George A. Romero has died at the age of 77. If you don’t know his name, you probably know his work. And if you somehow don’t know his work, then you definitely know his legacy — bringing the zombie genre (and by extension the zombie movie, TV show, comic book, and video game) to life.
There are plenty of publications you can check right now that have excellent, detailed obituaries on the director, a native of The Bronx who got his start in storytelling in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on the children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. I’m not writing an obituary. This is a recommendation.
Go and watch the original Night of the Living Dead right now. There’s a YouTube video embedded below. Put an hour and four minutes aside and watch it. I just did this about a week ago.
Here’s what stood out to me: Romero has been out-shocked, out-gored, and out-sized by modern horror films, zombie-related and otherwise, but his original contribution to the genre still lays bare what makes the living dead — and what they do to us (the living) — so truly horrific. At the end of the day, Romero was not making a film about a gunshot to the head, an intestine being ripped from someone’s body, or the ceaseless march of the undead towards the flesh of the living; he was making a movie about people and the horrors they unleash on one another.
In 2017, his message has never been clearer: We need each other to survive, but we’re our own worst enemies.
