George A. Romero started the age of Survival Horror with his original cult classic Zombie Movies. His first movie in the genre “Night of the Living Dead” started the fire that led to shocking visuals of people eating people on the silver screen. The second movie that had more grotesque and horrid images of guts, blood and more cannibalism was “Dawn of the Dead”. “Day of the Dead” was the final movie that had the last bit of survival horror and of course more blood, guts, mutilations, cannibalism and zombies so rotten you can smell it.
Romero had other zombie movies that followed, but none of them compare to these classics. His new movies lacked something that he had in his first films. The characters in the original movies had that realistic portrayal of the end of the world, humanity, and surviving the outbreak of the zombie apocalypse. Even though the first movie is in black and white, the second is a b-rated visual type 70’s film and the third being more modern with today’s film; they still have that survival horror aspiration that makes them comparable to none.
Dawn of the Dead is my favorite film out of the three. I am not saying it is better than the two but that I have seen this film (almost a hundred times) more than the other two. What’s funny is that every time I see it, I always expect something different to happen to the fate of the protagonists in the movie. One of the greatest lines of this movie regarding the fate of the world is “When there is no more room in Hell, the Dead will walk the Earth!” Even writing it down brings shivers down my spine. This movie is so great that when I first seen it back in 1986-87, I kept thinking about a part where a man is being ripped open by Zombies. The Zombies start eating his guts and I kept replaying this part of the movie in my mind on the way to school. Eventually I became nauseated and threw up. I was only 9 years old when I seen “Dawn of the Dead”.
There is only a few that I will mention that have hit the money when recreating this same genre of Survival Horror with Zombies. The Movie and Television Show that have replicated Romero’s original vision is the movie “The Dead” and AMC’s original Television Series “The Walking Dead”. The movie “the Dead” takes place in Africa and is very frightening, grotesque and very terrifying. I highly recommend seeing this movie. The T.V Series “The Walking Dead” (based on the comic book series) takes place in the good old U.S .A and has all the elements of Romero’s vision from his Zombie horror classics. If you haven’t seen this show and say that it’s not like the comic book but are a true fan of the zombie genre then you are a f**king idiot.
For the record, as quoted by George A. Romero “Zombies cannot Run, it is impossible...” As an artist of human anatomy, I concur with his statement because there is no way that muscles can contract as a dying rotting corpse. Although, a chemical induced virus making people infected with a mind altering maddening state, making them like zombies can account for running. The body has not died yet and is still pumping living blood.
On a final note, one of the best secrets of Romero’s original “…of the Dead” movies is that he never explains what has caused the dead to be reanimated into flesh eating monsters. The movies always keep you guessing for example, (Spioler) in the first move “Night of the Living Dead” the TV announcer says it was the cause of a space borne virus or radiation from a satellite returning from Venus. “Dawn of the Dead” and “Day of the Dead” state vaguely that it is the cause of God’s Judgment on the world.
