‘The Tales of Hoffman’: The classic British movie that unexpectedly influenced George A Romero
Where on earth would the horror movie genre be without the brilliant works of George A Romero? Well, certainly the zombie horror subgenre might not have had its origins without Romero’s 1968 independent horror film Night of the Living Dead, which is credited with bringing zombies into popular culture.
Over the years, there have been so many excellent zombie movies and television shows that are forever indebted to Romero’s work, including 28 Days Later, The Last of Us and even Shaun of the Dead. The Night of the Living Dead became a franchise with 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, and it remains one of the most significant collections of horror cinema works.
Elsewhere, though, Romero continued to work in a wide range of genres, as he took on the romantic comedy There’s Always Vanilla and the action film Knightriders. However, it was always horror that Romero had a penchant for and throughout the likes of The Crazies, The Amusement Park, Martin and Creepshow (to name just a few), he delivered more commendable efforts in the field.
Naturally, Romero had a number of personal influences on his filmmaking style, and he once named a British classic movie that provided him with deep inspiration. Where Romero was known for creating the zombie horror movie, it was Michael Powell who brought the slasher film into popularity with 1950’s Peeping Tom.
A year later, Powell and his frequent collaborator Emeric Pressburger released their comic opera film The Tales of Hoffman starring Robert Rounseville, Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann and Leonide Massine, based on Jacques Offenbach’s 1991 opera of the same name, which itself drew from three short tales by the author E.T.A Hoffman.
Speaking with Filmmaker, Romero expressed his love for Powell and The Tales of Hoffman. “Oh yeah. Powell is the man,” the director said. “Experimenting with that little 8mm camera when I first saw Tales of Hoffman and I saw some of those techniques, it made it accessible. It actually made me be able to say to myself, ‘I know how he did that’, and it made the process more accessible, and it gave me a little spark, and [I thought], ‘Maybe I could do this someday’ because the tricks he was using were so obvious.”
17 years after The Tales of Hoffman was released, Romero would make his own impression on the film world with his debut feature, which evidently used a number of techniques he had learned from Powell. “It’s a beautiful, beautiful film, and I’m a big Michael Powell fan,” Romero said of his predecessor director, adding that he had an “amazing body of work.”
Romero said that back in his day, before the home rental video had come into reality, one had to rent a 16mm print of a movie as well as a projector. Whenever the future director went to Janus Films, he always picked up The Tales of Hoffman, which was funny because nobody else seemed to want to rent it, well, apart from one “kid in Brooklyn” who “felt the same way”.
That kid only turned out to be Martin Scorsese, showing the great impression that Powell made on the next generation of filmmakers with The Tales of Hoffman. “We’ve since both done commentary tracks on the laser [disc] and the DVD of that film,” Romero noted. “I think we were both really influenced by that movie pretty substantially.”
