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Living with the Dead: The Films of George A. Romero Ranked

The living dead enabled the influential George A. Romero to free himself from self-consciousness.

Living with the Dead: The Films of George A. Romero Ranked
Photo: Rex

George A. Romero is among the most generous and empathetic of horror filmmakers, concerned with the traps of capitalism, which uses baubles to distract the fortunate from the cruelties of racism, classism, and sexism, though said fortunate must sublimate their own desires to benefit from the game. To paraphrase a character from 1985’s Day of the Dead, what’s the point in civility if there’s no reward? Romero’s filmography is governed by a friction that’s similar to that of the work of a critic: a culturally hard-wired desire to define art by thematic “meaning” versus the urge to create and capture a private and original essence. His films are often at their best when they don’t appear to be trying so hard, when the director’s sense of macabre humor is allowed to break through.

With 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, Romero bounded out of the gate with an unnerving masterpiece, one of those films that benefits from its creators’ inexperience. Romero’s themes are embedded in his adventurous aesthetic, which allows for free association that transcends meaning, achieving surrealism while anticipating the found-footage trend in the process. In subsequent films, Romero appeared to be eager to live up to the high marker that Night of the Living Dead set, calcifying his formalism so as to be sure that his socialist observations landed. These tendencies are most obvious in the ’70s films that follow Night of the Living Dead and the ’80s ones that proceed 1978’s Dawn of the Dead. Day of the Dead, from 1985, revels in the fear of a man who suspects that his monsters may no longer be profound enough for a new age of technologized über-capitalist insensitivity, and these anxieties would also define Romero’s second zombie trilogy, starting with 2005’s Land of the Dead.

To watch all of Romero’s films close together is to discover that earnestness is their binding quality for both better and worse, as they transcend their variable individual parts. Romero’s films are frequently shaggy, finding weird humanity amid the contrivances of bureaucracy. The filmmaker’s search for community and meaning informs even his lesser efforts with a fascinating obsessiveness. Like many of his protagonists, Romero is torn between inner yearning (to be a broader artist) and outer social expectation (to fulfill his mantle as the godfather of the zombie film). The living dead were very good to this man, enabling a gifted and incalculably influential artist to free himself from self-consciousness. Obligation ironically allowed Romero room to riff, as constriction is a potential gateway to freedom.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on October 28, 2017.


The Dark Half

17. The Dark Half (1993)

Insane and violent even by Stephen King’s standards, The Dark Half is a novel that demands a fast and lurid adaptation, though it inspired Romero to fashion the most plodding film of his career. And this isn’t a plot that one should be given time to examine at length, as it pivots on a pseudonym that achieves a corporeal essence, killing those who forced the author to retire the name. The murders are brutal yet flippantly staged—occasionally in the comic-book style of 1982’s Creepshow—draining The Dark Half of a sense of danger or emotional escalation. The actors have little rapport, and Timothy Hutton is embarrassing as George Stark, the hillbilly demon terrorizing high-brow author Thad Beaumont (also Hutton). The Dark Half is so drab and sluggish that it inadvertently suggests a failed parody of the film that launched Hutton’s career: Robert Redford’s Ordinary People.

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There’s Always Vanilla

16. There’s Always Vanilla (1971)

Preachy and awash in “groovy baby” clichés, Romero’s follow-up to Night of the Living Dead details the adventures of a former soldier, Chris Bradley (Raymond Laine), as he attempts to acclimate to a yuppie America that’s trying to better sell the Vietnam War to its citizens. To paraphrase one ad exec, how do you talk a young man into voluntarily getting his head blown off? There are surprising anecdotes, particularly involving Chris’s nuanced relationship with his father, but There’s Always Vanilla is undone by scattershot direction and a wandering narrative. Though the seeds of Season of the Witch, The Crazies, Martin, and Dawn of the Dead are present in There’s Always Vanilla’s soil, particularly in the film’s resonant likening of middle-class America to a kind of deceptively sanitized cage.


Diary of the Dead

15. Diary of the Dead (2007)

Night of the Living Dead and The Crazies have a docudramatic immediacy that suggests “found footage” before the concept had attained a name and a cemented series of tropes. This familiarity is a problem for Diary of the Dead, which follows a college film crew as they travel the countryside of Pennsylvania, capturing the rise of the dead for posterity and pontificating obviously on how cameras divorce people from life. There are choice words for Myspace and a superficial and self-absorbed media based predominantly on DIY reporting. Romero anticipated the bitter and nihilistic online era of “fake news,” and so Diary of the Dead is more resonant now than it was a decade ago. The zombie execution scenes are cheeky, but there’s little to distinguish this often flat and meandering film from many other found-footage horror quickies, which look more fake than most un-self-consciously fake productions.


Knightriders

14. Knightriders (1981)

Romero knows that King Billy (Ed Harris) is in danger of becoming a fascist, ruling his group of jousting biker knights with an inflexible hand, as Knightriders is a fantasy of power that’s surrendered sort of civilly. The film’s funnier than I initially understood, reveling in the bonhomie of Romero stock players such as Tom Savini, Ken Foree, Christine Forrest, and Scott Reiniger. Motorcycle jousting is still a flimsy metaphor for unfettered artistic expression, though, and Romero’s indulgent humanism traps a potentially spry drive-in film in the bloated body of a 145-minute wannabe epic. And Harris is uncharacteristically awful in a key role in his career, unvaryingly playing a blowhard who stifles the otherwise joyous atmosphere. That’s the point to an extent, but Billy’s torment isn’t as resonant as Romero thinks it is, as Billy’s idealistic yearning for the “purity” of a glorified renaissance fair is ludicrous.


The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

13. The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1990)

Romero and Dario Argento reunited in 1990 for Two Evil Eyes, each contributing an hour-long reinterpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s writing. Argento’s The Black Cat is a beautiful and disturbingly sexual gothic that’s due for rediscovery, while Romero’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar is a well-acted yet routine tale of just desserts served from beyond the grave. Like many of Romero’s 1980s productions, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar is distractingly overlong, inflating a glorified episode of the filmmaker’s Tales from the Darkside to nearly feature-length for no discernable reason. That said, the rarefied setting is stiflingly creepy, and Romero’s anti-capitalist symbolism still has a bitter tang, particularly a character’s impaling on a triangular instrument that resembles the temple on a one-dollar bill.

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Bruiser

12. Bruiser (2000)

Bruiser combines the two dominant themes of Romero’s career: the conformity that’s required of people to participate in capitalist society, and the split between ego and id that said conformity brokers. Though Bruiser is marred by the usual Romero dialogue that deconstructs the film’s concerns for us, it’s a mild return to form for the director after the disastrous and similarly themed The Dark Half. Shooting in Toronto rather than his usual Pittsburgh, Romero uses the city as a symbol of corporate anonymity, giving the film a chilly steel sheen that complements the story of Henry (Jason Flemyng), who’s grinded down by capitalism and alpha-male inhumanity into an anonymous cog in the machine, embracing his bland new face, a white mask that suggests the Phantom of the Opera. His feelings of nothingness actualized, Henry is able to wreak havoc and confront alphas on their own terms. Romero understands that it’s a fear of failure that ironically shackles failures, and so hitting rock bottom is freeing.


Monkey Shines

11. Monkey Shines (1988)

Monkey Shines illustrates how Romero’s earnestness can be at odds with the traditionally relentless mechanics of a thriller. Romero spends over an hour of running time setting up his narrative, in which a recently paralyzed quadriplegic, Alan (Jason Beghe), befriends an experimental servant monkey, Ella, who comes to terrorize him. Yet Romero’s slow-burn pacing renders the horror scenes truly strange and intrusive, as one grows to enjoy Alan relationship with his cute companion. Monkey Shines offers a more successful variation on the Jekyll-and-Hyde duality that drives The Dark Half. The difference between the films ultimately rests on their respective senses of escalation: The Dark Half sputters in circles, while Monkey Shines builds to a climax that’s eerily ridiculous and savage.


Survival of the Dead

10. Survival of the Dead (2009)

Survival of the Dead, Romero’s final film, underlines a similarity between his ongoing zombie series and the western genre: Both usually concern land disputes, in which corrupt white men use governmental pretenses to seize swathes of territory and enslave the populace. Imagining a feud between a military outfit and two Irish families on a small Delaware island, Romero allows the zombies to symbolically speak for themselves, with the sociopolitical civics lessons arising more or less naturally. Survival of the Dead is funny, charming, and confident in its embrace of western-horror tropes, with one of the most charismatic casts to appear in a Romero film in ages. It’s the work of an elder statesman who’s made peace with his legacy, fashioning compositions of tender and unfussy lucidity.


Land of the Dead

9. Land of the Dead (2005)

Like Day of the Dead before it, Land of the Dead is preoccupied with theme, at the expense of a plot that barely moves or matters. But said theme is good, utilizing zombies as metaphors for the lower class that insidiously bolsters the comfort of first-world life, which is embodied here by a Manhattan-esque neighborhood that’s presided over by Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), a corrupt businessman in a red tie and ludicrous comb-over. Casting a countercultural legend as a parody of you-know-who is admirably perverse, indicting the discarded efforts of the Baby Boomers to revolutionize America. But Hopper is sedate in the role, and so the satirical idea is unfulfilled. The film derives its energy from tangential flourishes, such as a booth that invites one to take their picture with a zombie, or the undead ragtime band that’s visible near the beginning of the film; these sorts of poetic vignettes are the foundation of Romero’s artistic vitality. Land of the Dead lacks the sleazy punk ferocity of Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, but the images are often classically and poignantly beautiful, such as a shot of the dead rising out of a river, literally obliterating a border barring them from the lair of the privileged.

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The Amusement Park

8. The Amusement Park (1972)

This 52-minute film was commissioned by the Lutheran Society, which wanted an educational piece to encourage support for the elderly. The organization hired Romero, and he delivered a rallying cry for elder needs that’s also, well, a full-tilt Romero horror film. After 71-year-old actor Lincoln Maazel’s prologue, Romero drops the hammer in The Amusement Park, fashioning a slipstream of horror imagery that bridges surrealism with lo-fi docudrama, in an effort to approximate the experience of aging in a society that’s concerned with money and sensation. Romero viscerally links elder abuse with capitalism, astutely suggesting that resentment of aging people subliminally stems in part from their inability to consume as rapidly as younger individuals. As a metaphor, the amusement park here is clearly a trial run for how Romero would utilize a shopping mall as a symbol for unbridled, amoral commerce in Dawn of the Dead. The film’s sound design, coupled with the endless and distorted close-ups of older people in misery, intentionally renders The Amusement Park an ordeal to watch, with the slim running time coming to feel as the only reprieve. Though even that small mercy is eclipsed by a disturbing implication: Eventually we may get old and return to a form of this hell, reminiscing about our younger selves as society picks our bones dry.


Day of the Dead

7. Day of the Dead (1985)

As usual with Romero’s zombie films, there’s plenty of thematic meat to chew in Day of the Dead. Trapped in an antiquated WWII bunker, a group of military and scientific professionals attempt to survive the rise of the undead in two familiar fashions: with reactionary force and intellectualism, respectively. A horror legend with unimpeachable liberal credentials, Romero favors the intellectuals, though one of them, Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty), is also crazy, betraying the barbarous military to use the corpses of slain soldiers for experiments. Which is to say that Logan is a resonant right-wing nightmare of the intellectual who’ll sell his country out for knowledge that might not even matter, yet Day of the Dead is more stimulating to discuss than to watch. After a promising opening, which features a few of Romero’s most graphic and iconic images, the film goes to sleep. The characters are caricatures, which is a stark departure from the fascinating humans of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, and so one’s inspired to impatiently await for the carnage to arrive.


Creepshow

6. Creepshow (1982)

One of Romero’s most purely enjoyable films is also one of the great comic-book movies, approximating the tactile act of reading and flipping through a magazine, ideally on a rainy Saturday afternoon with a can of soda by your side. Romero directed from Stephen King’s original screenplay, which pays homage to EC Comics like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, and the filmmaker displays a visual confidence and tonal flexibility that’s reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead. The bright, deep, and garish cinematography is both beautiful and disturbing, enriching King’s gleefully vicious writing while providing a sturdy framework for the lively performances of a game cast. Creepshow straddles an ideal line between straight-faced seriousness and parody, particularly in the eerie climax of a story in which one can hear the pained gurgling of aquatic zombies.


Season of the Witch

5. Season of the Witch (1973)

More accomplished than the thematically similar There’s Always Vanilla, Season of the Witch mines Buñuelian terrain with a surreal story of a wife, Joan (Jan White), who’s growing to resent the hypocrisy of her suburban world. An equal-opportunity critic, Romero compares the macho entitlement of Joan’s conformist husband with the egotism of the counterculture, which uses its own shtick to serve a different kind of patriarchal supremacy. Witchcraft is likened to a third social option for Joan, perhaps suggesting a supernatural Green Party, but Romero doesn’t even grant her this reprieve. A visual rhyme—between a leash in Joan’s nightmare and a rope tied around her neck during her induction into a coven—suggests that she’s destined to trade one social trap for another. Self-entrapment is human nature as well as an obsession of Romero’s, which would reach its ultimate expression in Dawn of the Dead.

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The Crazies

4. The Crazies (1973)

Like Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies concerns a plague that explodes America’s suppressive (and suppressed) tensions, though the monsters are left almost entirely off screen in this case, as Romero foregrounds the sociocultural textures of martial law. The Crazies reprises Night of the Living Dead’s mercilessly propulsive editing while introducing a bold comic-book palette that would be refined in Dawn of the Dead and Creepshow. The film also abounds in inspired sketches of madness and infrastructural collapse, from the military’s dehumanizing uniform of black gas mask and white hazmat jumpsuit to an irrational image of an insane woman sweeping a battlefield with a broom. Even Romero’s self-consciously lyrical touches intensify the film’s textured canvas. The Crazies ironically understands fascism as being inherent in both the preservation and revolution of society.


Martin

3. Martin (1978)

In its obsession with vampirism as a symbol of a cultural legacy of oppression, Martin suggests a Caucasian response to Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess, which featured Night of the Living Dead’s Duane Jones. Martin (John Amplas) is an intelligent but awkward and sexually repressed young man who’s been convinced by his insane Catholic relative, Tateh Cuda (Lincoln Maazel), that he’s a vampire, initiating a very Romero-esque exploration of nature versus nurture and the contrasting prejudices of differing generations. In a handful of the most disturbing scenes of Romero’s career, Martin drugs attractive women and rapes them, eventually slicing their necks and wrests with a razor and drinking their blood. These grotesqueries are offset, and intensified, by Martin’s unexpected aura of sweetness. One of Romero’s liveliest and most daring films, with grimy and claustrophobic imagery.


Night of the Living Dead

2. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Romero’s classic film remains intimately and peerlessly terrifying, offering one of cinema’s definitive portraits of societal collapse. Intuitively riffing on the tensions of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, Romero fashions nightmarish images of seemingly found surrealism: of an old man chasing a woman in a graveyard; of car lights illuminating a growing army of shambling “ghouls”; of redneck militias who blow away the undead with a bravado that’s as creepy as the monsters themselves; of a girl hacking her mother to pieces in a basement. Every image and scene is centered on a domestic suburban America that’s burning down, its puritanical classism eating it away like corrosive acid. The marks of the film’s low budget—its spotty sound and alternately shrill and inky black-and-white cinematography—only amplify its wormy gothic intensity. Night of the Living Dead suggests less fiction than fact, rendering America’s endless oppressive legacy in shards of brutal DIY expressionism.


Dawn of the Dead

1. Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Romero was working toward Dawn of the Dead throughout the 1970s, his ambitions crystallizing into an operatic, seamy, tragic, and trashy horror-action canvas. The preaching of his recent prior films is gone, replaced by lush pop-art compositions, Tom Savini’s visionary gore, Goblin’s satirical score, evocatively nasty dialogue, and the sharpest editing of the filmmaker’s career. Dawn of the Dead dramatizes cycles of revolution, following working-class characters as they get a taste of rarefied life, walling themselves off from the populace, in the traditions of our political leaders and celebrities, and resenting the people who come clawing at the gates for a taste of the wealth. When the protagonists are overthrown from the perch of their shopping mall, the new revolutionaries are corrupted as well, destroying a utopia that’s really a hell of impersonal corporate consumerism, leaving the dead—an endlessly evolving symbol of society’s marginalized outliers—to finally inherit the Earth. Yet Dawn of the Dead also revels in the promise of America. The film’s most exhilarating scenes show a miniature democracy in action, as men of color bond with white men and women to course correct a society that’s in its death rattle. They fail, but, in an ending that implicitly reverses Night of the Living Dead’s hopeless coda, they will themselves to rise again.

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Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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