The first thing to understand about George Romero is that he makes honest films - indeed, he is the least exploitative of filmmakers. This might sound strange about the director of whom Variety in 1968 said, “Until the Supreme Court establishes clearcut guidelines for the pornography of violence, Night of the Living Dead will serve nicely as an outer-limit definition by example.” In 1968, in Pittsburgh, with $120,000, this unknown director who grew up in the Bronx where he was picked up by the police at age fourteen for setting a dummy on fire and tossing it off a roof (he was making a home movie) made what has come to be recognized as one of the half-dozen or so masterpieces of horror films. Looking back, it is the first reviews that are a little unnerving. Vincent Canby of the New York Times said, “Night of the Living Dead is a grainy little movie acted by what appear to be nonprofessional actors, who are besieged in a farm house by some other nonprofessional actors who stagger around, stiff-legged, pretending to be flesh-eating ghouls.” The Variety writer said the film “cast serious aspersions on the integrity and social responsibility of its Pittsburgh-based makers,” “amateurism of the first order,” “abysmally lit.” “unrelieved orgy of sadism,” “unrelieved grossness,” “unrelieved..." - but make up your own, you can't go wrong.
Why these reactions that are so far off base? Night of the Living Dead, it's true, is a frightening movie, but it's also quite funny. It's funny from the very beginning when the brother and sister start arguing over whose fault it is that they should be arriving there at dusk, and the film's parody of the genre itself begins almost immediately as the man, teasing his sister, starts lumbering around the graveyard like - yes - a stiff-legged zombie. That's when the first real zombie suddenly appears at the edge of the woods.
The thing about Romero is that he's unrelenting. He starts off with one zombie but soon the whole forest is flooded with them - hundreds of them - and it doesn't dilute the horror either, rather, it transforms it into mega-horror. A young couple is introduced into the story, and we think they're going to survive - that's how it happens in the genre. Instead, their pick-up truck explodes, and they become a barbecue feast for the zombies who walk away from the truck munching on various limbs, and pretty far up on the joints too, where the meat is tastiest. Perhaps Vincent Canby isn't a cannibal. Perhaps you have to be a cannibal to relish such a diabolical little number. But then again, moviemaking of this order really does require nerve, integrity, and critical intelligence.
After Night of the Living Dead's commercial success, Romero probably could've worked in Hollywood (Tobe Hooper of the overrated The Texas Chainsaw Massacre chose to, and his next film, Eaten Alive, was an embarrassment). Instead, Romero stayed in Pittsburgh, working with his own production company, and during the next decade produced four more films, There's Always Vanilla and Jack's Wife, both of which saw almost no distribution. The Crazies, dealing with the accidental contamination of a New England town by biological warfare weapons that cause insanity and death, and Martin, the story of a vampire who seems to be a very familiar sexually disturbed adolescent. The latter two films saw wider, though still limited, distribution, and reviews were mixed, though Martin has garnered its own devoted following.
Then in 1979, after a hiatus of eleven years, Romero returned to his zombies with Dawn of the Dead. The film was shot in a shopping mall near Pittsburgh at the cost of about $1.2 million - nothing by Hollywood standards, but a huge budget for Romero - and the film looks like it cost some $10 to $15 million. If violence in the movies accelerated in the decade following Night of the Living Dead's release, then Romero, with insane abandon, with murderous precision, bounced right back in to first place - no mean achievement in the 1970s. Yet - here is the irony - a film like Dawn of the Dead could never have come out of Hollywood, not out of the usual channels of production and distribution. Again, the man's integrity - he rejected the MPAA rating board's designation of an “X,” refused to cut in order to get an “R,” and went ahead and distributed the film through his own channels. The man knows what he's about, he sees the mainstream films and knows what they're about, and he doesn't want any part of it. Romero, it's true, went out of his way in the creation of especially gory effects - I won't catalogue them - and the first sequence after the credits piles up the corpses faster than an Apocalypse Now body count. Yet I would contend the violence is never gratuitous, never exploitative, or rather, that is is gratuitous to the point of being demonstrably gratuitous, of making obvious the mechanics of amoral gratuitousness, a gluttony of violence.
