The legacy of George Romero’s influence on the history of film is so poetically symmetrical with his most famous creation as to defy description. It is an influence that is almost certainly unprecedented either before Night of the Living Dead or since. George Romero is the man responsible for killing the zombie movie genre as it was known before. He is also the man responsible for making zombie movies the most influential “horror” genre of the 21st century.
Like his lumbering “living dead” creatures who aren’t quite people in the same way they used to be, zombie movies are not quite what they used to be. Oh sure, movie zombies look like zombies in movies made before 1968, just like the titular flesh-eating reanimated corpses of the film look like the loved ones laid to rest at some point in the past. But they’re not the same.
Prior to George Romero’s arrival, the zombie was a movie “monster” based on its Haitian voodoo “reality.” That reality states that a person becomes a zombie under the power of a witch doctor’s spell capable of turning a “living” human being with soul into a kind of mindless automaton completely under the witch doctor’s power to control. None of the movies about zombies made before had anything to do with rising from the dead. In order to become a zombie, the rule was rigid and strict: you have to possess a soul, therefore you must still be alive.
Little surprise, then, that the word “zombie” is never mentioned nor even alluded to in Night of the Living Dead. The creatures in that film do not resemble any movie zombies presented before. What they do resemble, however—and quite closely—are the aliens who inhabit the bodies of humans they kill in a 1959 film title Invisible Invaders and the dead which are resurrected as part of another alien threat put into place as Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Invisible Invaders is particularly noteworthy because not only do the aliens who take over the bodies look and movie like the “living dead” of Romero’s film, but that plot of the earlier science fiction flick eventually has a small group of humans hunkering down in a single location to fight off the lumbering horde of pasty-faced invaders. Was Romero directly influenced by Invisible Invaders? Did Ed Wood have an invisible hand himself in guiding the look and behavior of the living dead?
Who knows? The point is moot at this point since it is Romero’s vision which has guided the influence and direction of the transformation of the zombie genre. What had begun as strictly a horror film trope—Bela Lugosi himself starred in a movie titled White Zombie—has through the mediation of George Romero and through no small part the work of revolutionary filmmakers like Oscar-winner Danny Boyle now become as transformed as the resurrected dead.
What was once human became something that was no longer quite human in Romero’s film. Likewise, what was exclusively category within the horror genre at the time that Night of the Living Dead was released is now something no longer quite so exclusive. By the second decade of the 21st century, the zombie movie had movie had moved into being something much closer to science fiction than horror as the zombie had transformed back again into something living.
The “infected” zombies of films like the 24 ____ Later franchise, the [REC] franchise, World War Z and Train to Busan have infected the genre to create a new hybrid that is something like a cross between the pre-Romero horror movies and the post-Romero influence in which zombies became the dead brought back to life. One can only surmise where the zombie genre would be today had it not been for George Romero and Night of the Living Dead. Only one thing is certain and one thing very likely: it would not be where it is today and it almost doubtlessly would not be the most influential horror-based genre of the 21st century.
