‘Martin’: The “perfect” movie George A Romero called his best
George A Romero would have been 86 years old this week, and you like to imagine if he could be, he’d probably either 1) still be alive or 2) be strolling about the place regardless, scaring the shit out of people, given that’s what he most enjoyed doing throughout his career.
There probably isn’t anyone in film history who is responsible for as many pairs of eyes being hidden behind hands or people shaking behind sofas; after all, Romero was not just a pioneer of horror as a genre, but was basically single-handedly responsible for the plethora of zombie movies, good and bad, we’ve seen over the past 50 years.
Without Romero making the transformational, low-budget, black and white movie Night of the Living Dead in 1968, using chocolate syrup for blood, there would be no 28 Days Later, no The Walking Dead, no Shaun of the Dead, no Resident Evil video games, the list is almost endless.
But much as that initial, shocking movie (one can only imagine the reaction cinema goers had in the late 1960s to seeing the undead having their heads smashed in with tyre irons) was a monumental success, earning over $30million at the box office against a desperately assembled budget of just $100k, it didn’t lead to immediate riches for Romero.
He still had to work hard through the next decade in order to keep the lights on, and not always on horror movies, instead turning his hand to romantic comedies of all things alongside his passion for the evil stuff. But once he did, the results were groundbreaking once again. 1978’s Dawn of the Dead was again shot on a budget of less than a million, but brought in a staggering $66m at the box office, a whole new generation getting to discover the joys of having their local shopping mall invaded by flesh-thirsty zombie types.
Censors and bible-clutching republicans hated it, of course, resulting in the film being slapped with an ‘X’ certificate and thereby making anyone under 30 want to watch it even more. It was the film that really put Romero at the top of the tree when it came to horror, but interestingly, it was a different movie altogether that he made in the 1970s that stands as his favourite.
The year before Dawn of the Dead, Romero made the little-known horror flick Martin, the story of a twisted young man who believes himself to be a vampire who has lived for hundreds of years. Typically ‘out there’ for Romero, you can gauge how the film, which opens with the drugging and raping of a woman on a train, went down in the UK by knowing that all copies of the movie were seized under the obscenities act.
But Romero remembers it fondly, once telling film writer George Hickenlooper: “I thought it was the best translation off the page of any of my films. It was the most successful in terms of my ability to match the ideas I had written and executed”.
Adding: “We got great locations, a lot of cooperation. I think it has some of the most successful sequences that I have ever realized. It may not be the most pleasant of my films or most accessible, and other people may not like it as much, but it’s just one that I love.”
Despite its content and the fact that the original cut ran to some two hours and forty-five minutes, Martin was well-received by most critics and, in more recent years, has found its way into best-of lists as something of an overlooked horror classic. Romero, meanwhile, went on to continue the ‘Living Dead’ series all the way up to 2010’s Survival of the Dead.
