George A Romero named the scariest movie he ever made: “The movie had stopped being delightfully scary”
There are very few people who can claim to have truly inspired an entire genre, but the late George A Romero was undoubtedly one of them. Anyone who has ever watched a horror movie cowering behind a sofa, hiding their face behind their hands or had to run out of a living room offering a pathetic excuse like “I just need to check I didn’t leave the oven on” owes a considerable debt of (possibly questionable) thanks to Romero.
The New York-born director was a true pioneer of horror and, more specifically, zombie movies. He was the man who came up with the Night of the Living Dead franchise, the litany of films that began as far back as the late 1960s when people were absolutely not prepared to be subjected to the sights of formerly-buried folk emerging from graves and hunting for flesh in ordinary places like shopping malls.
Starting off at 14 years old with his uncle’s 8mm camera, Romero worked on kids’ TV shows before going on to direct TV ads and his own short films, taking inspiration from the classic British Hammer horrors of the 1930s. He then turned the entire industry on its head when he made Night of the Living Dead in rural Pennsylvania on a budget of less than $100,000 and using gore and violence nobody had witnessed on the big screen before. People lapped it up, and the film was a worldwide hit, making 250 times its budget and starting the Living Dead series that ended up spawning five sequels, plus a sixth that’s rumoured to be in production.
Those movies became some of the most influential and successful horror movies in history. The Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead are also considered absolute classics of the medium, using filmmaking techniques and special effects that terrified cinemagoers through the ’70s and ’80s. Legendary horror directors, including the likes of Wes Craven and John Carpenter, have cited Romero as a direct influence in making their films as scary as possible, and terror-master Stephen King once described how Romero’s work led to his exploring themes of isolation and family breakdown in his books.
Speaking before his sad death in 2017, the filmmaker revealed a few facts about his own movies and the secrets behind what it takes to scare the pants off millions of people on a regular basis. The original Night of the Living Dead movie apparently came to be thanks to a book that eventually was made into a different film altogether.
Romero explained: “I guess the original idea for Night of the Living Dead was basically inspired by a Richard Matheson novel called I Am Legend. Richard actually jokes with me that I stole his idea, and I keep saying to him, ‘No, my guys aren’t vampires!’”
The ‘Godfather of Zombies’ he may be, but Romero wasn’t originally a fan of his creations even being labelled as such, revealing, “I thought I was creating a completely new monster; the neighbours turning into flesh-eaters, ghouls—that’s what I call them, ghouls. What I was really saying, which I didn’t articulate until the second film [1978’s Dawn of the Dead] was ‘When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth’.”
Romero considered his debut effort the scariest film he ever made, however, which is no small feat when you consider the movies that followed, including 1982’s classic Stephen King adaptation Creepshow. It’s hard to imagine the impact it would have had at the time, but famed movie reviewer Roger Ebert gave us an idea when he reported from one of the Living Dead’s early screenings, writing, “The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.”
And they continued to be scared by Romero’s movies for many, many years to come.
