The dead return to life with an insatiable appetite for living flesh in George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, premiering at this year's TIFF. (Artfire Films)
Four decades ago, a young commercial director in Pittsburgh rounded up some colleagues and college pals and, armed with black-and-white film stock, mortician’s wax for makeup and Bosco chocolate syrup for blood, shot a low-budget chiller in which lumbering, pasty-faced corpses rise to feed on the flesh of the living. Today, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968, is not only a horror classic — it’s also recognized as the picture that hatched the modern zombie genre, including such recent offspring as the 28 Days Later/28 Weeks Later films, Max Brooks’s novel World War Z and the hit parody Shaun of the Dead.
Romero himself has been a mainstay of the genre, making three sequels — Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead — that continued his apocalyptic scenario and helped establish zombie lore. Now, he’s gone back to the graveyard, so to speak. George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, premiering at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, revisits and reimagines that fateful first night of the zombie outbreak, this time from a fresh angle. It follows an obsessive student filmmaker (Joshua Close), caught in the middle of the crisis, who decides to document the carnage around him, shooting relentlessly even as his friends are turned into zombie lunch.
The movie finds the 67-year-old Romero returning to his indie origins, working again with a no-name cast, a modest budget and computer-generated effects — the digital-age version of chocolate syrup. Like his previous two films, Bruiser (2000) and Land of the Dead (2005), it was shot in Toronto, where Romero has been living for the last three years. The director recently spoke with CBCNews.ca about the making of Diary, the current zombie trend and how his Dead series serves up social commentary along with its gory thrills.
Director George A. Romero. (Getty Images)
Q: Why did you decide at this point to go back and revisit the origins of the zombie uprising?
A: I’ve always gotten the ideas for these films from what’s happening out there in the world, and the thing that impresses me most about what’s going on right now is this explosion of alternate media — blogging, and YouTube and MySpace, and all this stuff. There’s all this information out there, but it’s not really being controlled or managed; it’s a bit chaotic. So I didn’t know quite how to [focus on] that without going back to the beginning. The idea is that these students are out shooting a college project, a small horror film, and when the shit hits the fan, they start documenting it. They become compelled, captivated with this idea of documenting what’s going on. And I figured that had to be on the first night, otherwise it wouldn’t really make any sense.
Q: The premise of students shooting a low-budget horror movie sounds close to your own personal experience making Night of the Living Dead.
A: I had a lot of nostalgic moments during the production, thinking of us doing that film. [Night of the Living Dead] was really guerrilla; we had a little commercial company, we were doing beer commercials and industrial films, and we’d go out between jobs and shoot some more of the movie. So the characters [in Diary] reminded me of that, and the whole situation, too — the fact that we did this [Diary] on a very low budget and it’s really completely my film for the first time in years. There was nobody looking over our shoulder, there was no studio involvement, it just was an independent. So it was really back to the roots.
Q: Your previous film, the 9/11-themed Land of the Dead, was a studio-produced picture with a big budget and some big-name actors like Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo. With Diary, was there a conscious decision to do a low-budget indie production, or did circumstances put you in that position?
A: It was a little of both. I wasn’t doing it out of frustration. Universal [which released Land] was actually terrific with us; they really let me make the movie I wanted to make. So I didn’t flee into [an independent film]. This was just a chance to do a small film, and really be able to drive the train myself and do exactly what I wanted to do. I was actually originally going to do it just as a little experiment, hopefully for DVD release. But when I got the script together, there was group called Artfire that read it and loved it, and they said, “No man, let’s go for a feature. We’ll give you all the creative control. And can you do it for under $2.5 million?” And I said, “Yeah.”
Q: You’re the "ghoul father" of the zombie film, the one who really started the modern trend. Why did you settle on the zombie as a horror vehicle?
A:It’s a bit of a long story. I ripped off the idea for the first film, Night of the Living Dead, from a novel called I Am Legend that was written by Richard Matheson. [A new film based on the book, starring Will Smith, is being released this fall.] It’s the story of the last man on Earth after everyone else has become a vampire. It’s a wonderful book and I felt that it was basically a story about revolution. And my friends and I were ’60s guys and our revolution had failed, we thought we’d changed the world and, in fact, nothing had changed at all. In fact, it had gotten a little worse. So I felt we should make a film that starts at the beginning [of a revolution], but I couldn’t use vampires because he had already done that, so I used ghouls. I thought, what would be a revolutionary thing that would really be a real sea change in the world? Well, what if the dead stopped staying dead? So that’s what I did. And I made them flesh eaters just to make them threatening.
I never thought of them as zombies. In ’68, when we made that film, zombies to me were still those guys down in the Caribbean who’d been reanimated with blowfish powder or something. It was only when people started to write about it that they used the term, so then I said, “Well, maybe that’s what they are, in fact.” So, in the second film, I actually used the word.
But to me, [the zombies] are almost in the background of my stories; my stories have always been more about humans in a crisis and how they handle it. So it’s been a device that I’ve been able to go back to any time I feel like I’d like to make some sort of a comment about what’s going on in society.
A line of ghouls search for prey in the original, 1968 film of Night of the Living Dead. (Pictorial Parade/Getty Images)
Q: What do you think of the current popularity of zombies?
A: I’m not sure how long it’s going to last. There’ve been several successful films, and Steve King’s novel Cell and Max Brooks’s World War Z, I understand were picked up for films, but we’ll see whether those happen or not. I think it’s just a commercial trend — a couple of films go out, and are a hit and everybody starts to imitate them. I guess I’m more cynical that way. I don’t think there’s any sort of a zeitgeist that makes people say, “Oh, gee, man, zombies are where it’s at right now.”
Q: You’ve also inspired a parody with Shaun of the Dead.
A: I love that film. Actually, those guys, the director [Edgar Wright] and the lead actor [Simon Pegg], played zombies in Land of the Dead.
Q: Your Dead films have always revelled in gore, and the special effects have become increasingly more sophisticated and realistic, especially when it comes to the zombies eviscerating living humans.
A: That’s always been fun. I’ve never cringed from any of that. I grew up on EC comic books, which, before the ratings code, were pretty gory. And to me, that was just part of horror. I’ve avoided it in the extreme in all my other films, but it seems appropriate for the zombie stuff.
But yes, the effects have come a long way. I used to love being able to improve them when we were executing them practically. But now with CG [computer-generated imagery], it’s just so much easier, and it’s almost a mandate because, rather than spending three hours on the set when every minute costs 10 grand, it’s much easier to do it in [post-production].
Q: Did you use a lot of CGI effects in Diary?
A: We used some — we had to, we had no time. We were also doing these long shots because the conceit is that these kids are shooting this, so there are shots that go three minutes, four minutes long, and you can’t have effects in the middle of that and have the effect blow, and have to reshoot the whole thing. So, when zombies get shot in the head and things like that, we wound up doing it in CG because it enabled us to keep shooting; all the actor had to do was fall down.Q: After this film, do you hope to continue the series with a sequel to Land of the Dead?
A: There have been plans for a while. I have a script, but nobody has stepped up to the plate and said, “OK guys, let’s do it.”Q: Beyond your filmmaking, are you preoccupied with horror in your everyday life?
A: No, man, I have a very ordinary life. I do some writing and try to keep my fears in that part of my life, try to not lose the chops. But not all the time. I’d just as soon lay around and play Scrabble.George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead screens Sept. 8, 10 and 14 at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
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