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John Allman

If you’ve ever wandered the aisles at the video store or surfed the DVR pay-per-view options and seen a bunch of movies that you’ve never heard of, chances are John has watched them. Why? He loves movies. All kinds of movies. Good, bad, so-bad-they’re good, even the truly unwatchable ones. He mostly loves horror and science-fiction and drive-in exploitation movies that most upstanding model citizens wouldn’t dare watch. Then he writes up his thoughts so you can decide - watch, don’t watch or avoid at all costs. Sometimes he even gets to talk to the cool folks who make some of your favorite films.

Blood, Violence and Babes
John Allman

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A Conversation With: George A. Romero

Posted Sep 4, 2010 by John Allman

Updated Sep 4, 2010 at 05:37 PM

As any horror fan will tell you, there are just some directors who make movies that always stick with you. No matter how many times you’ve seen the movie, no matter if you can quote chapter and verse the dialog even before it comes out of the actor’s mouth, you will still stop, drop everything and plop down in front of the TV if a film by one of your favorite filmmakers comes on.

For me, my shortlist would include John Carpenter and “Halloween,” Sam Raimi and “The Evil Dead,” John Landis and “An American Werewolf in London,” Joe Dante and “The Howling” and George A. Romero and “Dawn of the Dead.” Each of the movies, and more importantly, the directors, touched on something that resonated with me. Whether it was the circumstances surrounding how I got to see their films (My wonderful, poor father who was forced to sit through hours of gore because I was underage), how I heard about their next projects or learned the wonderfully icky makeup techniques employed (Thank you, Fangoria magazine) or just the rush of primal fear that the images caused to surge through my body, I still vividly remember the first time I saw each of those five movies.

Being a horror fan first, and a film critic purely by luck, I’d never had the chance to actually speak to any of those, my top five directors from my childhood. That is, until now.

Hot on the heels of the successful “Diary of the Dead,” Romero is back with the latest chapter in his unstoppable living dead series, “Survival of the Dead.”

BVB: Blood, Violence and Babes got to speak to George by phone from his home in Toronto, Canada, and the conversation was, simply put, a dream come true.

Here is Part One of BVB’s two-part interview with Mr. Romero, the granddaddy of zombie movies, the legend of the living dead, and an all around pretty awesome guy to talk to for 20 minutes on the phone.

BVB: Your films for horror fans have really defined great chunks of our growing up. I’m in my 40s now, but I can still remember the first time seeing “Night,” seeing “Dawn,” seeing “Day,” and they’ve just had such an impact and I want to start out just asking: Did you ever think, 42 years ago, back in 1968, that you would still be fascinated by and making movies about the living dead?

GR: (Laughs) No! (Laughs) I don’t know if fascinated is the right word. I’m more fascinated with human behaviors. My stories are about the humans and how they address the problem, fail to address the problem, address it stupidly. I can’t imagine a zombie film without a bunch of stupid humans running around.

BVB: Is it more about how humans react to certain situations? Is that what fuels your creativity?

GR: Yeah, you know, it has been from the pop. Here’s a situation, which is, you know, basically a game changer, even in the first film. And when I made the first one I wasn’t thinking at all there would ever be another one. We just all wanted to be filmmakers and we went ahead and we had a little production company making industrial films and beer commercials and we had the equipment and we just went ahead and said let’s make a movie. Even in that first film, I hadn’t developed yet this idea that I could write social criticism or satire and do it in this format.

The first film I thought of as a one-off. It wasn’t until people started to write about it as if it was some sort of essential American cinema, and I resisted for years making another film until I socially knew the people who were developing that big shopping mall, Monroeville Mall, and it was one of the first indoor sort of temples to consumerism that any of us had ever seen and I went out before it was even open and I said wow, here’s an idea and I decided that well, maybe this can be my shtick. I can bring the zombies out of the closet whenever I have an idea, something I’d like to write about. And that’s when it happened.

BVB: Just out of curiosity, in the first film, the last scene…a lot has been made of that, that you were making a statement about race relations because here’s the one black guy who comes out of the house and gets killed because they assume he’s a monster. So that wasn’t really what you were going for? It was just ironic that he happened to come out and get shot?

GR: Exactly. That script was written the same before Duane [Jones] agreed to play the part. Duane was just the best actor from among our friends. The script was the same. In our minds, he was a white guy. The script was the same, he still got shot. It was all about the irony…We weren’t so focused on that. Duane was much more concerned about it while we were shooting. He said you want me to hit this white woman? Do you know what’s going to happen to me outside the theater? I’m going to get attacked by people. We thought we were being very hip by not changing the script.

BVB: You had mentioned that back then, it took you a while before you figured out you could use these films to kind of put the sly and sometimes not so subtle social commentary in. What is it with “Survival of the Dead”? What are you hoping people will draw from that? What is your eye trained on now?

GR: Well, you know, it’s not trained on anything specifically in the news. When I made “Land of the Dead,” that was big box, it was Universal, it was a really difficult, grueling shoot and it was somewhat disappointing, the way they distributed it. And I felt that I had sort of strayed from the roots. I said you know, I can do these things without movie stars and on very low box, and while we were shooting “Land,” I was starting to noodle on a script. I wanted to do something about emerging media, citizen journalism, and all that, so I got the idea for “Diary of the Dead.” And I knew we could make it for under $3 million, and we found this financing company, Artfire, they said they would be willing to finance it 100 percent and give me creative control, so I jumped on that, made “Diary” and figured again this was a one-off as far as sort of taking a little sidebar from the rest of the series. And because we made it so inexpensively and it wound up having a limited release, it ended up making a fortune. So everybody said, OK, let’s, we want another one right away.

Un-oh. So it was the first time that had happened to me. So I said, OK, I’ll take just a universal theme about war, about enemies that don’t die, conflicts that I don’t even know what started it, all I know is you’re my enemy. You can think of that as Northern Ireland or the Middle East or even the Senate these days. Anger management, I think we all could use a course in anger management these days. So that’s what it’s about.

And I also had the idea that I could use characters from “Diary.” I actually developed three story ideas. I don’t know if the others will happen. It depends on, if this film goes out and makes a lot of money, they’re going to want another one again and I’m ready. I’ve got two more story ideas that all base around characters from “Diary of the Dead.” It’s also the first time that I’ve been able to do that because all the earlier films are controlled and owned by different people. I’ve never been able to bring characters back or use story points so I’m sort of enamored by that idea.