The Zombie whisperer -
'Night of the Living Dead'director George Romero brings horror to concord
Concord Monitor
September 21, 2006
JOELLE FARRELL
Monitor staff

Shadows and vampires never scared George Romero when he was a child. Neither did zombies, the flesh-eating creatures that eventually made him famous.
"I was always hoping to run into one and be able to make friends somehow,"he said.

Romero did have zombie friends in college, but only because he convinced his classmates to drive to rural Pennsylvania and lumber around in his first film, Night of the Living Dead. Now that Romero has made more than a dozen films, including Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead, zombies flock to him.

"I get letters from celebrities saying, 'I'd love to be a zombie,'" he said last week in a telephone interview. Romero, 67, was speaking at a horror convention in Kansas and stayed at a hotel under an alias. "Usually at these things fans root me out and it's hard to get any sleep,"he said.

Romero had hoped for a reprieve from zombies at Concord's Capitol Center for the Arts this weekend. Instead of showing films from Romero's dead series, Red River Theatres is presenting a double feature screening of The Dark Halfand Creepshow, two films Romero worked on with author Stephen King. Romero will be on hand for a question-and-answer session.

But with Halloween just a month away, who could resist a free zombie-makeup job? Red River Theatres is encouraging people to come to the event in costume, and Ballard's Novelty and Party shop on Broadway is offering free makeup to costumed movie-goers.

Romero won't mind if audience members plod into the Cap Center and pretend to eat each other. He's used to it. At a horror convention in Massachusetts last October, a man lifted his shirt to show Romero the zombie faces tattooed all over his back, said Barry Steelman, who owns Cinema 93 and attended the convention to talk Romero into a Concord appearance.

And Romero isn't finished with zombies. Next month, he'll begin filming Diary of the Dead, which follows a group of film students making a movie in rural Pennsylvania.

The premise for Diary is the same as his other zombie films: The dead wake up hungry. But each Dead film carries a fingerprint of the era in which it was made.

"I use it as a platform to sort of reflect on sociopolitical themes,"he said. "The zombies are almost incidental."

Night of the Living Dead dealt with race, war and revolution, Romero said. Dawn of the Dead, released in 1978, satirizes consumerism and was filmed in a shopping mall.

Day of the Dead, released in 1985, examined science and the military, and Land of the Dead, released last year, focused on class conflict.

Miscommunication is a favorite theme of Romero's, and Diary of the Dead will look at how a world with cell phones and the internet reacts to a plague of the undead.

"In Night of the Living Dead, they had to tune in that old Zenith to find out what was happening in the next town," he said. "We have this electric artery running through our planet."

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