Matt Gurney's Halloween confession: George Romero was right about people. I was wrong.
I used to think the creator of the modern zombie genre was too cynical about how we'd respond to danger. I know better, now.
Normally we at The Line have to write about a lot of really serious, grim stuff. But we also like to have some fun. In recent weeks, both Line editors realized they were planning to write about horror films. So we decided to save our columns and turn them into a Halloween double-feature. So grab your popcorn, pour a tall glass of Coke and settle in for a brief break from the news. Happy Halloween!
First up, Matt Gurney. Jen Gerson’s offering is up next! Stay tuned.
By: Matt Gurney
After a plague and then a war and now a looming economic crisis, one of the ways in which I now assess someone's intellectual integrity is to ask them for an example of something they’ve changed their mind about. Way, way too many people out there have the bad habit of taking everything that happens and fitting it into what they already think. That's easy, and dangerous. What's harder but necessary is, during or after a major event, asking yourself what you learned having lived through it — and what you now realize you'd been wrong about before.
This author's list could consume half a dozen columns. Today, though — October 31st, 2022, Halloween — let's just focus on one of them.
I was wrong about people. George A. Romero was right all along.
Romero, if the name isn't familiar, was an American-born filmmaker who is essentially the father of the modern zombie. The notion of the zombie has been around for many years, but Romero's 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead is what gave us the zombies we know and love today. Though Romero had a long career in film and television, it was the zombie genre that came to define his work across the decades. There were six films in the Dead franchise; another was in production when Romero, who had by then gained Canadian citizenship and relocated to Toronto, died of lung cancer in 2017. (The film is reportedly in production under the creative guidance of his widow.)
If you aren't a zombie fan, or familiar with the genre, have no fear — the point of this column isn't to recap all the plotlines or to summarize the films. All that you need to know can be explained in a few sentences: the first film depicts the sudden reanimation of the bodies of the recently deceased. By means unknown (but hinted to be a form of exotic radiation accidentally brought to Earth by the crash of a returning NASA Venus probe), the brains of the newly dead can continue to live and exercise some limited control over the nervous system. Zombies are clinically dead. Their hearts have stopped, they don't breathe. They have no memories, personality or higher reasoning. But the reactivated brain, which has only very primitive abilities and desires, is enough to let the zombie stagger around, slowly, in search of live prey — humans, mostly. They attack such prey on sight, tearing at and biting them. Anyone so bitten becomes a zombie in minutes or hours — 100 per cent of the time, unless the site of the bite is instantly amputated. A zombie can't be "killed" per se, since they're already dead, and injuries that would neutralize a living human don’t stop them. They can only be stopped by destroying the brain itself. Aim for the head, survivors.
That's all you need to know about the background of Romero's zombies. Because, really, his movies aren't actually about zombies. They're about people. And that's where he was right, and I was wrong.
Romero's six main Dead films aren't strictly a series. There's no characters that carry over from one film to the next, and the settings and even historical periods change. But the films do tell a roughly chronological tale of what happens when the dead rise. The first film, from 1968, shows the early hours of confusion and panic, but the zombies are a fairly minor threat dispatched by volunteer posses armed with hunting rifles in addition to the odd unit of the National Guard. By the second film, 1978's Dawn of the Dead, a botched response by panicky and irrational humans has allowed zombie infestations to take root in the major cities. By the third film, 1985's Day of the Dead, civilization has seemingly collapsed entirely, leaving increasingly insane groups of civilian scientists and military commanders at each other's throats in military redoubts. The later three films, released from 2005-2009, are lesser known, for a reason — they aren't as good. But they follow the same general pattern of showing humanity increasingly on the ropes and reduced to a few defensible holdouts, where despite the hordes of zombies, we remain very much our own worst enemy.
I am, as the reader has probably guessed, a zombie fan, and a Romero fan. While the latter three films of the Dead franchise are decidedly uneven — for completists only, as the saying goes — the first three are very good. Classics of the horror genre. The first and second, in particular, are fantastic. Even as I've enjoyed them over the years, though, I confess I've always disagreed with them. Romero, I thought, was far too cynical about people. Far too pessimistic.
Zombies, after all, aren't particularly dangerous. A rational, competent response effort could easily defeat a zombie uprising, at least as depicted in Romero's films. Sensible precautions by individuals, a reasonably coherent response by law enforcement and military units, and no problem. Zombies are dumb. They're slow. A locked door will hold them off. Any old shotgun, or even a solid club, will dispatch one with ease. What's the problem here?
Us. People. Humanity. We’re the problem. That's the real theme in Romero's movies. The zombies aren't evil. They're more akin to a force of nature or a natural disaster. All that the people need to do to survive is not be stupid, pull together for the common good, and combine resources to master a shared problem.
But we don't. Because we're idiots.
In the first movie — a classic in the isolated-country-house genre of horror films — a group of strangers take shelter from a few zombies in the opening hours of the uprising. They proceed to argue, fight, and generally make terrible decisions, all while failing to apply much effort into figuring out how to survive before help arrives in the form of National Guard units. They all die.
In the second film, a few survivors flee the fall of Philadelphia in a stolen news helicopter and take shelter in an abandoned shopping mall which has everything they need to survive a long, long time. They mostly get along, but still make terrible decisions and fail to plan for much of anything. Eventually, a band of looters wipes almost everyone out, and the mall, with all its useful supplies and groceries, are overrun by roaming zombies.
The third film sees the military and civilian scientists fall into open conflict, dooming a chance at a breakthrough that might have given humanity a chance.
This used to strike me as wrong. Now? It all sounds about right, doesn’t it? Having spent the last few years seeing how we've handled COVID-19 — a much tamer threat than Romero's fictional zombie plague! — it's hard to conclude that Romero was wrong about anything.
I hate admitting this. I was once so thoroughly committed to my belief that Romero was too pessimistic. I used to lament to friends that what the world needed was a zombie series (or a horror genre generally) where normal people make more-or-less rational decisions and behave in a mostly reasonable manner. I wanted to see people who come to the unlocked door in the dark basement, and decide, hey, you know what, I’ll open this later. I want to see governments that are slightly prepared for a new threat, and react reasonably well; and communities that rally effectively and take moderate precautions. This wasn’t Romero’s take, but it’s the one I wanted to see.
My friends got tired of hearing it, so I set out to write a trilogy of novels that tells that story. I finished two of them, before parenthood took all my free time and energy and vapourized it. (I still tell myself I'll finish the third and publish them some day, but gosh, they'd need an update now!) I even met Romero once in Toronto; his long ponytail and huge glasses were instantly recognizable. We chatted briefly, including about this, and he was an absolute delight. He heard me out but just laughed and smiled and said that he wasn't ever that interested in telling stories about zombies. It was people he wanted to comment on, and he didn't think much of us.
We wished each other well and I let him get back to his evening. But I've actually thought back to that chance encounter more than once over the last few years. All the government incompetence and confusion we saw at the start of COVID? The shambolic, disorganized response? The immediate proliferation of conspiracy theories, and common refusal of many to take the most basic, reasonable precautions against a stoppable threat? The absolute fury and hatred between those demanding more be done and those refusing to do anything? The exhaustion, the bitterness, the gradual tuning out? The real, and ongoing, societal blowback to everything done to try and stop the danger? And it’s not just COVID-19, of course. It’s everything we’ve seen in the last few years. We’re destroying ourselves, either actively or by consistently failing to solve problems that ought to be solvable. We don’t need any help from the zombies.
So here’s my guess: had he lived longer, through the last few years, Romero wouldn't have been surprised in the least. Even me, with my already very low estimation of our state capacity, expected better of people in general. I wasn't surprised to see governments fall flat on their faces, especially not in Canada. I was absolutely shocked to see people I know simply refuse to accept any discomfort or inconvenience, or even to acknowledge that there was a problem at all, because thinking about it was just too stressful for them to bear.
Not everyone behaved badly or stupidly, of course. Most people did respond reasonably and well to the new danger. Overall, I'd even go as far as to say that most of us did better than I might have expected, for the most part. But we did way, way worse than I'd have guessed in some ways, and as I've long said, it only takes a few jerks to ruin a great party.
Romero grasped something crucial about people that I didn't, and based his series of films around it: some of us just won't ever play nicely with others, and can't be forced to. Any effort to compel their cooperation will just make things worse in the end. We were lucky with COVID-19 that the threat was mild enough, and societal co-operation high enough, to allow us to get through it mostly intact. But that was, I repeat, luck. It could have been worse. Thank God it wasn't.
So as we hopefully put the pandemic behind us, what we're left with is what I'll dub the Romero Rule: most people will respond better than you expect, but a sizeable minority will behave worse than you'd believe possible. Whether or not you're doomed really hinges less on the threat itself than the people you’re with, because the people are gonna do as people do.
We never change, and honestly, maybe we just can't. Romero probably figured that out a lot sooner than I did, too.
So sorry, George, wherever you are. Matt in Toronto wants it on the record: he was wrong. You were right.
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