The introduction to Not of the Living Dead, the latest book on cinema’s King of the Zombies quotes George A. Romero from a 1992 interview, saying that he hopes he’ll be remembered for something other than just Night of the Living Dead. At the time of the interview, Romero had already made his three most famous zombie films (Night plus Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead), as well as eight other feature films. Although he would spend the next two decades developing tons of projects, he would direct only four more films, including three zombie films. Perhaps for that reason, even in death he has not managed to escape his own zombie-verse.
But while most people know George Romero as the creator of cinema’s ubiquitous non-voodoo zombie, fans and serious critics know him as a lifelong revolutionary. Robin Wood was one of the first academics to highlight and celebrate the progressive socio-political subtext of Romero’s narratives and Tony Williams took a deeper dive with his career-spanning 2003 book The Cinema of George A. Romero. Since then, hordes of critics have feasted on Romero’s texts and subtexts, but most have continued to focus on the zombie movies. Not just because they’re more popular but because they’re less ambiguous, easier to “read.” That’s why the new book Not of the Living Dead is so refreshing.
In this collection of essays, four authors (Noah Simon Jampol, Cain Miller, Leah Richard, and John R. Ziegler) examine Romero’s “non-zombie films” as standalone narratives and/or components of the revolutionary storyteller’s work as a whole, prompting viewers to see them from new and different angles. The book offers extremely close readings of There’s Always Vanilla (1971), Jack’s Wife (1972), The Crazies (1973), Martin (1977), Knightriders (1981), Creepshow (1982), Creepshow 2 (1987), Monkey Shines (1988), “The Cat from Hell” (a segment of Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, 1990), “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (a segment of Two Evil Eyes, 1990), The Dark Half (1993), and Bruiser (2000). There’s also a chapter on The Amusement Park (completed in 1973, released in 2021) and George’s unproduced script for a Resident Evil movie (1998). These essays will make even the most ardent Romero fan look at the films with new eyes.
Leah Richards, an authority on Victorian Gothic literature, analyzes There’s Always Vanilla and Jack’s Wife as products of a particular zeitgeist. Drawing on contemporary interviews with Romero, she points out that the director envisioned Vanilla as a statement piece about the fate of the “American hippie,” and Jack’s Wife as a response to second-wave feminism. She also notes that neither film lived up to the director’s hopes; in later years, Romero dismissed Vanilla as “a little romantic comedy that didn’t pretend to be anything else,” and said he’d like to remake Jack’s Wife in order to make it “more pertinent” and “more sensitive.” The implication is that, although both films are admittedly dated, they were also ahead of their time—because Romero was ahead of his time.
Noah Simon Jampol, author of a thesis on “Science Fiction as Ethical Response to the Holocaust,” finds Holocaust imagery in Romero’s third film The Crazies while highlighting the complexity of that film’s theme. Unlike the Dead films, he writes, The Crazies blurs the line between Good and Evil, Us and Them, presenting a more nuanced view of humanity. Perhaps that’s why the film initially failed to find a larger audience? But it’s also why the film remains worthy of careful analysis. Jampol’s insights on the ending of the film are especially thought provoking.
Cain Miller, whose main area of study is masculinity and the male body in horror cinema, examines Martin, Monkey Shines, and Bruiser as an unofficial trilogy about toxic masculinity. He offers a surprisingly sympathetic reading of the Cuda character in Martin while pointing out the significance of the film’s setting for conveying its theme. I think Romero, who once said the film was about how “evil” is “a permanent part of us” and needs to be understood, would have loved this reading. Although the director claimed there was no such social message in Monkey Shines, Miller’s Freudian reading of that film is equally satisfying. Again, comments on the film’s ending—which was eventually changed by studio execs—are illuminating. Analyses like these, which contemplate artistic intentions vs. commercial considerations, show us exactly what and how a revolutionary storyteller like Romero contributes to normally-staid genre storytelling.
Bruiser is a more problematic subject for study. As Miller points out, Romero said this film was “exactly what I wanted it to be”—and yet the film is the most “socially regressive” film in the director’s catalogue, exhibiting “derogatory stereotypes, outdated gender politics, and uncomfortable racial subtext.” The essayist notes that Romero loyalists sometimes pin the mean-spiritedness of the film on the director’s lost decade in the wilderness (he spent the 1990s in development hell) but the film remains something of a blemish on his record. Thankfully, Bruiser was not his last film—which makes me yearn for a chapter on the sorely-neglected Survival of the Dead as a kind of riposte.
Rounding out the collection are several essays by supernatural studies expert John R. Ziegler—on Creepshow, Creepshow 2, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, and Two Evil Eyes. These essays are arguably the most suppositious in the book. Ziegler reads many of these films as narratives about the dangers of patriarchy and capitalism, but I think sometimes he stretches things a bit too far. For example, he reads the rape scene in Creepshow 2 as “a critique of middle-class white masculinity.” The author’s reading of The Dark Half as a narrative about “queer reproduction” is more intriguing. Romero consciously transformed Stephen King’s novel about two minds fighting over control of one body into a film about two bodies fighting over what type of man should rule the roost. Reflecting on the studio-imposed ending to that film, Ziegler makes an inspired comparison to Hitchcock’s The Birds. One is left to wonder what Norman Bates—who famously liked to stuff “birds”—would make of George Stark being carried away vs. picked apart by “birds.”
In the 1992 interview that the authors quote in their introduction, Romero said he had not yet made a film that fully expressed his style and vision. In later years, he cited Martin as a personal favorite, but Knightriders comes closest to the man behind the movies. In her essay on that film, Leah Richards explores the complexities of King Billy, the film’s central character and a kind of surrogate for Romero himself—a heroically-progressive but sometimes-crazy individualist attempting to control a socially-liberal monarchy. Knightriders offers ample criticism as well as sympathy for Billy, the flawed but loveable idealist who draws viewers into his troupe the same way George Romero drew (and continues to draw) viewers into his vision for a better world. Unfortunately, after Knightriders, Romero never again had so much creative freedom.
But he certainly had more to say. As the George A. Romero Archival Collection at the University of Pittsburgh illustrates, the filmmaker spent decades developing non-zombie projects that have not yet seen the light of day. Those projects, like the Not of the Living Dead book, are valuable to cinephiles who believe that George Romero revolutionized horror cinema by putting so much of himself into the stories he told. I am personally grateful to the keepers of the flame at UPitt, grateful to the authors of Not of the Living Dead, and looking forward to the next book on Romero’s “lost” work (Adam Charles Hart’s Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero, due this year from Oxford University Press).
Long live the King!
Not of the Living Dead is available from the publisher at McFarlandBooks.com
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