George Romero

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Passed in his sleep yesterday morning after "a brief but aggressive battle with lung cancer".  He was 77.

 

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-me-george-romero-20170716-story.html

 

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/max-brooks-george-romero-was-the-thinkers-zombie-creator-w492613

[Admin]

I grew up on his work.  And they inspired generations to follow.  For me, his stuff hit on every level.  It was exciting, visceral, funny and moving.  He seemed to have such a grasp of what it was to be human that grounded all the horror and fantasy elements.

 

Even in his cameos.  As the priest in Martin, focused on the food and wine he was eating and drinking, while congenially waving off the concerns of the old man serving him.  His movies were almost always alternative releases because studios couldn't quite box him up. 

 

Social undercurrents were strong throughout his work.  Racism, consumerism, militarism, feminism and patriarchy, just how people were often responsible for their own social frustration.

 

So many amazing movies.  I was blown away by most of them.  his characters were focused and layered, but also daringly mundane.

 

Many of my all time favorite movies are Remero movies.  Jack's Wife, Martin, Knightriders, Night of the LIving Dead, Dawn Of the Dead, Day Of the Dead, the Crazies, Creepshow, etc.

 

Diary of the Dead did the same thing that the first three Dead movies did, which is take stock of where we were as a species.

 

He fought hard for every creative inch he got, much of it of his own making or taking.  It had been several years since his last movie.  I had hoped he had a few more in him.  He had a unique ability to wrap fantasy and action in the mundane, sort of marrying it to reality.  I can't think of anyone that has ever done that better.

 

Besides his work, he leaves a trail of inspiration from that crop of late-70s-80s horror directors that in their own right set off some inspirational waves, on up through directors and writers just starting out or in school today.  I feel good that his work will probably be studied and passed around for as far into the future as I care to look.

 

I'm so so glad he lived.

[HardcoreHunter]

Being from Pittsburgh I grew up with Romero's films since I was born. Even if you didn't watch his horror films early on, his first job was filming and directing the early episodes of Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood. He even said that his inspiration to get into horror was an episode where Mr.Rodgers  went to the doctor to get his tonsils removed.  He often did charity events in the city, one was a Night of the Living Dead haunted house down in station square. They replicated the house from the film (to a larger scale) and filled it with top quality zombies.  Tom Savini's school which is stationed in pittsburgh actually helped with the makeup and fx. 

 

Still he was an engaging guy to talk with. He had trouble remembering a lot of details from filming, but if you asked him questions about the area he would go on about where they would hang out and what used to be around and would sometimes lead into stuff from the films.

 

 

[Ric]

RIP. Going to rewatch Dawn and check out Martin which I haven't watched before over the weekend.

[BUU8800]

Yeah this sucked. Love the original Dead films and Creepshow, a horror icon. RIP

 

Incidentally his passing made me look up John Carpenter's age and I was surprised to learn he was 8 or so years younger. The two looked approximately the same age to me.

[HardcoreHunter]

Pittsburgh is doing a thing for him sat, I'll probably end up going.

[HardcoreHunter]

Zombies walked the earth in cinema long before George A Romero got round to populating his movies with them. But they never had a cheerleader like this influential horror director, who has died aged 77 from lung cancer. His counterculture hit Night of the Living Dead (1968), which he also co-wrote, got the ball rolling.

 

The simple scenario – a group of misfits holed up in a farmhouse defend themselves from a zombie attack – suggested Rio Bravo with added putrefaction. Ironically, the word “zombie” isn’t mentioned in the film; Romero even contested this description of the story’s monsters. “I didn’t call them zombies and I didn’t think they were,” he said in 2013. “Because the traditional Haitian voodoo zombie is not dead. And I thought I was doing something completely new by having the dead rise. The recently dead. They’re too weak to dig themselves out of graves. They’re too weak to eat brains, because they’ll never crack the skull.” In spite of these objections, Romero is seen now as the godfather of a genre that is alive, or rather undead, and kicking.

 

It was not a lucrative corner of cinema when Romero made that first film, originally called Night of the Flesh Eaters, for only $114,000. But even now, its haunting black-and-white cinematography (modelled on Orson Welles’s Shakespeare films), detailed makeup and ingenious suspense lend it a chilling seriousness. “I wanted that stuff to look like newsreels, everything from the race riots in the south to police coming out with dogs,” Romero said. “I wanted it to look like all-American crisis footage.”

 

Much has been made of the casting, unusual for its time, of an African-American actor, Duane Jones, in the lead role. His presence as one of the besieged humans gave the picture an extra tinge of social commentary, particularly in light of the despairing ending, which sees the character mistakenly shot dead. The film became a popular fixture on the midnight film circuit, though Romero lost out financially when the distributor altered the title: the copyright pertained only to the original one.

 

There was a dramatic change of tone for Romero’s next zombie outing, Dawn of the Dead (1978), an anti-consumerist black comedy in which the undead plod through a huge shopping mall where a group of humans are hiding out and living it up in a materialistic fervour. Asked why the zombies are congregating there, one character replies: “Some kind of instinct. Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” The film was drenched in a sly, knowing humour – the incessant muzak seemed to be instrumental in keeping the zombies in their somnambulant state – and it was impossible not to notice that, give or take the decomposing flesh, the picture depicted what looked like a normal day in any American mall.

 

It was filmed in a functioning shopping centre near Pittsburgh. “We shot every night from 11pm until 7am, when we had to clear out,” he said. “We had a regular assembly-line established to make up the zombies, and there was a lot of competition among our extras about who would get a ‘special wound’, or get to be killed in a spectacular way, or get to eat human flesh. The shopping mall had one of those machines where you get four photos of yourself for a dollar, and there was always a line outside it; zombies taking their pictures.”

 

In contrast to its predecessor, Dawn of the Dead had a cultivated blandness that extended its satirical commentary into the realm of the visual. “With Dawn, I wanted to bring out the nature of the shopping centre, the retail displays, the mannequins. There are times when maybe you reflect that the mannequins are more attractive but less real – less sympathetic, even – than the zombies. Put those kinds of images side by side, and you raise all sorts of questions.” The film was remade, not to Romero’s liking, in 2004. He contributed a further four instalments to his own zombie cycle – Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2009) – though none had the impact of those first two.

 

Son of George and Ann, Romero was born in New York City, where his father was a commercial artist. He studied art and design at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, and continued working in that city for most of his career. After graduating, he and a group of friends started the production company Image Ten Prods, and made commercials and shorts. It was with the help of those friends that he rustled up the budget for Night of the Living Dead and paid for initial print and cinema hire costs.

 

After the success of that film, Romero made the drama There’s Always Vanilla (1971), Season of the Witch (1972), about a suburban witches’ coven, and the biological horror The Crazies (1973). His favourite among his own movies was Martin (1978), a strangely tender horror film which thrived on an intriguing central ambiguity: despite plentiful references to vampire lore, the lonely title character appears to be a serial killer with delusions of vampirism.

 

In between zombie movies, Romero also made Knightriders (1981), about travelling entertainers who stage jousting events; Creepshow (1982), a larky Hammer-style portmanteau film written by Stephen King; the tense Monkey Shines (1988), arguably his most frightening work, in which a quadriplegic man develops a dangerous psychological bond with the primate brought in to help him; and The Dark Half (1993), adapted from King’s novel about a writer whose pseudonymous alter ego takes on a malevolent life of his own.

 

Despite the part played by zombies in his success, Romero was reluctant to be associated too closely with that genre. “My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines. I don’t care what anybody else does.” Nevertheless, he was frank about any pop-culture phenomenon seen to be following in his footsteps. He likened the hit TV series The Walking Dead, which he had turned down an invitation to direct, to “a soap opera with an occasional zombie”.

 

He is survived by his third wife, Suzanne, and by three children, Tina, Andrew and Cameron.

 

• George Andrew Romero, film director, born 4 February 1940; died 16 July 2017

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/17/george-a-romero-obituary

 

 

Sad to hear my favorite collaborator--and good old friend--George Romero has died. George, there will never be another like you. - Stephen King

 

Romero has passed away. Hard to find words right now. The loss is so enormous. - Guillermo del Toro

 

Goodbye George A Romero. We laughed through 50 years and 9 films. I will miss him. There is a light that has gone out and can't be replaced. - Tom Savini