What inspired you as a kid, that you think moulded you into the horror icon you are now?
Icon? Heh heh, well there's the rub, I don't think of myself that way at all. Man, I'm just having fun. It's very flattering, but I'm just making movies, it's hard for me to think of myself that way.
Inspiration... I think mostly EC comics. I was reading 'em before the ratings code where things would happen like somebody would pull someone's heart out and use it as home-base in a baseball game. I gleefully accepted that gore.
I loved fantasy and horror films, which in those days were 'Be careful of science, or you're gonna breed a 50ft woman or something'. Those influences, even the Godzilla flicks, were a way of using fantasy as parable and I think that's probably what got me involved.
Why did you choose zombies as your subject matter for Night Of The Living Dead?
It was the late 60s and we all thought the era was gonna reform the world - wrong! That's what I was thinking about, that's what was in my heart. I read a novel by Richard Matheson called I Am Legend, which was about some disease causing vampires to take over the world and there was one man left. Thus the title - vampires are no longer legend, now the human is.
What I loved about it was it seemed to me to be a real sea-change in global society, and I ripped it off basically. His story begins when there's only one man left and I wanted to start at the beginning. Also I couldn't use vampires because he used vampires, so I decided to use ghouls. I didn't originally identify these things as zombies - audiences and critics did that later! In my mind at the time, zombies were those Caribbean guys who'd had the voodoo whammy put on 'em, and my guys were flesh-eaters. In fact our first choice of title for the finished film was Night Of The Flesh Eaters, it wasn't Night Of The Living Dead - that was the distributor's title. They said there was an old movie called The Flesh Eaters so they changed the title. That's how we lost the copyright, but that's a long story. People started saying these are a new kind of zombie, so I get credit for creating this new kind of zombie, when I didn't even realise I was doing it!
Did you always intend to do a zombie trilogy?
I originally wrote it as a short story and we turned it into a film. The short story had three parts: the first became Night Of The Living Dead, the second was a couple of paragraphs, and the third was just a sentence where the zombies had taken over the world. That's where the idea of a trilogy came from.
But then, after we made the first film, I really resisted making another for a long time, until Dario Argento [who later did a version of Dawn... for the Italian market] called and said, "This is too long a story for the amount of time we have." So I did the second one and then I realise, wow man! I could keep coming back to this... it could be my thing, my way of expressing myself and reflecting what's going on in the world. The first three films were 60s, 70s, 80s, I missed the 90s and now there's Land Of The Dead. I never thought it would end. I'd love to keep making them as long as I'm on my feet and breathing. I'd just wait for a change, otherwise there's not much to talk about.
Did you ever imagine your low-budget 1968 movie would become such a major influential and enduring benchmark for horror and zombie cinema?
No. We were a bunch of guys in Pittsburgh, man, we made a little flick, threw it in the trunk of a car and drove to New York to see if someone might wanna show it.
I loved film, I sort of wormed my way into it... when I went to college you couldn't get your hands on any hardware, you sat around and watched Battleship Potemkin [Sergei Eisenstein, 1925] and talked about it. That was the extent of what film courses were in those days. Even after we successfully completed the film I never imagined it would do anything except maybe go out and play in some neighbourhood theatres and drive-ins.
How come it's taken 20 years for you and your zombies to return to the big screen for the fourth time?
My partner and I got tied-up in Hollywood and I made more money than I've ever made in my life, but I didn't make any films, because all the projects blew up. Out of frustration I went off and made a little film called Bruiser that nobody has seen, and then I started to write the script for Land Of The Dead.
It was very different, it was much more about homeland problems, homelessness and AIDS and things like that. I finished the script and we sent it around right before 9/11. But when 9/11 happened, everybody wanted to make soft, friendly flicks. So I stuck it on the shelf for a while... for two years.
Did you make any conscious changes to the script after the events of 9/11?
Yes, absolutely. Not to capitalise on the tragedy, but it's a much stronger film. There were very conscious images, like the administration lying to people and telling them everything's OK. My original version was about ignoring the problem, this was more intentional on the part of Dennis Hopper's character, Kaufman - keep the people occupied with games and vices and they won't worry about it. And again, some of the imagery, like the idea of feeling you're protected by water, the idea of the high tower being the financial centre; images like an armoured vehicle driving through a village and mowing everyone down - I think all of that stuff came out of 9/11.
That armoured vehicle you refer to is called 'Dead Reckoning'. Wasn't that the original title of the movie?
It was, yeah.
So why did you change it to Land Of The Dead?
What can I say? Everybody said, "No! It has to be something 'of the dead'!" Actually, once again, they said there was an old Bogart movie called Dead Reckoning, but I don't think that would've been a problem.
There were black human heroes in Night and Dawn Of The Living Dead and there's a black zombie 'hero' in Land... Was that a conscious decision?
Well, when we made Night Of The Living Dead, Duane Jones was the best actor from among our friends, and everybody said it was an innovative and bold move... I dunno man, I think if we deserve any credit it's just that we didn't change the script when Duane agreed to do the role.
Then it became sort of a conceit, as so many people had written, "Well this was so bold, Romero's using his African-American lead where it doesn't need to be." So then I stayed with that in the next two films and what happened was... the zombies in Dawn Of The Dead and Day Of The Dead were very sympathetic, they were closer to my heart than the humans - the humans were rat bastards, the zombies were just doing their thing. So I decided in Land Of The Dead that to make the zombie an African-American, would be my signal to the fans to say, "Look at this guy, he's an OK guy." It's silly, these ideas come to you in the shower.
Your zombie movies aren't just gory horror films' they've always been spiked with social commentary, haven't they?
Some of it's right in your face. What it's been about for me is a revolution. It's about a sea change in society and people can't cope with it and try to maintain life as it was. It's been my platform. I'm not so much trying to criticise, although there's a good deal of criticism... Dennis Hopper's character in this film is obviously meant to shoot a few digs at our administration.
You mean he's Bush?
Yeah - although Dennis saw the guy more as [US Defence Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld. I've basically just been trying to reflect the times, not only in the messages of the film, but stylistically as well.
It's been a wonderful exercise I can keep going back to and show a little bit more of myself, at least the way I think, rather than if I were writing movies about guys in hockey masks with knives. That stuff just doesn't occur to me. I'm more interested in fantasy being about parable - it's Gulliver's Travels, man, it's Ring Around A Rosie and it's a bit disappointing people don't use it that way.
I would never go into the shower and say, "Oh I just had a great idea man, I'm gonna make a movie about... if you watch this video you might die" - I don't think that way.
It seems your movies are all reflections on what's been going on around you throughout your life. You put those experiences into another context.
To a great extent, yes, it is that. Obviously everybody observes things from their own perspective... so that's really it, my canvas, my way of saying, "Here are my observations." And there's another slightly underlying conceit because I've been sort of learn-as-you-go, it's a very complex medium. The film that made me wanna make movies was The Tales Of Hoffmann [Powell and Pressburger, 1951], because I never thought I could do it, I thought you had to be born royalty. But the effects in that film were transparent enough that I could see it and say, "Wow! I know how he did that!"
Do you have nightmares?
I grew up in this development in New York where there were elevators and little carriage-rooms and dark corners. When I was young I used to have nightmares about the elevators stopping at strange floors that really didn't exist. Most of my nightmares were led by the beasts at St Helena's... it was having to step up and meet the Devil and confess to stealing a baseball, or about our neighbourhood being blown to shit by the Russians.
Land Of The Dead is in cinemas 23 September
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