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Saturday Evening Movie Thread 04/13/2024 [TheJamesMadison]

George Romero

If there's one thing George Romero is known for it's zombies. He was the zombie guy. He made zombie movies. And, to be fair, six out of sixteen films were zombie films. That's not a small percentage, but half of those three were made in the final five years of his career from 2005-2009. Much like many film directors who started in the horror genre, he spent most of his career trying to break out of that mold before ultimately just giving up and using what little clout he had in that tiny subgenre he called home to make whatever he could.

Was that all he was, though? Was he just the zombie guy? Was he just the horror guy who made a lot of zombie films? Surely we all remember, or have at least heard of, Martin, his pseudo-vampire film, right?

Well, to figure out Romero, who he was, how he was perceived, and who he wanted to be, you have to break his filmmaking career into three parts. The first is Night of the Living Dead until Dawn of the Dead. The second would be Creepshow to the end of his career with Survival of the Dead. The third would be the film that falls in between: Knightriders.

The Start

George A. Romero began filmmaking somewhat unusually: he was an industrial filmmaker, largely making commercials for local clients around Pittsburgh through his company Image Ten Productions after he graduated from Carnegie Mellon studying drama. Wanting to get into feature filmmaking, he pulled together a bare amount of funds to make an easily marketable horror movie that became Night of the Living Dead. Using a very small cast of local actors and even some crew, a remote almost condemned farmhouse, and as much time as he could, Night of the Living Dead tapped into the cultural zeitgeist of the moment which helped propel it to become one of the most profitable independent films ever made, an honor that gave Romero precious little comfort since he and his producers signed terrible distribution deals that gave them no cut of the profits.

This led to Romero essentially going back to square one with his next film, There's Always Vanilla, made in largely the same way, a process he followed for several years, his films either simply unsuccessful (like Vanilla) or plagued by more bad distribution deals (like The Crazies).

What is common across this first decade of his career is how he made them. Every single one of them was crafted in the editing bay. What I mean by that is that he filmed quickly, with only tangential relationship to a script, and he filmed a lot of footage, taking it all into editing where he crafted. He was, essentially, the Terrence Malick of Pittsburgh and horror. Not all of these films are horror, and they provide an important glimpse into what he was trying to be outside of zombie films.

There's Always Vanilla is a relationship drama (it's not very good and a weird choice if he was trying to recreate the financial success of Night of the Living Dead). Season of the Witch is about a bored housewife who decided to dabble in witchcraft, never actually making magic but finding meaning in it anyway (while turning into a monster at the same time). The Crazies was obviously an effort to recreate the success of Night, a film about a disease attacking a small Pennsylvania town, the military's efforts to quarantine it, and the conflict between the two. Martin is about a young man who thinks he's a vampire, drugs women, and uses a razor blade to get the blood he drinks.

This period is really seemingly defined by the idea that magic isn't real, but belief in it fills a hole in the human experience. That's most evident in Season of the Witch and Martin where the lack of magic is a central idea, but the investment in trying to pursue the magic provides meaning in a world where people are alone. It seems obvious that Romero grew up in a Catholic household (his early films are filled with the iconography), but he fell out of belief before he started his filmmaking career. He had become something of a materialist who struggled to find meaning in a world without magic and wonder and God.

Martin is where his career changed, though. It's not that Martin was a financial success (it wasn't), it's that it was the start of his professional career with his producing partner Richard Rubinstein. With Rubinstein, Romero was able to get the funds to return to zombies for the second time with Dawn of the Dead, the highest grossing film of Romero's entire career, the film that solidified him as the master of the zombie subgenre, and gave him real freedom with real money for the first time. However, before we get to what he did with that, let's skip ahead to how he continued his career afterwards.

The Long, Drawn-out Ending


So, Romero became friends with Stephen King, and the two were determined to work together. What they managed to bring together was the anthology film, and homage to EC comics, Creepshow. Now, I separate at this point mostly for production reasons. The way Romero had made his films up to Creepshow are done, never to return. The "film as much as possible and I'll put it together in the editing bay" methods are discarded for much more structured productions around a script. There's a manic energy in almost every frame of Romero's first decade, but the filmmaking techniques are much more sedate and, I might say, generic for the rest of it.

One of the important things to know about Romero is his influences. They're not horror films or anything along those lines. He regularly mentioned two as the most influential to him, and they were both films by The Archers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman. Those are not rinky-dink independent productions, rather they are lush visual treats with heavy emphasis on music. The visuals in Creepshow in particular are usually accredited to influence from Dario Argento with whom Romero had worked with on Dawn of the Dead and was considered a friend, but I think it's more likely that the visual splashes of color in Creepshow have as much to do with The Red Shoes as it does Suspiria. (Note: I'm not discounting an Argento influence, just saying that the Powell/Pressburger influence can't be swept away.)

That visual sense and strictness around scripting is ironclad for the rest of his career. From Day of the Dead to Monkey Shines to, in particular, The Dark Half, all the way to the end, there's a lack of visual improvisation to his films. As I was going through the films, Mark Andrew Edwards was going through them with me, and he made regular mention of how the later films simply didn't "feel like" Romero films, and I think this change in production approach is the key. We associate Romero with that sort of improvisational style of filmmaking where he found the film in the edit, but he wasn't finding the film in the edit of something like The Dark Half. He had found the film in the script stage as he adapted his friend's book (it's based on a Stephen King novel). He was becoming more typical as a filmmaker in general.

He was also beset by the lack of financial success, leading to greater gaps between his films. After The Dark Half, it took him 7 years to release another film. Bruiser, a story of a man who wakes up with a white mask as his face and decides to kill people, was met by trepidation from the studio that funded it, leading to the decision to release it direct to video without a theatrical run. It really felt like Romero's career was over, but he was saved by Zach Snyder.

Yes, that guy.

Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead was successful enough to get studios interested in zombie films again, and they got Romero to make Land of the Dead. It followed a couple of years later with the found footage zombie movie Diary of the Dead, which you would think would be more improvisational, but Romero said it was the most tightly planned film he ever made. It's also his worst. His final film was Survival of the Dead in 2009. Intended as the first in a trilogy, he never got the second off the ground, beset by health problems until he died in 2017.

Who He Wanted to Be

I leave this space to talk a bit more in depth around Knightriders because I think it's probably the most important film in Romero's filmography when talking about him as an artist. We see who he was before and who he was after, but there's something key about the first film a filmmaker can put together after a big success. Martin Scorsese's New York New York after the success of Taxi Driver presaged his later, big budget career by showing his affinity for large budgeted films with actors as the central focus. Knightriders could have been something similar if Romero had ever gotten the kind of success of someone like a Scorsese, but not only was Knightriders a financial non-entity (I honestly can't find any box office numbers for it at all, just numbers from Blu-ray sales decades after its release) but he ended up stuck in the horror ghetto for the rest of his career. And Knightriders is not a horror film in the least.

I really, really like Knightriders, so I can't quite completely escape this as a plea for people to discover it and reappraise it in the light that I find appropriate, but that's not why I highlight it. I highlight it because it's obvious that it's the kind of movie that Romero wanted to make. It's the transplanting of the Arthurian legend to the Pennsylvania countryside, made with local actors (yes, Ed Harris was still local at the time), filmed loosely in that first decade style, and...kind of weird. The replication of the Arthurian court has the knights jousting on motorcycles. It's honestly bizarre to see, and it's a serious impediment for many people's enjoyment. I have no problem with it. I get into it.

The other film to point out is something that was never even meant for theatrical distribution: The Amusement Park. Made for the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania, it's supposed to be something like an educational film about the plight of the elderly in the mid-70s, a rather typical product of industrial filmmaking of the era. However, Romero took the money and made a nightmarish fever dream built on his editing style of the time that would honestly feel right at home next to movies like Lost Highway in David Lynch's filmography. Completely unmoored from any commercial concerns and with enough money to see a project through at one clip, he went full experimental, and it is glorious (I think it's his best film, though that's an unpopular opinion, so caveat emptor).

So, if these two films are him either purely distilled or purely aspirational, then who did Romero want to be as an artist? He wanted to tell stories about characters, filmed loosely with plenty of time to film a lot and find the vibe in the editing bay, and probably stay in the Pittsburgh area. He wanted to tell a variety of stories, and yet, he was the zombie guy. That's his legacy.

Zombies

So, I've largely avoided this topic despite it obviously being the main focus of his career because I, much like Romero himself, quickly grew bored of zombies. It's about two-thirds of the way through Dawn of the Dead where it becomes apparent. Four people, two of whom have no police or military experience (one of whom is a pregnant woman), clear out a mall of zombies and live easy. Zombies are just the worst popular monster. They're slow, easy to kill, and there's no reason why they should be able to take over the planet. They're silly once you think about it. The main antagonists of the final act are raiders who find out that there are people in the mall and try to invade. Yes, the central argument becomes that zombies aren't the real danger, it's humanity. Oooo. Consider me unimpressed, to be honest.

Romero establishes the rules pretty clearly around how zombies work in the first two films. They are people who die. They eat the living to power themselves. They are not human anymore. They only operate on instinct and some kind of repressed memory (this is the explanation for zombies in the mall, never consumerism). There's honestly not a whole lot to do with them, but zombie lore has barely budged over the past 57 years, and that's despite Romero's own best efforts.

Bored of zombies, he started changing the rules in Day of the Dead, emphasizing the habit part (and overexplaining it for some reason...I really don't like the film) to the point where there's promise that the central zombie, Bub, is becoming human-like by the end. This is in direct contrast to the zombie action where the humans take out zombies with headshots like they're meat and not people while the film never seems to judge them harshly for it. The zombie stuff becomes incoherent.

That gets worse in Land of the Dead where a group of zombies led by Big Daddy band together to march on Pittsburgh where they discover that humanity has only the barest of defenses that they can just walk through despite the world being zombified for seemingly decades by this point. The point being that the zombies are effectively no longer zombies. They're ugly, decaying humans who move slowly and eat other humans. They're also supposed to represent some sort of newer form of humanity that won't have current humanity's problems. And they eat people. Do you see the incoherence?

Diary of the Dead returns to normal zombie rules (and massively overexplains them because we've never seen a zombie film before), but Survival of the Dead, Romero's final film and what was supposed to be the first in a trilogy, completely changes the rules again, emphasizing the idea of a cure, having a zombie ride horseback for most of the film, and getting them to eat something other than humans, while most of the film is actually a neo-Western...on an island...off the coast of Delaware...filled with Irish people. Gonna be honest, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would (it's still not good, though). It's obvious that Romero understood that the only way he was getting money for movies at this point was by having zombies in them, that he was bored to death by them, and he was trying to find other types of films to make while still including the zombies. The actual plot has more in common with old silent westerns about land disagreements than zombie stuff.

The End

So, in retrospect, what did I think of Romero's filmography? I was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed it more in general than I thought I would. His Stephen King adaptation (The Dark Half) is surprisingly good. The first decade is different but fairly strong. It's just...those zombies man. The kind of film that defined him fills his filmography, and they're hard to get away from. However, he still has The Amusement Park, which is amazing.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Civil War
Arcadian

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Martin (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's not some forgotten masterpiece, but it's solid and well-done in his own, dirt-cheap way." [TubiTV]

Dawn of the Dead (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "So, the zombie stuff is good. The character stuff is good. The man-on-a-mission approach to the storytelling works. The threats are handled well. I just find it to be a bit thematically bare and inconsistent." [Personal Collection]

Knightriders (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "I honestly loved this film. I do think it suffers slightly from being cut down (an extended cut at three hours is something I'll always want and will never see), but it's this wonderful portrait of anachronism and meaning." [Library]

Day of the Dead (Rating 1/4) Full Review "It meanders forever without a plot. Its point is thin. At least the gore is quality, I guess." [Library]

The Dark Half (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Romero allowing the film to feel like an actual series of events in a narrative form instead of a series of highlights. He was pretty good at this whole moviemaking thing." [Library]

Land of the Dead (Rating 1/4) Full Review "This movie is stupid to its core. It doesn't work as a story. Its characters are uniformly dumb. The situation makes no sense. It all falls apart the second you think about it at all. Hiding behind metaphor is a terrible defense since the text still needs to work even when there's intended subtext. Again, the gore is decent, though." [Library]

Diary of the Dead (Rating 0.5/4) Full Review "If not for the handful of guffaws, I'd say it has no worth at all. But, I did guffaw at least twice. Maybe it was only twice." [Amazon Prime]

Survival of the Dead (Rating 2/4) Full Review "So, it's not good. However, it's decently performed (a huge step up from Diary), it looks surprisingly good, and it has some entertaining individual moments." [Amazon Prime]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 5/4, and it will talk about the films adapted from Robert E. Howard's stories.