RIP
George A. Romero is a short
string of words I dreaded ever having to see, hear, read, write.
George A. Romero passed away today and as I write this, I'm still
wearing the Night of the Living dead T-shirt that I left the
apartment in this morning, about 12 hours before my wife read and
broke the news to me after seeing it on her iPhone. I couldn't bring
myself to take it off just yet.
To
say that George Romero was a huge influence on my life is an
understatement. He was my first “favorite film director” when I
started getting into film and discovering his films
in the early nineties. Yes, I'd seen Creepshow in
the eighties, but I was just a nine-year-old kid. It was later on
when I caught Monkey Shines and
Night of the Living Dead on
late-night cable television that I became really interested in
Romero's films, and following that, I would go about seeking and
exploring Romero's visionary horror films through the various video
stores in my area. I rented Dawn of the Dead, Day of the
Dead, and Tom Savini's Night
of the Living Dead remake and
watched all three back-to-back in a single evening. That had quite an
effect on me. I rented The Dark Half, and
fell in love with that film, too. But when I found a then-rare copy
of Martin on VHS tape
at a video store called 24-Hour Video, my world suddenly exploded
open. I had never witnessed a film like Martin before,
and though I loved vampire movies, Romero's vision was so authentic,
so experimental, so engagingly realistic and suspenseful and sad and
thoughtful, it changed the way I looked at cinema forever. After
this, one might think (myself included) that there would not be a
Romero experience to outdo Martin (although
the back-to-back Dead trilogy
left a branding upon my brain that is still in evidence); however, a
mere couple of months following my life-changing viewing of Martin,
I managed to find a copy of
Knightriders at a mall
in Bellingham, in a VHS retail store called Suncoast Motion Pictures.
Taking this VHS tape for the car ride home, I was on the edge of my
seat with anticipation. I didn't unleash the tape from the thin foil
wrap until I got inside the living room and was ready to push
Knightriders into the
VCR, fully expecting to witness a Romeo gore-fest. It was not a
gore-fest at all. What it was, was a modern retelling of the Knights
of the Round Table as they jousted tournaments in modern-day
California on motorcycles, in a world that Romero imaginatively
created to critique the capitalistic ideas of greed, consumerism, and
corruption (both moral and capitalistic); and it instantly became one
of my favourite films of all time. After this first viewing, which
left me slack-jawed and awestruck, throughout 1995 to 1996 I would
watch my LP VHS copy of Knightriders every
Friday night for a year.
Ideals
and sentiments that Romeo brought up in Knightriders I
employed in my own life and actions. The visuals of Romero's film
swam in my mind for years, even after I stopped the weekly viewing of
Knightriders. His
films in general left an immense impression on me (as it did so many
others) and for the rest of the nineties and into the new millennium
I would seek out nearly anything George Romero was also partially,
and even remotely, connected to. I once stopped at a video store in
the middle of nowhere to buy a VHS copy of Two Evil Eyes;
I found a paperback copy of “Masters of Modern Horror”, a
literary horror anthology that contained a short story by Romero
entitled “Clay”, on a cross-Canada journey I was taking. Years
later I came across and purchased a 1974 Warner paperback printing of
a “Night of the Living Dead” novelization that contained a
lengthy preface written by Romero, and which is still, I think, one
of the best pieces he'd written. I read Jay R. Bonansinga's “The
Black Mariah” novel about a cursed runaway truck (which I still
think was jacked as the inspiration for the Keanu Reeves film Speed)
because Romero was developing a film version of the book. Likewise
the Canadian direct-to-video movie Dead Awake, which
Romero once mentioned in an interview that he had optioned as a part
of a handful of outside scripts he was developing for production. Of
course by the time it was produced in 2000, George Romero was long
gone from the project. In 2003, when I finally came across a
sought-after videotape of an early version of Roy Frumke's
documentary on Romero, Document of the Dead, and
I found myself transported back to
the magic of discovering Martin
and
Dawn of the Dead
for
the first time...
Like
so many filmmakers and producers throughout the world, visuals and
ideals and social criticisms form Romero's groundbreaking horror
films left significant impressions on me and also heavily influenced
my own film work for nearly a decade. Knowing that this amazing,
uncompromising artist and the author of these works is no longer with
us truly leaves a weight on my heart and a sadness in my mind;
although my thoughts keeps coming back to all of the creativity and
work and soul he's given to us over so many years, for us to enjoy
and to learn from and to draw inspiration from, and I can only be
forever glad he was a part of our world. RIP George A. Romero.
~Vince
D'Amato
