his worth beyond that franchise and that genre).
There is a subtlety and richness to his body of work that tends to find acknowledgement only in the commentary of academics and film enthusiasts – including recurrent themes of the embeddedness of patriarchy in social life, the tensions and conflict often lying close to the surface in the nuclear family unit, and the bereftness of late twentieth century appeals to Utopianism – from both right and left. But it is in the zombie genre that his innovations really had profound and lasting effect.
Take the cosmetic artistry on Night of the Living Dead: the special effects are largely achieved through the makeup applied to the players of the undead. This relatively cheap, but hugely effective method of terrifying audiences (not so much special effects but the time-intensive activity of layering actors and extras in prosthetics and makeup, the realism of which was undoubtedly assisted by the first film’s release in black and white) worked because all the made-up players needed to do was groan and walk en masse. There were no tentacles. There was no levitating. No metamorphosis into otherworldly creatures. They just trudged along.
Think about that for a second: they only needed to walk. The speed and suddenness of shocks now in modern psychological horrors can be juxtaposed with the slow deliberation of a zombie horde marching. The latter’s pace was no less terrifying, in its own way.
Personally, I find the visceral experience now of watching a zombie movie fascinating. This, I believe, is because there is something about the technical composition of the zombie movie that makes it temporarily seem ‘more likely’. That is to say, comparatively, it appears as more likely to become real than a film about vampires, a demon, or a monster. There is a good deal less suspension of disbelief for a modern audience than there is required for stories with their folkloric roots in the supernatural. So much so that there’s an International Relations reader on war and peace written by a Princeton academic – Daniel Drezner – which teaches the concepts needed for first year IR students by imagining the politics between states in the immediate aftermath of a Zombie apocalypse.
Authenticity
There has been no shortage of well-respected peers and colleagues reflecting on the authenticity of his contribution and character. Ed Harris, with whom he worked on Knightriders (1981) described him as ‘a big lovable bear of a man’ and a joy to work with. Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) described his “fierce intelligence and humour” citing Dawn of the Dead and other his other zombie films as the “work of a major satirist…better records of the years in which they were made than countless serious dramas.”
We couldn’t agree more with Wright and others who have commended the insights his films afford. In our view, he created the conditions for horror as social commentary, and even as political intervention. And two particular ways in which he did this strike us as particularly important.
Social Commentary: Race
Later movies and other franchises and series (such as the Walking Dead) tacitly or explicitly elide questions of race. Watching the Walking Dead we have asked ourselves, for example: how are African Americans (re)presented in the series? Where are they cast? What have the conditions of the post-apocalypse American hinterlands offered black males and females in terms of emancipatory change? Where are all the black zombies? What’s the historical significance of the series’ location in the deep-south (Georgia)?
Romero was much more explicit and was so from the outset. Arguing as he did that the decision to cast Duane Jones as the lead in the original Night of the Living Dead was a result of him simply being the best actor in their group of friends, the significance at the time and since should not be understated. Notwithstanding that this was a black man in a role as a leader in a small group within a rural community terrorised by unthinking moronic simpletons that only wished to subsume, or devour those that were not biologically identical to them, it was a highly political move. Whether it was intended or not.
Jones’s character – Ben – is mistrusted, and experiences literal exclusion from the privileged safe haven of the house that harbours the living at one point, after attempting to free them all. The film ends with Duane Jones’ character being first liberated, and then shot, by a posse of white males.
For an indication of the underlying American hostility to Black men in lead roles, read the one reviewer in a 1969 Los Angeles Times who referred to the character of Ben as a “comparatively calm and resourceful negro”.
Social Commentary: Consumption.
While other horror sub-genres have their origins in folklore – think of werewolves, vampires, and witches – the zombie plague is a profoundly modern thing, only conceivable when you have notions of populations and masses …when you have urban areas and their fringes, with commonly shared notions of safe spaces and their violation..when you have some generalised medical understanding of contagion, requiring some degree of education on the part of the audience about threats such as pathogen transmission, or nervous systems against which to weigh plausibility. It’s the ‘sci’ in sci-fi.
But most importantly, you have to watch the movies with some idea of what modern authority is – not only in what degree safety and security reside in our own ability to wield more or less primitive weapons, but the extent to which these things are provided at scale by the organs of the state: army, Police etc. Until they’re not. Like when Zombies crawl out of the ground and eat all the soldiers.
These are contemporary things we’re all meant to understand whatever our background. But they aren’t meaningful in the same way if you were to transport them into the relatively recent past (you don’t need to go back further than Western Europe in the 1800s, and the Frontier in North America much later). Which is perhaps why it’s not done in cultural production very often.
Romero spoke to these things quite humbly when he spoke about his films. Cognisant of the prevailing anxieties of his time – about our impoverishment by conspicuous consumption, of the blurring of meaning.
I actually think we can even move beyond what Romero meant by his films, by the genre they unleashed. Intention is NOT the only source of meaning in cultural objects like the zombie genre. We don’t have to specifically mean to include something as a political statement for it to be considered in this way. We can look instead to the assumptions that are made about the fundamentals of the world we move in when apocalyptic imaginings cause their fracture and dismantling – interrogate how powerfully ideas are reproduced in such places.
This is what we do in our research into the Walking Dead. So more than anything, today, we want to pay tribute to the visionary cinema that George A. Romero showed us and, by giving the platform to all that followed, a wonderfully vivid and exciting way of thinking incisively about modernity by turning it on its head.
We’ll be revealing the results of our own autopsy of the genre he helped create very soon.