or at least he enjoys himself during interviews. And when I mention I hail from Buffalo, N.Y., the filmmaker says he likes to go to the nearby Niagra on the Lake, a picturesque little town in south Ontario noted for its theater festivals. “We go there for Christmas; it's beautiful - sleigh rides, jingle bells and everything's pretty,” chuckles Romero, who lives in Toronto these days. Sleigh rides? Slay rides? After all, Romero is the man behind a little black-and-white indie film made 40 years ago called “Night of the Living Dead,” which unleashed the horror genre from its creepy (often campy) basement. The film's impact is still felt today - just look at the billions horror films rake in at the box office. Not that Romero, whose big credit to that point was a terrifying segment for “Mister Rogers' Neighborhood” in which the host underwent a tonsillectomy, ever thought much would come from the film originally titled “Night of the Flesh-Eaters.” “I'm a guy who got amazingly lucky by ripping off a story idea and a lot of filmic technique,” says Romero, whose latest in the franchise (though he tends to think of it more as a gimmick), “Diary of the Dead,” is also coming out on DVD. “Night of ...” was inspired by the plot of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel “I Am Legend.” Romero and investors had put together about $100,000 to make the film, planning to sell it to a studio. It didn't happen. But a small distributor released it, and the drive-in crowd ate it up. Still, the director had no interest in horror (he points to Michael Powell's lyric film “Tales of Hoffmann” - based on the opera - as one of the reasons he got into filmmaking), and he used the profits to make another film - a romantic comedy - that tanked. Then one day his doorbell rang, and it was Rex Reed, one of the most well-known film critics in the country at the time. “He said, `Listen, your film has become essential American cinema. Would you sit down and talk to me for a while?” and I said, what???” It turns out that with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, scenes from the Vietnam War being broadcast nightly on network news, and violence in the streets, “Night of the Living Dead” was being hailed as more than about flesh-eaters. The influential French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema had even praised the film, saying it was not about zombies but racism. That is partly because Romero and the others had cast Duane Jones, an African-American, in the lead because “he was the best actor from among our friends.” “We thought we were very hip. We thought we weren't going to change the script just because Duane was a black guy.” Which meant that Jones' Ben had to hit a white woman. “Duane would ask us every day, `You're going to ask me to slug this white woman?”' remembers Romero. “And we would say, `It's the ‘60s, we're past that.”' But the filmmaker doesn't think he or the others can take much credit for casting Jones. “About all you can say for us is that we had no problem in casting him.” At the end of the film, Ben is shot in the head by a white police officer. That may have been provocative enough, but shortly after finishing the film, Romero heard that King had been killed and knew he had a stronger film. While Romero believes that a lot of the attitude that he and his cohorts felt at the time - “frustration that peace and love had not changed the world” - seeped into the “Night of ...,” he also is quick to note, “At the same time, we just wanted to make a hard-ass horror film where the ghouls started to eat their victims.” Even today Romero doesn't take much credit for the horror and zombie craze he helped create. But he does seem surprised that he's still at it. “We got to make the film we wanted, never expecting 40 years later I'd be chewing on the same bone - no pun intended.” - Los Angeles Daily News __
