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This chapter analyzes the careers of David Cronenberg and George A. Romero, charting the evolution of two notable horror film auteurs from their origins in what the rhetoric of crisis has construed for many as the golden days of 1970s neo-horror, all the way toward the present. It suggests that while Cronenberg’s movies have come to exhibit that staid minimalism expected from a “mature” director of international stature, Romero’s recent films feature a joyful yet dour return to the exuberance of his genre’s g(l)ory days.

This chapter reviews the horror films Two Evil Eyes and The Dark Half. Two Evil Eyes is a two-part film produced by Dario Argento; Romero was in charge of “The Facts in the Case of Mr Valdemar.” Both “The Facts in the Case of Mr Valdemar” and The Dark Half share a Gothic heritage, a feature also common to Stephen King's novels. However, although the Gothic aura of the supernatural appears ideal territory for Romero, his concerns lie elsewhere. Expressing disappointment in his review of The Dark Half, Kim Newman commented that Romero's “films prefer science fiction to the supernatural.” “The Facts in the Case of Mr Valdemar” attempts to avoid the Gothic style entirely and aims (apart from the unfortunate presence of the ghostly “They” towards the climax) at naturalistic levels of meaning, while The Dark Half cannot discard the trappings entirely.

This chapter looks at the horror films Bruiser (2000) and Land of the Dead (2005). Bruiser represented a necessary artistic break for Romero before he went on to capture the best of both his cinematic worlds involving accessibility and subversiveness in Land of the Dead. The film raises familiar issues concerning individual dehumanization in late-capitalist society; it plays with the boundaries dividing fantasy from reality in such a manner that both realms appear to merge. However, there are no Gothic sequences where we can be certain that the events are really fantasy. In Land of the Dead, Romero continues his contrast between the human and zombie worlds but in a complex manner recognizing that the old divisions between upper classes and lower classes or “them and us” are no longer valid in the old ethical senses of the terms. Both Bruiser and Land of the Dead depict fictional situations in which characters may try to change their lives or submit to the system at great personal and emotional cost.

This chapter opens with a discussion of John Winthrop, Governor of New England, who delivered a rousing sermon entitled A Model of Christian Charity. Winthrop outlined the hopes and fears of the community of men and women who had left Europe in search of religious freedom and warned of the dangers that imperiled the success of their mission to redeem the sins of the old world in the new. Winthrop warned people, that the Lord would surely break out in anger against them and stated that they would be ‘consumed out of the good land.’ The long-dead figure of John Winthrop is resurrected here for a number of reasons, primarily because close consideration of his words provides a salutary reminder that the foundational historical documents of the United States, as is the case with all nations, are continually open to ideological manipulation in the service of competing interest groups. It is nonetheless significant that by the 1970s new generation of activists, writers, artists and particularly film-makers looked to the nation's foundational mythology as a means of understanding why and how things had gone so terribly wrong in the present. Through a hugely creative deployment of the conventions of contagion horror, supernatural horror and body horror, the films of George A. Romero thus provide some of the most visually arresting political challenges to the low, dishonest decades from which they emerged.

This chapter theorizes the structure and function of localness in cinema, examining the split viewership that results when films embrace marginal, relatively unknown real spaces as a backdrop for fictional narrative. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s discussion of anamorphosis, it argues that when real locations (those clearly coded as specific but unknown to a generalized mass audience) are emphasized by the fictional filmic text, what results is a sort of extrusion of unknowable specificity, a blind spot in the field of spectatorial vision. Even spectators who know the place visible on-screen will run the risk of falling for their own supposedly privileged access to the image’s (and the place’s) plenitude. The desire for the local is, like desire itself, impossible to satisfy. George Romero’s early films, shot on location in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, provide a particularly instructive case study in the psychodynamics of localness in film.

The first edition of this book suggested that the naturalist discourse intuitively motivated much of George A. Romero's work as a filmmaker. By contrast, this second edition has little to say on this subject since arguments made in the first remain valid while recent material receives comment in added footnotes. However, some modifications have been made. The original conclusion has satisfactorily become redundant in the light of recent developments, the most important being that Romero is now consistently working again without any of the creative frustrations and delays he encountered within the Hollywood studio system. Material on Bruiser now forms a new chapter combined with analysis of Land of the Dead, while The Amusement Park has been removed to an epilogue. The succeeding chapters contain new material on Diary of the Dead, a film which has been misunderstood by most reviewers and fans but one representing Romero's greatest achievement to date and needing urgent re-evaluation as well as Survival of the Dead.

This introductory chapter provides an interview of George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982). When Stephen King and Romero announced in 1982 that they were working together to produce a horror film with the no-nonsense scary title Creepshow, the news was met by horror film fans with excitement but also a certain amount of trepidation. Both Romero and King were hitting their stride as masters of their respective mediums. Creepshow saw King and Romero collaborating as equals, which as far as the author was concerned, made this a very different and much more exciting prospect compared to the previous adaptations of his novels. While Romero and King, described by Fangoria as ‘two bearded behemoths of fright’, would spend much of their later careers promising horror fans that they would work together again, Creepshow was to be their sole collaboration as director and writer.

This chapter details the making of George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982). The idea for Creepshow arose from a discussion between Stephen King, Romero, and Romero's producer Richard P. Rubenstein that took place in Maine in the summer of 1979. The three men had met to come up with a concept for a film which would, they hoped, be sufficiently successful to attract investors to their proposed adaptation of The Stand. While King wrestled with turning The Stand into a viable length for a theatrical feature, the challenge for Romero and Rubenstein was to find the money. The decision was therefore made to collaborate on a medium-budget picture that would be a big enough hit to calm investors' fears and raise the necessary capital for The Stand. It was King who suggested the alternative concept of tying the film into EC horror comics of the 1950s, and who also came up with the name, Creepshow, at which point the idea of using different formats drifted away.

This chapter assesses the emergence of American independent horror, looking at George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). By the mid-1960s, the traditional Hollywood studio system was responsible for only around 20 per cent of America's film production. The remainder came from independent film-makers and from films made outside of the United States, where labour and locations were cheaper. The 'New Wave' movements in countries such as Japan, France, Britain, and Czechoslovakia introduced new styles of film-making to American cinemagoers, who found them an attractive alternative to the classical Hollywood feature film. As such, the late 1960s saw enormous changes in American cinema, including within the horror genre. Influenced by social, political and cultural upheavals occurring in the country at the time, 1968 is often cited as the dawn of the 'modern American horror film'. The chapter considers how political and social turmoil in America led to a growing number of independent film-makers actively working against the industry establishment, taking advantage of the heavily diminished influence of the major studios, and producing films which rejected Hollywood conservatism and deliberately pushed the boundaries of acceptability.

This chapter scrutinizes the structure of George Romero’s Living Dead films in light of Friedrich Nietzsche’s distinction between passive and active nihilism. The films analysed include Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead. It is argued that in this series there is a progressively building ambiguity in Romero’s attitude toward the passive forces of the zombie invasion and the active efforts of the human survivors. Initially, Romero’s sympathy seems to be with the humans; especially with minorities, women and the disabled. Yet as the films progress, sympathy shifts toward the undead, who are increasingly depicted as targets of human cruelty and abuse. What begins as a nightmare of nihilistic passivity eventually ends with a nightmarish scenario of nihilistic activity, exposing the awful potential of human power unleashed from moral constraint.

This epilogue reflects on George A. Romero's cinema, which reveals the tragic absurdity of a twentieth-century condition recognized in the novel of Joseph Conrad by Thomas Mann, who commented that “the striking feature of modern art is that…it sees life as tragicomedy with the result that the grotesque is its most genuine style,” one that is appropriate in recognizing the dreadful nature of modern experience since “the grotesque is the genuine antibourgeois style.” Romero's zombies represent grotesque metaphorical embodiments for ideas which have been running through his films ever since Night of the Living Dead. They transcend class, racial, and gender categories, including both children and senior citizens. His film, The Amusement Park—with its edge is its keen combination of fantasy and realism within an allegorical condemnation of selfish materialism—significantly illustrates the real concerns motivating Romero's role as a director throughout his entire career.

This chapter examines the resurgence of the zombie genre which went from a minor figure to one of the defining pop cultural icons of the era. What might be said about the connections between this renaissance and the turbulent War on Terror decade? It offers a detailed analysis of the films of George A. Romero and I Am Legend.

This chapter analyses the reception of George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982). Creepshow, in spite of the involvement of Romero and Tom Savini, and also Stephen King's stated desire to make a film so scary that people would ‘literally crawl out of the theatre’, stands apart from the splatter/slash/body horror/gore traditions of early 1980s horror cinema. This did not however prevent the film from being criticised for its violence. Given the moderate levels of violence actually in the film, the fact that Creepshow was criticised for its violence was more likely to do with the reputation of its producer and director rather than its content. Creepshow was a milder form of the kind of horrors that Romero had explored in his previous work. It also lacked the overt, angry social commentary about militarism, racism, poverty, urban decline, and consumerism that had categorised his prior horror output. Although social commentary was present in the form of Romero and King's critique of wealth, greed, and consumption, like the violence, it appeared in Creepshow in a much subtler form.

This concluding chapter looks at the legacy of George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982). It focuses on the sequels and on the Tales from the Darkside series and movie. The relative success of Romero and Stephen King's film was sufficient to lead Richard P. Rubenstein, along with United Film Distributors (UFD) and Warner Bros, to suggest a sequel. It was also good enough for Rubenstein, on behalf of Laurel Productions Inc., to plan a spin-off TV series, which in order to get around Warner Bros' part ownership of Creepshow was renamed Tales from the Darkside. The pilot episode, written by Romero and directed by Bob Balaban, first aired in the US in October of 1983 and the series was picked up by Paramount, beginning in earnest in September of 1984, and running for four seasons until July of 1988.

This chapter discusses the influence of EC horror comics on George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982). Despite Romero and Stephen King openly acknowledging the influence of EC, it was not their intention to adapt EC stories, but rather to capture the essence of the comics, making Creepshow an homage to EC rather than an adaptation. This is attested to by the fact that two of the segments of Creepshow are based on stories already published by King. The result is that even though Creepshow draws upon both the subject matter and the themes of EC, they are nevertheless filtered through the different yet complementary preoccupations of King and Romero. The resulting film is therefore a hybrid text that combines elements from King, Romero, and EC, and this is particularly noticeable in the way in which the film adapts EC's moral landscape.

This chapter examines how George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982) integrates EC's comic book visual style. At the same time as Romero and Stephen King were building upon EC's moral themes by introducing their own preoccupations, what they were also attempting was to create a film that integrated horror cinema and the visual look of EC comics. Interviewed in 1982, Romeo claimed that although it was ‘the irreverence and that graphic nature of the comics’ that attracted him to EC, the influence of EC in Creepshow ‘is not so much visual’. It is possible therefore that it was King who was initially the greater advocate for including comic book stylizations, since they were ‘very specifically planned and spelled out in the shooting script’. Although the influence of EC visuals was apparently of lesser importance to Romero initially, in its conception Creepshow was designed to ape the style of the comics to which it was an homage, and Romero certainly embraced this in the shooting, deliberately introducing moments that foreground a comic book visual style, including animated sequences, an expressionist use of colour at key moments, and the replication of the experience of reading a comic book through the use of panels within frames, gutters, and comic book style shot transitions.

This chapter explores the way in which George A. Romero's Creepshow (1982) is situated within the early 1980s tradition of the horror comedy. If Creepshow did not have the level of savage violence and equally fierce social commentary that they expected from Romero, what did remain largely intact was Romero's subversive humour. This merging of the gory and the funny was an identifiable trope in the emerging splatter and body horror movement. King's comedy is sometimes even broader, particularly in his screenplays, which often lack the sophistication of Romero's use of humour in Dawn of the Dead. Although Creepshow was advertised as ‘The most fun you'll have being scared’, the film does not aim for big laughs. In general, Creepshow uses humour to undermine the horrors of what is depicted, which is similar to the way in which EC used puns.

This chapter illustrates the interconnection between representations of war and Gothic imaginary. It presents a reading of WWI poetry in conjunction with George Romero's Diary of the Dead (2007), Ambrose Bierce's Gothic description of his Civil War experience and the American military involvement in the Caribbean. Romero's distinctively self-referential style is read as a reflection of the monstrosity of the cinematic medium itself, conjoining on the thematic level the return of soldiers as zombies and on the extradiegetic level a visual language returning both as spectral bodies on screen. The war zone is depicted as a realm between life and death, as though the Gothic mode were the only way the truth can be told in a situation of catastrophe. The zombie, poised in this space, functions as a trope used to confront us with the ethical crisis raised by a ubiquity of digital images at the beginning of the 21st century.