![]() ![]() ![]() With his talents apparently unwanted outside of horror, Romero returned to the genre and filled out the rest of the ’70s with his best streak of movies: virus-based The Crazies, vampire deconstruction Martin, and the legendary Dawn of the Dead. Romero was keen to quickly climb out of the horror genre pit, releasing rom-com There’s Always Vanilla in 1971, and then drama Season of the Witch in ’73, whose distributor chopped out 40 minutes and marketed as softcore. ![]() Night of the Living Dead took the space-age hopes of a nation on the cusp of landing on the moon and cut it to ribbons, fashioning an ambiguous backstory of a downed space craft whose radiation transforms the freshly deceased into mindless flesh-hungry shamblers. The movies he made in-between these two Deads represent a visionary’s rocky but tenacious journey through the industry, frequently compromised or pigeonholed, but true to a drive to shake up the conventions of horror. ![]() His final movie - Survival of the Dead, released 2009 and eight years before his death - had, well, not quite the same impact, but discloses Romero’s lifelong commitment to the zombie revolution he spearheaded. Romero’s first movie, Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968, walloped the country with its black-and-white dread and gore infused with progressive casting and social commentary, it single-handedly created the modern-day zombie genre. (Photo by United Film Distribution, Universal, Weinstein Company / courtesy Everett Collection) All George A. ![]()
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