[quote=“Dex”]
Yeah, I like to think of them more as Survival Horror. It’s more about how the characters deal with the situation than actually scaring the audience. Romero’s problem is he doesn’t give his characters enough depth so you really don’t care if they live or not. In fact most of the time you want them not to survive.
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One thing you said that Romero’s zombie films are serious pictures, that’s not accurate. In Dawn and Day there are a few moments of comic relief, in fact almost all his films have moments where you can breathe easy and laugh at the stuff you’re watching. A more gritty, serious zombie movie would be those of Lucio Fulci - which are very surrealistic. Romero tries to capture the social conflicts and moralistic values of the times, he applies that as a theme in a very liberalistic way. Now here’s the thing, you may not care about it now because you’re living in these times and you hear this stuff on the radio and television and blogs, and it’s just everywhere. Wait ten more years, when these social issues become ancient and other issues arise.
Those who watch films will see this film and pick SOME of the things our society has/was dealing with. Romero’s films have more value for future viewings. Me, I’m more concerned about the future of cinema. It seems many directors are relying too much on directing the lenses, and most of them abandon their actors, and the ill-casting of them, and the one-dimensional portrayal of them. You have all these new fancy methods of filmmaking, and the directors take pride in these CGI creations and dare to call them their own, when they were in fact made by a machine. Did Jack Ford or William Wyler need these things to make a great picture? No. They used their natural talent and relied on their actors and believed in the story they were making. Great filmmakers are great writers, if not on the page, with the camera - and the actors should ALWAYS be major contributors.
In the case of Romero, he is not a man who makes movies for people who don’t like to think. Who are apathetic to the world they live in and care only for themselves. The simplistic man is one that will not render their ears for the truth. They’d rather live blindly in themselves and think not a few years ahead into the future. That is what the media has done to all of us and the art of cinema. Movies used to be smart and they spoke out against the world. Now things blow up very nicely in movies. And that’s all that ever happens.