The God of Zombies

George Romero has a talent for tapping moviegoers' shoulders with an icy touch of horror. Best known for the most celebrated horror film of all time, Night of the Living Dead, Romero created a cult classic with a low budget and a high aim to achieve.

Born February 4, 1940, George Romero started his filmmaking career by shooting movies in 8 mm when he was still a teenager. He later attended the Carnegie-Mellon Institute of Art in Pennsylvania where he received a Bachelor's degree. After having mastered the fundamentals of filmmaking, he added his unique touches that led to the groundbreaking "Dead" series. These five horror movies had a zombie apocalypse theme that made them true thrillers, but more importantly, Romero included his insightful commentaries on modern society.

The first movie in the series was made with a ridiculously low budget of just over $100,000 but that was enough to literally propel Romero to the highest level in the industry. The entertainment arena is often best entered with a horror film because traditionally, it's easier to find a distributor for this type of movie. While Romero merely sought to get a start in the business, the phenomenal success of this film showcased his talent for combining suspense, horror, dark humor and romance. This versatility became his trademark and also allowed him to comment on social issues, thereby giving his movies depth.

Romero distinguished himself in the horror genre through the subtle, yet powerful messages contained in his work. Often the overall point was a stab at some aspect of society and therefore contained a cynical and bitter tone. After Night of the Living Dead, his next films didn't achieve the same acclaim, and in 1978, he returned to the zombie genre with a movie that gave him the success he deserved. Dawn of the Dead featured a story about four people who fled from a zombie outbreak, only to become victims of a different kind. With a budget of $1.5 million, the movie grossed over $40 million and Entertainment Weekly declared it one of the top cult films.

George Romero is impressive as a writer and director. His talents were seen in a variety of venues including a live action commercial to promote Resident Evil 2, a video game. He also put together a series of short films detailing the work involved in the Diary of the Dead.

Although his work received both exceptional reviews as well as mediocre ones, George Romero added something special to his zombie tales - specifically, a combination of gore and the guts to comment on society's flaws. His horror movies connected with audiences because he had the ability to transfer ideas to the screen with stop-your-heart action. Romero is a legend that will live forever in these zombie movies.

What makes a good zombie movie?

There are no sure things in Hollywood, but one genre of horror movie that seems to always just draw people to it is the zombie movie. I think part of what makes zombie movies terrifying, even the older ones with slow zombies, is the taboo. They're not human, but they're close enough to bring up the cannibalism taboo.

There's something great about zombie movies, which with George Romero's influence have also become renowned for having hidden political and social commentary. This combination makes these horror movies particularly interesting, even above many of their peers. Zombie movies also tend to have a cult following, keeping them popular even years and years after release to DVD.

There are several main factors that make up a great zombie movie.

#1: Interesting Zombies. The best zombie movies have a wide variety of zombies who could be odd looking, funny looking, or terrifying, but the best zombie movies have something that sets their zombies apart from the rest.

#2: Gore. Zombie fans can tell you one of the major things everyone waits for is the first extremely gory death scene. It's just not a zombie movie without one violent death scene.

#3: Non Cliched Characters. Don't get me wrong, there are always basic cliche characters, but the best zombie movies have one or two characters who really stick out as being unique and different. They're not just the pretty girl who gets killed or the rich jerk who gets what's coming to him. "Cemetery Man" is one of the best examples of this.

#4: Man vs. Zombie. The majority of good zombie movies have a siege mentality, with humans struggling to survive against the zombie onslaught. Most zombie movies are also synonymous with "zombie apocalypse."

#5: One Human Psychopath/Idiot. Usually there is one person who is either a psychopath and thus is as much of a danger as the zombies, or there's one idiot who does something stupid which lets the zombies in.

These are just a few of the things that make a great zombie movie. Not all of these always have to be present, but they definitely help. The new remakes of the old Romero classics are continuing the new trend of running zombies, which is definitely different from all the old school interpretations which had zombies strong, but slow.

This is a good base for starting a zombie movie. The one other interesting trend is the explosion of shorter fan films which are usually pretty funny zombie movie parodies, but that's for another article.

I Love Zombies

I’m fascinated with zombies. I cannot explain why. I am also a huge horror film buff and have seen every zombie flick committed to film. The thoughts of zombies constantly flit through my mind. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I frequently imagine what it would be like to survive a coming zombie apocalypse. Regrettably, I don’t even own a shotgun, which is by far the best anti-zombie weapon available to the average consumer, as determined by zombie experts (and if you didn’t know this, geez, where have you been?). So I definitely need to get a shotgun to deal with the zombie apocalypse when (not if) it comes. And you know I’m seriously fascinated with zombies, because I don’t even know if I’m joking when I say that.

I have had some seriously weird dreams revolving around zombies. They’re multi-hour affairs, and continue to take place for many minutes even after I’ve woken up. My most recent dream took place in a post-zombie apocalypse Detroit. Yes, there were massive casualties, but order was eventually restored and life continued on, with one minor exception: zombies remained a lingering threat, especially at night (you didn’t think we would manage to take out all of the zombies in one fell swoop, did you?). It was just like how you might currently be afraid of being attacked by a mugger at 3 am on a seedy side street, except in my dream, the attackers were zombies, and they weren’t after your valuables, but rather, wanted to eat your brains. So in that sense, it was a bit scarier than contemporary Detroit.

The best part of that dream, though, was how the everyday Detroit PD took on secondary anti-zombie duties. In the dream, I became surrounded by zombies in a dark alleyway (I don’t know what I was doing there). But luckily, the police arrived at the last second and saved me. Now, normally, the police would arrest alleged criminals, but since we are dealing with zombies here, they killed them on the spot. So the police function as judge, jury, and executioner in this post-apocalypse version of Detroit, at least as far as zombies are concerned. And why shouldn’t they be? There’s no point in holding trials for zombies, since you know you’ve got to exterminate them all in the end anyway.

In addition to dreaming, I have many fully conscious thoughts about zombies, including how I would survive the coming zombie apocalypse. My ultimate zombie survival plan is this: two autoloader shotguns, a chest full of ammunition, a dependable slicing melee weapon such as a longsword or chainsaw (everyone knows you don’t bother trying to use bludgeoning weapons against zombies), and two weeks worth of food and water. The key to my plan is that all of these supplies are kept on the second story of a building with only one staircase, such as your typical house (or I would head to the nearest mall, ala Dawn of the Dead). That way, all you have to do is defend the stairway (zombies aren’t dexterous enough to climb the sheer vertical exterior walls of a building). And since zombies are noted for their slow movement, especially when trying to tackle stairs, you’d have a generous amount of time to take out each ascending zombie before it reached you. I suspect by the resolution of the zombie apocalypse you would have a huge pile of festering perforated zombie flesh at the bottom of your staircase, but meh, that’s unavoidable.

The reason for the second shotgun is so that you can conduct proper maintenance on one shotgun at a time without leaving you defenseless. After all, in a sustained zombie apocalypse situation, you may end up needing to fire hundreds of shells. A shotgun won’t hold up too well after going that long without cleaning. The melee weapon is in case things really go downhill. You never want to fight a zombie at melee range, but if it’s unavoidable, you’re much better off with a proper weapon than being stuck with just your fists. Just remember to aim your slashes to decapitate the zombie. You need to take out the head. A zombie with limbs sliced off will keep coming after you, but a headless zombie cannot.

Why are we so fascinated with zombies?

With his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, George Romero brought the concept of the slow-moving, flesh-eating zombie into mainstream American culture. From Michael Jackson's Thriller video to recent films like 28 Days Later, the zombie has continued to thrill and horrify audiences with the idea of the undead roaming the earth, searching for brains to devour.

Is there any evidence of real zombies existing? And why are we so fascinated with them?

Peter Dendle, author of The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia and associate professor of English at Penn State Mont Alto, studies zombies in movies and folklore. He believes that although it might be possible to produce a zombie-like state pharmacologically, Hollywood's zombies are a product of our imaginations.

Ethnobotanists and anthropologists have investigated reported cases of "zombification" in Haiti, says Dendle. They've found that some traditional healers and practitioners of Voodoo in that island nation produce a "zombie powder" using tetrodotoxin, a very potent neurotoxin found in puffer fish. Tetrodotoxin is so poisonous that reportedly the amount found in a single puffer fish can kill thirty people. Death occurs from electrical signaling in nerves shutting down, leading to muscle paralysis and respiratory failure.

In Japan, fugu, the flesh of the puffer fish, is a sought-after delicacy, though it can be lethal if prepared incorrectly. Sixty percent of fugu poisoning victims die within hours. If a victim survives more than 24 hours, he or she is expected to recover. But because tetrodotoxin poisoning can put people into a coma-like state resembling death (while the sufferer remains fully conscious but completely paralyzed), there are stories of some fugu victims being laid out next to their coffins for three days in order to verify death.

Could such a poison be used to create a zombie? Highly unlikely, says Dendle. "The amount of tetrodotoxin would have to be within a very specific range, enough to put the person into a comatose stupor but not actually kill them. In other words it doesn't seem like something you could rely upon controlling very well."

In any case, Dendle believes that focusing on whether zombies could exist misses the real point. "Let's say this state has perhaps occurred a few times in history, maybe once every generation," he offers. "The more interesting thing is the importance of the story as a cultural artifact, the way that we shape our communities and shape our behavior based around this set of stories."

In Romero's Night of the Living Dead, the director combined the idea of the undead zombie with the ghoul, or flesh-eater, creating the modern zombie we see today in various film, television, and even video game adaptations.

"The scary thing is this idea of entropy, that they're contagious," says Dendle. "They bite you and then you die and turn into a zombie, so it's going to spread. It becomes this global Armageddon with only a handful of survivors trying to escape. But you can't, you're fighting this uphill battle against a maddeningly relentless foe."

"Zombie movies tap into our apocalyptic fears and anxieties very effectively," Dendle continues. "They de-romanticize the connections between human beings and reduce humanity to its lowest common denominator, focusing on power relations in their most brutal human form. It's 'I will exert my will over you.' It's very Nietzscheian," he says.

Since Night of the Living Dead, the zombie has been used as an allegory for society's ills. Romero's 1979 sequel Dawn of the Dead is seen by many as a critique of capitalism, with zombies roaming around a mall, the place they remember most from their life, shuffling past storefronts in a daze. Dendle also sees horror films using the zombie as a barometer of our cultural anxieties.

"We're on the defensive—everyone's an attacker, everyone's threatening, shoot first, ask questions later," he says. "They may look nice, but you never know if they're a zombie or not, so you just have to act as though they are until you know different. The zombie movies play that up a lot and characters are scrutinized in this paranoid, defensive way."

While the vampire seemed to dominate many horror films of the 1990s, he notes, the zombie has become the go-to creature of the last few years, with recent remakes of the Romero franchise and films like 28 Days Later, in which zombies attack London following the accidental release of a deadly virus.

Dendle suggests this is because the zombie character stands so clearly opposite our multi-tasking culture. "The zombie is slow, mechanically inept, it can barely use tools, it's a Luddite, it's technologically challenged," he explains. "I think that's exactly part of the point, that this technology-saturated generation has fixated on this creature specifically because there's fascination as well as repulsion. There must be something viscerally satisfying about the simplicity of the zombie's cravings and impulses. And we also must find something unacceptable about it, about its general demeanor, how slow it is and how old it looks."

Perhaps what is most frightening about zombies is that unlike most creatures in horror films, the zombie is us.

"There is something about the fact that, unlike space aliens or demons, zombies look like sick people," Dendle acknowledges. "They look like diseased, unhealthy, contagious outsiders. And yet human. So it does hit home in that sense."