George A. Romero

“Having fun with the living dead”, entitles our dear friend and collaborator Kim Newman the 14th chapter of his extraordinary excursus “Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen since the 1960s” (www.bloomsbury.com, greatly expanded 2011 edition of his classic which appeared in 1988). Of course, George Romero already appears in the prologue, and his powerful influence on international fantasy horror is gradually explored until the last pages. “Throughout his new Living Dead trilogy, Romero revisits his early films, but in light of current events: AIDS and swine flu, 9/11 and the war on terrorism, Hurricane Katrina and the Boxing Day tsunami, Iraq and Afghanistan, militiamen and the new millennium, credit crunch and banking crisis […] Romero’s zombie films continue to represent a vital counterpart to the galloping apocalypse of contemporary American history”. George Romero “enjoys” obsessively comparing the two levels of reality – life & post -, as Kim Newman, according to the horrifying Clive Barker, “takes a healthy pleasure in dealing with this subject, and it’s a joy”.
The Romerian bibliography (almost as much as the Rohmerian one!) available in libraries, bookstores, Amazon, etc., is now overflowing with mostly deadly serious treatments. It seems there is no one in the world (or in the post-world) who does not have to have his say on the bivalent characters of his sagas. The Bronx director “replies” to all of them through an excellent non-posthumous anthology: “George A. Romero: Interviews”, edited by Tony Williams (2011, www.upress.
state.ms.us). It is no coincidence that the oldest of the interviews reproduced there was published in “Andy Warhol’s Interview” in 1969, that is, the year following the release and success of Night of the Living Dead, and the year following the almost fatal attack to the life of the superstar artist. As Kim Newman perceptively notes, “it was the Warhol Factory that changed the perspective from looking for kitsch horror films […] to making some of them.”
Tout se tient.

Lorenzo Codelli