The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead

By Tony Williams

In placing Romero's oeuvre in the context of literary naturalism, the book explores the relevance of the director's films within American cultural traditions and thus explains the potency of such work beyond 'splatter movie' models. The author explores the roots of naturalism in the work of Emile Zola and traces this through to the EC Comics of the 1950s and on to the work of Stephen King. In so doing, the book illuminates the importance of seminal Romero texts such as Night of the Living Dead (1968), Creepshow (1982), Monkey Shines (1988), The Dark Half (1992). This study also includes full coverage of Romero's latest feature, Bruiser (2000), as well as his screenplays and teleplays.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Release date: Apr 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9780231850759

Tony Williams

Tony Williams is professor of English and area head of film studies in the English Department at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. His books include The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead and John Woo's "Bullet in the Head."

Book preview

the cinema of GEORGE A. ROMERO

DIRECTORS’ CUTS

Other titles in the Directors’ Cuts series:

the cinema of EMIR KUSTURICA: notes from the underground

GORAN GOCIC

the cinema of KEN LOACH: art in the service of the people

JACOB LEIGH

the cinema of WIM WENDERS: the celluloid highway

ALEXANDER GRAF

the cinema of KATHRYN BIGELOW: hollywood transgressor

edited by DEBORAH JERMYN & SEAN REDMOND

the cinema of ROBERT LEPAGE: the poetics of memory

ALEKSANDAR DUNDJEROVIC

the cinema of ANG LEE: the other side of the screen

WHITNEY CROTHERS DILLEY (Second edition)

the cinema of TERRENCE MALICK: poetic visions of america

edited by HANNAH PATTERSON

the cinema of ANDRZEJ WAJDA: the art of irony and defiance

edited by JOHN ORR & ELZBIETA OSTROWSKA

the cinema of KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI: variations on destiny and chance

MAREK HALTOF

the cinema of DAVID LYNCH: american dreams, nightmare visions

edited by ERICA SHEEN & ANNETTE DAVISON

the cinema of NANNI MORETTI: dreams and diaries

edited by EWA MAZIERSKA & LAURA RASCAROLI

the cinema of MIKE LEIGH: a sense of the real

GARRY WATSON

the cinema of JOHN CARPENTER: the technique of terror

edited by IAN CONRICH AND DAVID WOODS

the cinema of ROMAN POLANSKI: dark spaces of the world

edited by JOHN ORR & ELZBIETA OSTROWSKA

the cinema of TODD HAYNES: all that heaven allows

edited by JAMES MORRISON

the cinema of STEVEN SPIELBERG: empire of light

NIGEL MORRIS

the cinema of WERNER HERZOG: aesthetic ecstasy and truth

BRAD RAGER

the cinema of

GEORGE A. ROMERO

knight of the living dead

SECOND EDITION

tony williams

A Wallflower Press Book

Wallflower Press is an imprint of

Columbia University Press

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Copyright © 2015 Tony Williams

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-85075-9

Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Williams, Tony, 1946 January 11–

The cinema of George A. Romero : knight of the living dead / Tony Williams.—Second edition.

     pages cm.—(Directors’ cuts)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-17354-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-17355-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-85075-9 (ebook)

1. Romero, George A.—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PN1998. 3.R644W55 2015

791.4302'33092—dc23

2014029738

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Book design by Rob Bowden Design

Cover image: © Getty

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction to the First Edition

Introduction to the Second Edition

1.      A Director and His Traditions

2.      Night of the Living Dead

3.      There’s Always Vanilla

4.      Jack’s Wife

5.      The Crazies

6.      Martin

7.      Dawn of the Dead

8.      Knightriders

9.      Creepshow

10.    Day of the Dead

11.    Monkey Shines

12.    One Evil Eye and The Dark Half

13.    From Bruiser to Land of the Dead

14.    Diary of the Dead

15.    Survival of the Dead

Epilogue

Appendix One: The Romero Screenplays and Teleplays

Appendix Two: Chronology

Notes

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WISH TO thank Southern Illinois University for providing me with a sabbatical to undertake this work; graduate student Chris Costello for his valuable preliminary research in investigating certain leads into naturalism, the grotesque, Stephen King and the comic strip; Chris Hauserman for alerting me towards Romero’s use of new technology; Robert Singer for insights into the complex and diverse operations of twentieth-century cinematic naturalism; Steve Bissette for research material; the Humanities and Inter-Library loan staff of the Morris Library of Southern Illinois University for their valuable efforts in obtaining key material; Steven Schneider for encouragment; Anna Gural-Migdal, Monique Fol, Vincent Lacey, Director of CAIRL Laboratory for his generous help with technical problems; The Latent Image for their kind hospitality granted me during my 1979 visit to Pittsburgh, especially George A. Romero, Christine Forrest, Michael Gornick, Tony Buba and Vince Survinski; and Dean Shirley Clay Scott of the College of Liberal Arts for providing me with travel funding for further interviews in Chicago with George A. Romero and Christine Forrest. Finally, I wish to acknowledge Del Cullen of Wallflower Press for his copy-editing work.

For this second edition I wish to include the following names. I’m indebted to the stimulating work, e-mails, and phone conversations of Reynold Humphries, whose lucid arguments and scholarly work in the horror genre contain great value for me; Frank Lafond and Jean-Baptiste Thoret have honoured my work in this area by translating two of my essays into French for their edited anthologies on Romero’s work; former graduate student Brian Wilson has begun a very promising career as a film critic by writing profoundly on Romero’s films; Rusty Nails allowed me to see an early cut of his documentary on George Romero, Dead On, that will certainly become a definitive statement on this director’s concerns; and finally I’d like to thank Tye Wilson for giving me a DVD of his Broken Shadow Entertainment student undergraduate film I Heard the Darkness (2008). It was not only a very accomplished work of professional filmmaking but also one that continued the spirit of George Romero films in a creative rather than derivative manner of so many better budgeted Hollywood films and ephemeral direct-to-DVD productions.

George Romero links the worlds of past and present, cinematic, cultural, and literary in many key ways. When recently reading the works of Henrik Ibsen I also encountered this very striking speech of Mrs. Alving in act 2 of Ghosts that foreshadows Romero’s own recognition of human beings enslaved both by outmoded ideas but also destructive ideologies, features that occur in all of his films, and not just those having to do with zombies. Here parallels between ghosts and zombies need no further emphasis.

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.

Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts, Eleven Plays of Henrik Ibsen. New York: The Modern Library, 1935, 134.

Introduction to the First Edition

THIS BOOK AIMS to introduce the reader to the films of George A. Romero along the lines of the Wallflower Press Directors’ Cuts series. By concentrating upon the features Romero has directed it will analyse them in the light of the social and historical circumstances affecting cinema from the late 1960s to the present day. However, this book differs from many of its predecessors in attempting to outline some relevant, but neglected, cultural and literary factors influencing the work of this director. As my previous studies concerning the American family horror film and the work of Larry Cohen have revealed, no cinematic work can really be understood apart from significant aspects of a highly influential national cultural tradition. Such features often operate as salient unconscious factors influencing the work of any innovative director. Until recently, Romero had not directed a film since The Dark Half (1993); his relative inactivity resulted from a deliberate policy of withdrawal from the dehumanising conservatism infecting the film industry since the Reagan era. However, I wish to argue that the specific nature of his work is not entirely comprehensible because of what Robin Wood has elsewhere described as those powerful radical elements rooted in the Vietnam/Watergate syndrome of disillusionment, protest and subversion (1986: 133, 189–91) which evaporated during the 1980s. Romero’s films have always been characterised by a lack of false optimism, a willingness to look objectively at the hard facts of reality, and a recognition that any victories may be tentative (or even unlikely) in grim situations. Rather than seeing his work as entirely symptomatic of a specific era, I would argue that its particular vision is more appropriately related to certain neglected factors in the American cultural tradition such as the apparently outdated tradition of literary naturalism. Although naturalism is one of those ‘master narratives’ supposedly rendered obsolescent by fashionable late-capitalistic discourses such as postmodernism, it is relevant to an era hysterically attempting to forget important historical lessons. Although naturalism has suffered from its associations with Emile Zola’s dogmatic theories expressed in his essay ‘The Experimental Novel’, the author’s fiction often operates in a creatively different and dynamic manner, which refutes any attempts to classify it into conveniently rigid theoretical parameters. Zola’s work was not just influential in Europe but also America. It stimulated not only diverse American literary explorations by writers such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London and Frank Norris, but also achievements in early silent and sound cinema. The movement includes such diverse works as Greed (1924), The Salvation Hunters (1925) and Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989).

The American cultural tradition developed its own version of naturalism. It also recognised the diversity of a movement where aspects of the grotesque and fantasy appeared within its terrain. Gothic features also characterised certain works of European and American naturalism. They developed in specific literary and cinematic incarnations during the later years of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century. Literary features characteristic of ‘New American Gothic’ also appear in films as diverse as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Wise Blood (1979), the fiction of Stephen King, as well as another neglected cultural phenomenon relevant to both past and present American cinema—the comic strip.

During the 1950s, Romero was influenced by the visual style of EC Comics. Although castigated by conservative forces, McCarthy-era hysteria and academic experts such as psychiatrist Dr Frederic Wertham, who claimed to find a link between comic books and juvenile delinquency in The Seduction of the Innocents (1954), these examples of ‘trash culture’ were often more visually and thematically subversive of institutional values than the politically motivated work of those unfortunate victims of the witch hunt. Such visual features have always influenced Romero’s work; they appear explicitly in Creepshow (1982). Although the film is not one of the director’s major achievements, it by no means deserves the comparison made by Robin Wood with British Amicus horror films of the 1970s involving ‘the same pointlessness, the same moral squalor: nasty people doing nasty things to other nasty people’ (1986: 191). Despite its appropriations by an artistically bankrupt and decadently redundant Hollywood system, the role of the comic strip as a purveyor of serious messages, particularly in historically repressive eras such as the 1950s, still needs serious re-evaluation as an alternative mode of expression.

The sub-title of this book, ‘Knight of the Living Dead’, accidentally occurred before my realisation of its use in Tom Allen’s article on the director. But it is not entirely coincidental or gimmicky. Romero’s best work has always operated as a wake-up call to those dominated by a materialistic culture that promises life but actually delivers a living-dead philosophy. As Wood notes, Romero’s zombies differ little from their living counterparts who are programmed into consumerist products of a decadent, late-capitalist civilisation and need desperate re-awakening before they supplement the former’s ranks. The title of Ibsen’s play When We Dead Awaken also operates as an unconscious, but relevant, parallel to the situations encountered by Romero’s characters. Like all key artists, Romero never makes the message overtly didactic; but it exists within the text for those willing to discover it. His vision directly opposes those debased Hollywood values of the last twenty years. Rather than capitulate to market forces, Romero has decided to maintain his independence as an outsider by articulating an eloquent silence which is also oppositional in nature. This study thus attempts to trace the source of the director’s oppositional directions. Previous studies of his work by R. H. W. Dillard and Gregory Waller relate Romero to the traditions of the classical horror film. Steven Shaviro sees the zombie films as a critique of the capitalist logic of production as well as noticing Romero’s debt to the EC Comics tradition of the 1950s. Steve Beard regards the zombies as an allegorical representation of ‘the disenfranchised underclass of the material world’ and ‘a projection of post-modern capitalism’s worst anxieties about itself’ (1993: 30). However, the films of George Romero deal with other issues also and should not be limited to zombies. As we shall see, they owe much to the tradition of literary naturalism derived from the work of Zola which entered the American mainstream and developed accordingly. Romero’s films represent an intuitive appropriation of a discourse which has often been denied and rejected by the status quo. Although the director has never read Zola, his films intuitively reflect themes which originally appeared in the French writer’s work and which infiltrated the American appropriation of naturalism in both literature and film. Artists are often influenced by relevant discourses, whether consciously or not. This book thus attempts to place George Romero within a particular cultural context and argues for seeing his work against a much broader background, rather than limiting him to the creator of the modern cinematic zombie.

Chapter one, ‘A Director and his Traditions’, is an extensive account of Romero in relation to relevant cultural, historical and industrial influences affecting his films. Chapter two examines his creative breakthrough as a director in Night of the Living Dead (1968). Chapter three reveals connections his recently released ‘lost’ film, There’s Always Vanilla (1972), has to the concerns of his so-called ‘horror’ movies. Chapters four and five relate Romero’s two neglected 1973 independent commercial films, Jack’s Wife and The Crazies, to the developing conservative climate of Nixon’s America. Chapter six investigates the relationship of Martin (1977) to both traditional Gothic fantasy and the New American Gothic explorations of writers such as Stephen King. Chapter seven examines the second part of his zombie trilogy, Dawn of the Dead, while chapter eight interrogates Knightriders (1981) as a dark allegory of compromise and contamination affecting both Romero and his fellow Americans confronting developing Reaganite cultural hegemony. Chapter nine examines Creepshow in terms of its relationship to naturalism and EC Comics influences. Chapter ten investigates the final part of his zombie trilogy, Day of the Dead (1985) and the cultural and industrial reasons for its neglect. Chapters eleven and twelve examine the unjustly neglected Monkey Shines (1988), his contribution to the Dario Argento production Two Evil Eyes, and The Dark Half (both 1990). The book concludes with an examination of his most recent film, Bruiser (2000), in terms of Romero’s overall career.

Introduction to the Second Edition

MUCH HAS OCCURRED since the first appearance of this book. Over the past seven years, the career of George A. Romero has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of a mostly moribund American cinema. Far from remaining in further inactivity and subjected to misguided descriptions of a talent who had long ago reached his peak as a result of different industrial production circumstances contrasting with those that existed at the beginning of his directing career, Romero has separated himself from a corporate dominated Hollywood studio system no longer sympathetic to the type of film he makes. He has relocated north towards Canada, the very destination Riley and his group move towards in the climax of Land of the Dead (2006). Six years after the poorly distributed Bruiser (2000), a film that went directly to the limbo of non-theatrical DVD distribution, Romero again obtained the support of a major studio to film the fourth part of his zombie series, one ironically stimulated by the remake of one of his major successes, Dawn of the Dead (2004) in which he played no role whatsoever. Beneath contempt, let alone serious criticism, Zack Snyder’s remake belongs to the current tendency of a creatively bankrupt Hollywood studio system ignominiously engaged in an endless series of remakes rather than stimulating new talents and commenting radically on disturbing political events. By contrast, although The Crazies (2010) resembled a bad TV movie of very little aesthetic value, features implicit in Romero’s original version managed to appear, ominously suggesting that the bland suggestion made in the Oval Office in Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) of using nuclear weapons against an American population is now official government policy, as the ending revealed. Parallels to the Iraq War, a meat hook hanging ominously outside a deserted diner, the discovery of incinerated bodies and the heroine’s recognition, ‘They exterminated everyone, not just the sick’, revealed the growing awareness that there was not little difference between the Nazi regime and twenty-first-century American military policy. However, such elements were rare since most films used zombies for their ‘scary movie’ affinities and not in the way Romero did. The economic law of diminishing returns aptly applies to such a situation. Zombies returned to products designed for DVD distribution. Hollywood’s decaying reproduction of more successful modes of previous achievements contained ironic parallels to Romero’s living dead hordes mindlessly reproducing instinctual vague memories of old behavioural patterns but never attaining any type of progressive development.

The one notable exception that emerged in a Hollywood system now hostile to any form of progressive creative expression occurred not in film but television. Joe Dante’s contribution to the Masters of Horror cable television series, Homecoming (2005) represented the one notable exception to this depressing trend. Significantly aware of the work of George Romero, Homecoming combined the zombie genre with a politically aware critique of the corrupt excesses of the George W. Bush era. Containing characters modelled on right-wing virago Ann Coulter, talk-show host Larry King, and the odious Karl Rove, Dante’s contribution delivered a crushing attack on the war on terror, the restriction of freedom, the press blackout on photos of American veteran coffins returned from Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and America’s use and abuse of veterans from the Vietnam War to the invasion of Iraq, revealing a political system rotten at the core. At the same time, Homecoming contained touching scenes such as the black family at a diner inviting a white freezing zombie soldier out of the rain and caring for him as if he were their own son. Several scenes not only contained ironic references to the false achievements of the Bush administration such as a ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign and the manipulated Florida election result in 2000, but also references to the cinematic achievements of predecessors within the realm of progressive horror such as Jacques Tourneur and George Romero in two graveyard scenes similar to Sergio Leone’s homage to Sam Peckinpah in My Name Is Nobody (1973). Dante’s tribute to Romero’s zombie trilogy and other important films such as The Crazies needed little emphasis for the knowledgeable viewer as Dante discovered when he received a standing ovation following one screening at a European film festival. He was one of the few directors who understood that the system really needed positive change and did not capitulate to the anti-political Hollywood mindset. A year later, Romero delivered his next instalment to this archetypal American political saga. Big Daddy in Land of the Dead emerged as the logical successor to both Peter of Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Bub in Day of the Dead (1985). All three revealed a potential of opposing the system, something they shared with George A. Romero, and Big Daddy took the lead in rising to this challenge.

Supported by Universal Studios, the company associated with 1930s horror films, as seen in Romero’s tribute to that era in reproducing the old period studio logo, Land of the Dead had a reasonable budget of $6 million. But despite Romero’s description of the film as his version of Beyond Thunderdome (a reference to the more elaborate and better budgeted final part of the Mad Max trilogy), his film was not in the Hollywood multi-million dollar blockbuster company and was soon routed at the box office by Steven Spielberg’s ultra-spectacular War of the Worlds (2006) starring Tom Cruise. Furthermore, despite gaining the support of a major studio, Romero expressed reservations about the nature of his recent return from the grave, reservations which have less to do with the quality of the film and perhaps more with the type of corporate control he was again dealing with. Following the Pittsburgh premiere of Land of the Dead, he left his home environment and moved north to Canada, the very area where he had filmed Bruiser. Finding a more sympathetic production environment, he directed another chapter of his zombie series, Diary of the Dead (2008). Living in Toronto, Romero became a Canadian citizen and completed Survival of the Dead, which was released in 2010. Another film is also planned and many more may appear from a director who will pass his 70th year by the time this second edition is published.

George Romero is very much someone indelibly influenced by the changes of the 1960s. Although he understands what later went wrong in his America, he has never sold out and still retains that independent spirit as well as a commitment to that arena of non-commercial independent filmmaking that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. As Rusty Nails reveals in Dead On, his excellent forthcoming documentary on the life and work of this unique director, both these elements are indispensable towards understanding the very nature of Romero’s cinema. This second edition affirms what has been stated in its predecessor. Romero is not just a director of zombie films. He is a keen observer of the social flaws in North American society, an incisive satirist of its failings, and someone still hoping for that decisive change for the better that never happened in the 1960s.

With the exception of some recent articles by Stephen Harper, John A. Loudermilk, Timothy Roberts, Brian Wilson, and Robin Wood, little of interest has emerged in critical studies of Romero in English. By contrast, Europe represents a stimulating exception. Two important anthologies in French have appeared featuring contributions by Australian, British, and French scholars revealing the high esteem and respect Romero’s work has in the non-Anglo-American world. In 2007, Jean-Baptiste Thoret edited Politique des Zombies: L’Amérique selon George A. Romero. Frank Lafond’s George A. Romero: Un cinéma crépusculaire followed. Both these collections contain in-depth, perceptive explorations of the director’s work and often compare the very different nature of American and European reception. Earlier other studies in German and Italian had appeared such as Dario Buzzolani, George A. Romero: La notte dei morti viventi (1998), Giacomo Caruso’s edited collection George A. Romero (1992), Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan’s edited collection George A. Romero (2001), Lorenzo Esposito, Carpenter, Romero, Cronenberg: Discorso sulla cosa (2004), and Frank Koenig, Dawn of the Dead: Anatomie einer Apokalypse (2004). Romero’s inclusion in the University of Mississippi’s Interviews series appeared in 2011.

Romero has also delivered many interviews both in film journals such as Positif as well as Internet publications, to say nothing of the February 2009 video discussion conducted by Erik Button. Despite Romero’s suspicion of the supposed benefits of democratic access to the media voiced in Diary of the Dead, he is a director fully aware of developments in new technologies such as his early involvement on the abortive Resident Evil project. Highly suspicious of the dubious progressive claims made on their behalf, he also uses new media for creative purposes rather than for sheer manipulation and control as seen in the supposed libertarianism of blogs. As Raymond Williams noted several decades ago in Television, Technology and Cultural Form (1974), nothing is wrong with technology itself but only certain ways in which it may be used. Diary of the Dead reveals that Internet users and abusers may become little better than different types of zombies succumbing to new types of infection in a nightmare version of the utopian vision of Marshall McLuhan. If anything, the recent return of George A. Romero to productive filmmaking reveals a talent still in process of development, experimenting with new technology but at the same time remaining true to those ideals that motivated him in the 1960s still remaining integral parts of his vision.

The first edition of this book suggested that the naturalist discourse intuitively motivated much of the director’s work. By contrast, this second edition has little to say on this subject since arguments made in the first remain valid in the author’s opinion while recent material receives comment in added footnotes. Yet modifications are necessary for any new edition. The original conclusion has satisfactorily become redundant in the light of recent developments, the most important being that Romero is now consistently working again without any of the creative frustrations and delays he encountered within the Hollywood studio system. Material on Bruiser now forms a new chapter combined with analysis of Land of the Dead, while The Amusement Park has been removed to an epilogue. The succeeding chapters contain new material on Diary of the Dead, a film which has been misunderstood by most reviewers and fans but one representing Romero’s greatest achievement to date and needing urgent re-evaluation as well as Survival of the Dead. At this point, a conclusion is now unnecessary since Romero has moved in a direction happily unforeseen when the first edition appeared. He will continue his creative trajectory.

CHAPTER ONE

A Director and His Traditions

ALTHOUGH HAILED AS the director of Night of the Living Dead (1968), a film popularly associated with initiating the gore and special effects syndrome affecting contemporary horror films such as Scream (1997) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), the name of George A. Romero really owes much to that relatively brief moment of independent commercial cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Stimulated by the success of Easy Rider (1969), many major studios invested and distributed early works of newcomers such as Dennis Hopper, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The era also saw the emergence of a renaissance in the American horror film characterised by significant works by directors Larry Cohen, Wes Craven, Brian De Palma and Tobe Hooper, which promised revitalisation of the Hollywood film industry. However, despite the appearance of early 1970s works including the Godfather films (1972, 1974), Chinatown (1974) and the films of Robert Altman, Hollywood cinema soon deteriorated into a complicit alliance of corporate conglomerates. Studios became dominated by multinational firms eager to include cinema as one item in a profit-sheet agenda.¹ Although making money had always been part of the pre- and classical Hollywood cinema, the profit motive had not exclusively interfered with the production of quality films, several of which involved some degree of thought and even challenge to contemporary patterns of life. The mid-to-late 1970s saw the appearance of two blockbusters, adolescently regressive films which would sadly herald the decline of a formerly great Hollywood industry—Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977). Among several other critics, Andrew Britton and Robin Wood have analysed the ideology determining these artistically impoverished works whose box-office success and dumbing down tendencies have contaminated the Hollywood film industry to the present day.²

Although elements of visual excess, horror and special effects characterised earlier horror films, the success of Jaws and the creatively bankrupt cycles of films in the Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series led to the horror genre’s change into a reductive series of roller-coaster experiences submerging the sporadic expression of intermittently interesting ideas within the narratives (see Williams 1996). This industrial late-capitalist movement led to the decline and debasement of talents who showed great promise in the 1970s. While Larry Cohen, Tobe Hooper, and George Romero became marginalised in the following decade, others like Brian De Palma and Wes Craven continued to work within the system but their later films never displayed the radical potentials and dynamic creativity that characterised the achievements of their 1970s work.

Apart from Monkey Shines and The Dark Half, Romero experienced inactivity during the late 1980s and early 1990s. These last two films differ visually from his previous work. On the surface, the formal nature of their respective styles appears to resemble an average Hollywood production as opposed to the independent film-making styles he employed in his earlier films. However, despite these differences, Romero was following a different type of style which moved away from his earlier visually ‘excessive’ type of direction. Yet his concerns in these later films remained the same as those contained in his earlier work. Most critics associate Romero with major achievements within the horror genre of the late 1960s and 1970s such as Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. But they often neglect his other diverse films such as There’s Always Vanilla, Jack’s Wife and The Crazies, made during the same period. Internet web pages and journalistic discourses usually connect Romero’s Night of the Living Dead to the gore and special effects operating within the contemporary horror genre. Most Hollywood mainstream horror films now indulge in sensationalism and special effects to the detriment of character portrayal and stimulating thought. They are actually debased heirs of an early film form commonly known as the ‘cinema of attractions’.³ Romero is often linked with the horror genre’s emphasis on sensationalism and violence, but such associations are far from the truth and are less important in understanding the specific nature of his films. Although Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead are associated with the horror genre, their links and implications are far broader.

Romero’s role as director is far more complex than it initially appears. Despite convenient application of generic labels such as ‘horror’ to his diverse output, Romero’s works resemble Larry Cohen’s. Like Cohen, Romero often engages in satirical attack on American society and employs comic strip imagery within certain films (see Williams 1997). But, unlike Cohen, Romero also unconsciously uses distinctive cinematic techniques derived from American literary naturalism, New American Gothic, grotesque realism, and cartoon imagery borrowed from EC Comics of the 1950s. Romero has also expressed his debt to the work of the British team, the Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), and has specifically mentioned their cinematic opera Tales of Hoffman (1951) in several interviews. As with other major artists, Romero often operates intuitively. He tends to be surprised at critical comments exploring his work, but significant cultural and historical structures of meaning are by no means absent from his films. While Romero may consciously employ the visual style of EC Comics in certain films, others exhibit patterns which belong to the American literary naturalist tradition and represent its cinematic development.

Zola’s Influence

The naturalist connection appears an arbitrary connection. Does Romero not operate within the excessive generic realms of horror cinema, a world apart from literary naturalism’s associations with factors of heredity and environment? However, naturalism is a complex cultural phenomenon. It is associated with Zola’s literary and theoretical explorations contained in the Rougon-Macquart series of novels as well as his essay ‘The Experimental Novel’. The Rougon-Macquart series emphasised genetic factors such as heredity and the wider realm of environment as key influences affecting the historical roles of individual characters. Many critics and readers believed that these factors operated in a rigid manner trapping many of Zola’s fictional characters into behavioural patterns they had no control over. But such influences often appeared deterministic. Zola’s nineteenth-century interpretations of certain hereditary and environmental factors affecting his characters involved potential, rather than rigidly deterministic, features. Such hereditary and environmental factors within Zola’s fiction are capable of other, more flexible, interpretations. Modern reformulations would place these factors in a wider context, such as how genetic-family-induced features in the human personality interact with outside, environmental forces, themselves influenced by historical and ideological factors. In Zola’s novels characters such as Gervaise Macquart, Jacques Lantier, Claude Lantier, and others appear to suffer from factors stemming from biological and environmental predestination when faced with overwhelming circumstances. However, although certain characters such as Jean Macquart and Etienne Lantier often encounter overwhelming odds and temporarily succumb to forces beyond their individual control, the novels in which they appear such as Le Débâcle and Germinal frequently conclude with hopes for a better future. Circumstances may change at any time. Zola never predicted any false optimistic solutions for future struggles facing his characters. Several of his works suggest possible alternatives, such as Dr. Pascal, but others, such as L’Assommoir, Nana and La Bête Humaine, end pessimistically. In these works, the main characters find that any alternatives are impossible due to the presence of overwhelming personal and social factors which cannot be overcome in specific circumstances.

Zola, however, was never entirely pessimistic. His utopian philosophy appears explicitly in his city trilogy, Lourdes, Rome and Paris. They involve Pierre Fremont’s struggle to articulate a new religious and social order for those unhappy individuals caught within negative historical forces. Although these features characterise his less significant novels, they do reveal optimistic currents which often struggle for expression throughout most of his work. Like naturalism itself, Zola’s work is a complex entity.

At its best, naturalism is never static but creative and dynamic. In his exploration of the contemporary urban film, Robert Singer notes that Zola’s ‘The Experimental Novel’ makes a metaphorical comparison between the biological circulus, an organic solidarity, with its ‘perpetual movement, until … dérangement … has broken the solidarity or brought about some trouble or stoppage’, and a social circulus. For Zola, ‘in society, as in human beings, a solidarity exists which unites … members … in such a way that if one becomes rotten many others are tainted’.⁴ Singer sees the concept of the social circulus often involving such ‘dérangements’ when heredity and environmental factors interact in specific and complicated ways. Such interactions appear in literary and cinematic naturalist texts. These texts often analyse and document individually damaging movements within the social circulus resulting from either hereditary or environmental factors or a specific combination of both. Despite the reductive nature of Zola’s theoretical definition in ‘The Experimental Novel’, his fiction supplies empirical testing grounds for the operation of such formulas. Fortunately, his novels reveal more creative and dynamic modes of interaction than the more static philosophy contained in his theoretical formulations.

Certain objections may arise at this point, especially concerning the biological nature of Zola’s ideas. They appear anachronistic and irrelevant within the concerns of a more modern historical era. But, as Richard Lehan has pointed out, despite the emphasis of recent studies upon naturalist associations with linguistic and institutional features, biological factors have always been common within the realm of literary naturalism (1995: 50).⁵ However, we need not think of these factors within now anachronistic concepts of nineteenth-century genetic determinism. They are better understood in terms of Michel Schneider and Robin Wood’s socially relevant reinterpretations of Freud’s dubious metaphysical definition of an eternal ‘repetition compulsion’ affecting human nature. Quoting Schneider, Wood comments, ‘like decadent bourgeois philosophers, he (Freud) mistook the death instinct of a murderous and suicidal class, the imperialist bourgeoisie, for the instinctive nature of man as such’ (1998: 16). By understanding Zola’s original genetic formula in this manner, greater insights into the author’s fiction become possible. Already trapped by biological and environmental factors, Zola’s fictional characters symbiotically exist within a dehumanising and materialistic Second Empire, moving towards its final apocalyptic descent in Le Débâcle. This situation also foreshadows Romero’s deadly cinematic symbiotic relationships that feature contaminating social structures and negative behavioural patterns leading everyone towards the path of mass destruction.

Robin Wood and Sumiko Higashi are two critics aware of the relationship of Romero’s films to their social and historical conditions of production. Such relationships also parallel June Howard’s understanding of the naturalistic discourse as a ‘form that struggles to accommodate that sense of discomfort and danger, a form that unremittingly attends to the large social questions of its period’ (1985: ix). Howard further notes that any investigation of naturalism ‘thus doubly entails an investigation of its historical moment—as the condition of its production and as the source of discourses embedded within the works … It is a way of imagining the world and the relation of the self to the world, a way of making sense—and making narrative—out of the comforts and discomforts of the historical moment’ (xi). Whether literary or cinematic, naturalism is no museum exhibit. In Howard’s words, it is ‘a dynamic solution to the problem of generating narrative out of the particular historical and cultural materials’ (xi) available to any artist at any particular time.

Although many Zola novels end pessimistically, naturalism also has utopian possibilities. It informs the reader, as Howard states, of the ‘discovery that our own history is contingent, that our world was not a foregone conclusion. That discovery may perhaps produce not only a renewed sense of historical difference but a renewed sense of historical possibility’ (xi). For example, both Germinal and Le Débâcle end on a note of total defeat for the vast majority of characters. But they conclude with their main characters leaving the respective scenes of their personal failures and deciding to build a new future. In Germinal, the new season inspires Etienne Lantier with a renewed and reinvigorating sense of new possibilities. Le Débâcle does conclude pessimistically in one sense when Jean Macquart accepts the fact that his chance of a romantic relationship with Maurice’s sister is now impossible since he has accidentally killed him during the military assault on the Paris Commune. But it also ends on an optimistic note with Jean’s desire to rebuild his country after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. However, Zola’s optimism always faces challenge by any changing factors which may occur in the future. Despite his relative freedom from contamination by the deterministic nature of hereditary and environmental factors affecting the rest of his family, Jean is not an entirely convincing hero whom the reader may expect to overcome satisfactorily any later obstacles. Any progress is provisional and liable to reversal at any time. Similarly, the concluding novel of the Rougon-Macquart series also reveals that little has changed since the Fall of the Second Empire in Zola’s rural community of Plassans. As in the opening novel of the series, La Fortune des Rougon (1871), Dr. Pascal sees Félicité Rougon still exercising control over her extended family. Although she succeeds in destroying her deceased son’s incriminating family history, fragments still remain for his surviving lover to begin his work anew. The obstacles will be great. But success is not entirely impossible. Similar thematic constraints also affect characters in the films of George Romero.

These literary references suggest that naturalism is not entirely deterministic or pessimistic as the endings of other Rougon-Macquart novels such as L’Assommoir, La Bête Humaine and Nana also appear to suggest. Howard notes that naturalist determinism may be neither pessimistic nor rigid in nature. It may operate according to a desire to place characters in situations of temptation from which they may or may not emerge successfully.⁶ Furthermore Zola’s ‘scandalous’ observations on the sordid aspects of certain facts of everyday existence do not result from either ‘bad taste’ or a perverse desire to provide sensationalism as his detractors argue. They result from drawing attention to unpalatable facts of human existence which readers ignore at their peril. This certainly occurs in the opening chapters of Paris. Affluent urban inhabitants ignore the plight of the dying, aged worker Laveuve. But their ignorance leads to apocalyptic consequences in this fin-de-siècle novel written near the beginning of a new century.

The naturalist movement soon crossed the Atlantic. American literary naturalism developed along chosen cultural and historical paths in the New World. But it also owed much to its British and French predecessors. As Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin notes, ‘Interest in contemporary French literature was a striking feature of cultural life in the United States during the last decade of the nineteenth century, and Zola’s popularity is evidenced by the numerous translations of his works and by the fact that even novels he had not written were published under his name’.⁷ Pre-World War One cinema produced many films influenced by both European and American literary naturalism. These included not only literary adaptations by Jack London, often filmed in a distinctively naturalist cinematic style but even some works of Zola himself!⁸ Even the different consumerist Jazz Age of the 1920s saw the appearance of naturalist films such as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) and Josef von Sternberg’s The Salvation Hunters (1925). But the very idea of a naturalist horror film appears to contradict what most people generally understand by the term ‘naturalism’ if we understand it reductively as a slice of life representation.

However, elements of horror and excess typical of this cinematic genre are not entirely foreign to literary naturalism. In Thérèse Raquin (1868), the work he designated as his first naturalistic novel, Zola depicts his guilty lovers tormented by images of a dead husband returning from the grave to haunt them. His descriptions operate on a realistic level so that the hallucinations depicted take on material form very similar to the appearances of Freddy Krueger in the everyday world of his victims in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Thérèse and Laurent are also under surveillance by the castrating gaze of a mother-in-law. Despite suffering from a stroke she still condemns them with her eyes. The imagery anticipates the castrating gaze of the dead Mrs Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), whose gaze encompasses guilty son Norman, intruder Lila Crane, and the cinema audience itself. La Fortune des Rougon opens with tragic young lovers Silvère and Miette meeting near a now disused, old Plassans cemetery where bone fragments are often scattered in the damp turf. Zola introduces significant grotesque and metaphorical imagery into the opening paragraphs framing the meeting of his doomed Romeo and Juliet figures. They become the first youthful sacrificial victims of a political strategy which leads both to the restoration of the Monarchy and the imposition of the dead hand of the past. These factors dominate the lives of future victims of the Second Empire during the entire Rougon-Macquart series. Both young lovers die separately in the novel. But their deaths leave a void throughout the remainder of the series. The dead past destroys any possibility of youthful potential and development. It is almost as if the dead rise from the graveyard to consume their youthful descendants in much the same manner as those living-dead elders of the Rougons and Macquarts destroy the lives of their children. Romero’s zombies attack the living in the same manner. Although the final novel, Dr. Pascal (1893), concludes after the fall of the monarchy, the repressive patriarchal forces which initially led to its victory are still in control as symbolised by the dominating figure of Félicité Rougon who attempts to control past history. The book ends with the deceased Dr. Pascal’s lover facing the huge task of opposing a life-denying authoritarian order. This climax resembles those tentative endings of Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead with the surviving heroines facing an uncertain future.

It is not surprising that Zola opens his first Rougon-Macquart novel with images of death and putrefaction closely linked with the future victory of a repressive order associated with patriarchal control (La Conquête du Plassans, Son Excellence Euguene Rougon), sexual repression (La Faute du l’Abbé Mouret, La Joie du Vivre, Un Page d’Amour), social decadence (La Curée, Nana, Pot-Bouille), consumer capitalism (Au Bonheur des Dames), economic excess (L’Argent), working-class misery (L’Assommoir, Germinal, Paris), rural oppression (La Terre), marital infidelity (L’Assommoir, La Bête Humaine) and, finally, the collapse of French civilisation (Le Débâcle). Although no Marxist, Zola is critical of impossible utopian solutions (as witnessed by his satire of the dying, young Marxist in L’Argent), and sceptical about human development, and his work contains strong, moralistic messages criticising a familial, political and societal system that causes great injury to its unfortunate victims. Despite Zola’s philosophical attachment to certain outmoded nineteenth-century theories concerning heredity and environment, his Rougon-Macquart series anticipates the American family horror film by revealing key relationships between the microcosmic and macrocosmic forms of social life. Zola’s creative works belong to a particularly turbulent period of French history; similarly Romero’s major achievements belong to another significantly influential historical period a century after Zola.

As many of Zola’s readers know, qualities of literary excess often characterise his fiction, as novels such as Le Ventre du Paris and La Faute du l’Abbé Mouret reveal. Passages in certain novels often collapse traditional divisions between reality and fantasy. Father Mouret’s hyper-realistic vision of nature’s restoration of its former power (the taking over a country church in an apocalyptic manner in La Faute du l’Abbé Mouret) is one of many instances. Grotesque and supernatural imagery erupt within the text in a manner akin to the return of the repressed in a horror film. Despite its rejection by the literary establishment for most of the twentieth century, naturalism is not the simplistic dogma parodied by its opponents. Like all innovative ideas, naturalism’s complexity suffered from distortion. But, as Raymond Williams commented in his re-evaluation of the term, ‘actual positions and practices are very much more diverse than their subsequent ideological presentations and … we shall misunderstand and betray a century of remarkable experiments if we go on trying to flatten them to contemporary theoretical and quasi-theoretical positions’ (1989: 66). Williams also noted that very little historical support exists for divisions generally made between supposedly formally different artistic movements such as naturalism and modernism. Naturalism and modernism share a common aim of criticising society. Although naturalism ironically later came to be popularly understood in terms of the very things it attempted to challenge, such as the static reproduction of everyday life via theatre and television set design or mere grotesque spectacle, it was never reductive. It also contained several unexplored potentials for future development. Williams notices neglected opportunities inherent within naturalism which horror films might generically develop culturally and historically:

In the same sense there is a crisis at that point in Naturalist theatre where someone stares from the window at a world he or she is shut off from. Dissident bourgeois art, including much of great interest and value, often stops at that point, in a moment of exquisite nostalgia or longing. But the more significant development is the growing conviction that all that can really be seen in that window is a reflection: a screen, one might say for indefinite projections; all the crucial actions of the world in a play of psyche or of mind. The powerful images which result will of course not be Naturalist, naturalistic, or classically realist either. When Strindberg, at just that point of crisis, changed his mind about what made people unhappy, he began writing plays of great power which there, in the 1890s, were contemporary with the first films and in fact, as we read them now, are effectively film scripts involving the fission and fusion of identities and characters; the alteration of objects and landscapes by the psychological pressures of the observer; symbolic projections of obsessive states of mind: all, as material processes beyond the reach of even his experimental theatre, but all, as processes of art, eventually to be realised in film: at first, as in expressionism, in an exploratory cinema; later as available techniques in routine horror and murder films and in the kind of anti-science fiction commercially presented as SF. (1989: 115)⁹

Williams notes how naturalism extends in different directions and uses various forms to realise its goals. It is a tradition Romero intuitively appropriates. Although popular audience response to his zombie trilogy often remains at gratuitously spectacular levels, the films actually contain deeper levels of meaning.

One such meaning linking both Zola and Romero involves the concept of the crowd. Although more mobile than their zombie counterparts, Zola’s fictional crowds often occupy terrifying roles. They can be also as mindless and violent as Romero’s zombies. La Fortune des Rougon depicts both national guard and insurgent forces acting in an uncontrolled manner. In Germinal, female rioters castrate a butcher who has been sexually exploiting them for years and proudly display their trophy! Etienne Lantier gets carried away by the crowds in his self-appointed role as political leader. Everyone descends into irrational mass hysteria that harms their respective causes. Etienne’s actions foreshadow Scottie’s male bravado in Dawn of the Dead, which leads to his downfall. David’s ‘debacle’ in the same film