But following his career was always frustrating. Fiercely independent and deeply uncomfortable with Hollywood, he often struggled to raise financing for the movies he wanted to make. Despite announcements for a number of different projects - both horror and non-horror - by the end of his career, he was more or less consigned to zombie movies, and his final three movies -Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and Survival of the Dead - divided fans, to say the least.
I've long been disappointed by this turn of events, feeling Romero didn't have the career he deserved and that the world missed out on some genuine classics from a deserving artist.
For that reason, Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero by Adam Charles Hart proves a welcoming, reassuring, and insightful exploration of the late filmmaker and his body of work. Equal parts biography, commentary, and cinematic analysis, Hart dives into Romero's life and work, both completed and unfilmed work, as well as other sources, to paint a more complete picture of Romero the artist: what drove him, what fascinated him, what he wanted to do, and what he accomplished. Reading this book has me wanting to revisit Romero's work with a new mindset, a new perspective, and a new appreciation.
Romero, as Hart elaborates early on in the book, never set out to become a horror director, much less the founding father of the zombie subgenre. He and his collaborators in Pittsburgh in the 1960s wanted to make artistic cinema, inspired by the likes of Ingmar Bergman, and Hart goes into great detail about what was supposed to be their debut film, The Whine of the Fawn. This was intended to be a medieval parable about a young man wandering the countryside and had an ending as bleak as the one in Night of the Living Dead, but Romero and company couldn't raise money to produce to it, so they decided to make a low-budget horror movie because they didn't need stars and a return on investment seemed more likely.
The rest is history.
Hart dives into both movies made and not made. As you would expect, there's analysis for Night of the Living Dead, which I thought I had read enough of, but Hart finds new angles worth exploring. I also appreciated the deep dives into earlier versions of Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and Martin. It's fascinating to see how the ideas and themes for these films evolved and changed into their final versions. Sometimes the changes came from creative reasons (Hart notes Romero seemed not to know how to continue an early version of Dawn that involved a cult leader of sorts mind-controlling the zombies) and financial versions (Day's earlier versions would have been massive in scale).
I also loved the exploration of titles that never got made such as War of the Worlds: The Night They Came (which would have been the first in a two-part series), Goosebumps, Resident Evil, and Romero's various attempts to make a found-footage Bigfoot movie, efforts that Hart traces from the 1970s to Jacaranda Joe (a short film made with students at Valencia College) in the 1990s and culminating with Diary of the Dead, which replaced Bigfoot with the walking dead.
I think the crowning achievement of Raising the Dead is a newfound appreciation for the career Romero did have. Few people, as Hart notes, have their desired career in moviemaking, but despite all the setbacks, untrustworthy distributors, lack of reliable funding, and other challenges, Romero forged ahead and crafted a strong body of films that deserves to be celebrated.
Romero didn't make all the movies he wanted to make, but his career was far from a disappointment. As an artist, he was constantly forced to adapt his ideas, but he never gave up on them. He didn't want to just be the zombie guy, but within that sub-genre, he found a certain freedom and creativity to express himself.
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