I dig George Romero. Of course he gave us our first zombies that were political/scary.
On his new movie Diary of the Dead which is shot much like Blair Witch and Cloverfield, he says some interesting stuff that I think has merit:
“There’s no power on the tube any more. It’s the computer, the iPod and whatever these new gizmos are. And everybody’s in touch with it,” he said. “There is serious debate going on, but most of it, and the stuff that people are attracted to, is in some way entertainment. Is Michael Moore an honest documentarian? Honestly? I don’t think he is. … The real discussion gets left behind the entertainment value.”
It only follows that Romero would want viewers of his stories to look beyond the entertainment value of squib-filled vests and heads split by scythes.
“All of my zombie films have been about the humans. The zombies, they could be anything,” he said. “They could be an avalanche, they could be a hurricane. It’s a disaster out there. The stories are about how people fail to respond in the proper way. They fail to address it. They keep trying to stick where they are, instead of recognizing that maybe this is too big for us to try to maintain. That’s the part of it that I’ve always enjoyed.”
Who knew that zombies could explain a lot about the human condition of the living.
Wait, I did.
Carry on.
I caught a radio interview with George the other morning. He said a lot the same as he did in you snippet. And I had one of those epiphanies…why I dig zombie movies. It’s a lot the same reason why I dig disaster movies.
Granted, there are other levels. But on the pure visceral (admittedly somewhat sociopathic) level….I like Zombie movies because it’s one of the few niches where there’s some social justice, and the people who die, generally do so because of their own pig-headedness and stupidity. Again, it’s that “humanity in a toilet swirl” way of thinking that tends to keep me from getting the really good gigs in life, but those who tend to think my way are generally more fun to be around.
So I got that going for me. Which is nice.
Nailed it completely. Zombie flicks, the good ones anyway, are about people and I’ve always taken them as “You know, if we just stop acting like pricks and actually worked together we could get through this, but oh drat, we’re humans, so we can’t, it’s not in our nature, so let’s squabble over nonsense until we get our heads gnawed off.” That being said, if you dig the “zombie stories revealing the human condition” aspect, I highly recommend the comic Walking Dead. It’s like a Romero movie in comic form.
George Romero rocks and he is the king of everything zombie.