How George Romero, the original zombie hunter, helped reshape popular culture

Here is an uncontested truth: Our 24/7 zombie entertainment culture owes George A. Romero everything. Ev. Ery. Thing. Without him — without the eruption from the cinematic id called “Night of the Living Dead” in 1968, there would be no “The Walking Dead” on cable TV and no “World War Z” book or movie. There’d be no “Resident Evil” or a zillion other videogames, no cross-genre mash-ups like “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” on the bookshelves and zombie-human romances like “Warm Bodies” in movie theaters. No meta-undead comedies like “Zombieland,” with its riffing on the rules of zombie behavior that “Night of the Living Dead” established.

Romero died Sunday, at 77, after a battle with lung cancer, according to his manager. What he wrought with the original “Night” was not only a horror movie that blew out the gaskets of anyone who saw it in 1968, and not only a series of movies that burrowed brainily and bloodily under the skin of our cultural discontents, but an entire cosmography of zombie lore and behavior that others have been profiting from for half a century now.
“I harbor a lot of resentment,” Romero told Indiewire earlier this month, and he was right to. When Brad Pitt and AMC moved into the zombie arena with, respectively the film version of “World War Z” and the hit series “Walking Dead,” it showed the suits that there was blockbuster potential in the undead — and suddenly Romero’s home-brewed horror fables, almost all of them embedded with acrid little social critiques, were deemed small-time. “I was ready to do another one, a $2-3 million one, and nobody will finance a zombie movie now,” he told Indiewire.

Which is a little like turning down a new hand-drawn Hayao Miyazaki animation because everyone’s already doing digital. Anyway, “Night of the Living Dead” isn’t just a landmark in the horror genre, It was a game-changer for American independent filmmaking, a black-and-white regional shocker that came out of Pittsburgh, PA — Pittsburgh — and lit the drive-in and midnight-movie circuit on fire. It cost $114,000 to make and grossed $18 million worldwide.