Here's an excerpt from my upcoming horror-film book, about his influence:
"George
Romero’s arguably more influential Night
of the Living Dead is the exact opposite. Shot cheaply and in black and
white, Dead is the epitome of DIY
filmmaking – simple, linear, graphic, and effective, it became one of the most
popular independent films of all time.
Its
story is cobbled from ideas set down in Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend (and takes a lot of its look
from the first film adaptation of the book, 1964’s The Last Man on Earth). Romero changed the nemeses from vampires to
flesh-hungry, slow-moving undead, single-handedly reviving the zombie-horror
subgenre. All the gore-goods are delivered, but there’s something else pulsing
along underneath all that – a precise and perceptive examination of people in
extreme circumstances.
Norms
are subverted -- the heroine is catatonic; the hero is black and
unapologetically smarter and more proactive than anyone else, one of the first
in a feature film. (Duane Jones’ character is not message-y because it wasn’t
written with race in mind – the real problem is, he’s stuck trying to help a
buncha selfish, short-sighted goddamn MORONS.) The characters dally, waver,
make bad choices, reverse themselves; they are convincingly like what you might
expect the average American would do if this kind of thing came up.
The
low-grade black-and-white footage gives the film a gritty documentary feel (and
Romero’s experience before was exclusively with documentary film). Romero turns
over the exposition to scattered news broadcasts, keeping the audience just as
in the dark as the characters, and adding a touch of satire to the proceedings
as well. (Of the ghouls, the local sheriff says, “They’re dead – they’re all
messed up.”) Ironically, the solution to the zombie problem consists of redneck
posses roaming the countryside, shooting people in the head (and killing out
hero by mistake in the process). As his body is added to the bonfire with the
others in a series of stills, the grim truth seems to be that, in this horror
universe at least, Murphy’s Law is ascendant."