This is the first post of several where I will categorize the different kinds of zombies in films, literature, and other entertainment mediums. With this inaugural post of this kind I felt it only fitting to start with the Romero brand of Zombie.
George A. Romero is someone I consider largely the mastermind behind our conception of the modern zombie. His original “…of the dead” movies were what seemingly started it all. It began with the cult-classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), and was followed by Dawn of the Dead and then Day of the Dead. Three additional Romero titles came out more recently and those include Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead, though they are not as favored as the original Romero films by most people.
I mention all six of his films because each one plays an important role in understanding the Romero zombie. Night of the Living Dead is what set up all the rules for the Romero Zombie. A satellite heading exploded in Earth’s orbit and spread radiation throughout the atmosphere causing odd mutations in the nearly deceased. The radiation affects the deceased’s brain and causes them to be reanimated. Along with this reanimation is an insatiable hunger for human flesh. The film called those that had been reanimated as ‘ghouls’ and made no reference to them as ‘zombies’, however myself and anyone else nowadays would call them zombies.
A bite from one of the zombies on a living victim will slowly cause them to become one of the zombies (as was the case with the little girl, Karen), a quintessential element of the modern zombie. Additionally, the zombies move slowly, something attributed to them because of the fact that they were recently deceased. They also seemed to exhibit the telltale ‘stupidity’ of a zombie in that they can’t use door knobs, open windows, use particularly complex tools, etc. Their strength is definitely being in large numbers and overwhelming their victims.
In this particular Romero film, the zombies were afraid of fire, though I’m pretty sure this was mostly abandoned in the later Romero films [and for good reason too, zombies afraid of fire? Really?] The easiest way to kill one of these zombies was to incapacitate the brain in some way. In this film, that was narrowed down to either “shoot[ing] them in the head” or striking their skull with a heavy object.
The first thing that makes the Romero Zombies distinct from other kinds of zombies is the effect that a ‘normal’ death has. Generally speaking, in other zombie films/literature, when a normal person dies from non-zombie inflicted wounds, they would die like normal. In the Romero realm, however, this person would then become reanimated due to the radiation in the atmosphere [as an aside, the zombie parody film Fido, poked fun at the logical conclusions of living in a world where you have to ‘kill’ the people that die of natural causes]. A person, who becomes seriously ill or seriously wounded, is now a significant liability to your own survivability. This adds an interesting dimension to the ability of the survivors to live.
The second thing I found distinct with the Romero Zombies deals largely with the apparent evolution of the zombies throughout the “…of the dead” films, but it becomes particularly relevant in the three more recent films. In Land of the Dead this was a central focus of the main grouping of zombies throughout the film. Early on in the film one of the zombies ‘learns’ how to use a firearm. The Survivors in the film had set up a city surrounded by water which was thought to be impassable to zombies. Again, the zombies ‘learned’ that they could walk through the water to reach the city. Finally, in Survival of the Dead, the main human antagonist was collecting zombies to see if, when faced with no other choice, they would consume animal meat rather than focus solely on human flesh [a ‘vegetarian’ zombie if you will]. Needless to say, the film ends with a scene of the zombies ganging up on a helpless horse and consuming it with the same fervor that they normally reserve for humans. It would be interesting to see how such zombies would play out in another Romero film [or even more interesting, in real life].
Each of these evolutions was a game-changer, in that they were each something that seemed to break the traditional zombie ‘rules’ in some way. This game-changing evolution aspect of the Romero Zombie is part of why I love the Romero films [all of them, including Survival of the Dead and Diary of the Dead, which is actually my personal favorite]. In a real-world application, a zombie that can ‘learn’ to adapt would pose a very significant threat to one’s survivability. No longer could one simply barricade oneself in a building [in no way am I ACTUALLY advocating for this, it’s a terrible idea] with the hopes of defending off an impending zombie onslaught. They might actually figure out how to open that doorknob.
-Rotten Ryan
