George Romero

Romero’s watchword was “gore for a purpose” and the film’s hellish bloodshed echoed the horror of a very real war, while the grisly fate of its black male lead evoked the struggles of the civil rights era. Arguably his lethally satirical nightmare was as subversive as the countercultural rock music of the time. “I used to pitch on the basis of the zombie action, and I could hide the message inside that,” he said. “I always thought of the zombies as being about revolution, one generation consuming the next.”

Later films in the franchise contained blood-soaked commentaries on consumerism (Dawn of the Dead, 1978), scientific ethics (Day of the Dead, 1985) and post 9/11 anxiety (Land of the Dead, 2005). The gore was “the fun part, the pay-off, the downhill dip on the rollercoaster,” he said.

Night of the Living Dead was panned by the critics. One notice even suggested that the film’s “unrelieved sadism” cast “serious aspersions on the integrity of its makers”. The filmgoing public ignored such brickbats and turned up in such numbers that drive-in operators in America were reportedly forced to take out newspaper ads to apologise for having to turn away so many customers. Romero kept audiences waiting a decade for the sequel, Dawn of the Dead, which on its release became one of the most profitable independent productions in film history.

In later years his films became the subject of learned academic study. “He took the image of the zombie, which up to that point was rooted in a black Caribbean culture, and turned it into a metaphor for all sorts of things in American culture,” Leo Braudy, veteran professor of English at the University of Southern California, told the Los Angeles Times. “The zombie is unique because it’s part of a group representing the potential threat of a mass mind.”

Peter Bradshaw, the British critic and novelist, compared Romero’s work to that of the 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift, while Romero jokingly described himself as the horror movie version of the political film-maker Michael Moore. If his films defined the modern genre of horror movies, he was less than impressed by the Hollywood phenomenon he helped to create, dismissing many of the films he was credited with inspiring as nothing more than “torture porn”.

“They’re just mean-spirited and Grand Guignol,” he complained. “I don’t find any substance underlying it. My zombie films reflect the sociopolitical climates of the different decades. I have this conceit that they’re a little bit of a chronicle, a cinematic diary of what’s going on.”

Remarkably, Night of the Living Dead was made for less than $120,000 (£650,000 today). About 45 years later, Hollywood spent more than $200 million making Brad Pitt’s zombie movie World War Z.

Romero was offended by such profligacy. “I harbour a lot of resentment,” he said. “I used to be the only guy on the zombie playground, and unfortunately it has been Hollywood-ised. I can’t pitch a modest little zombie film, which is meant to be sociopolitical. The moment you mention the word ‘zombie’, it’s got to be, ‘Hey, Brad Pitt paid hundreds of millions to do that’. ”

Intriguingly, Romero never used the word “zombie” in Night of the Living Dead, but deployed the term “ghoul”. The film was loosely inspired by Richard Matheson’s story I Am Legend (which was directly adapted by Francis Lawrence in the 2007 film of that name starring Will Smith), about a virus brought back from another planet that causes the recently deceased to return from the dead and eat the flesh of the living.

“I didn’t think of them as zombies,” Romero recalled. “Then people started to write about them, calling them zombies, and all of a sudden that’s what they were.” It was not until ten years later that he surrendered and called them zombies in Dawn of the Dead. “It was never that important to me what they were. Just that they existed.”

He never saw much money from his films, in part because most of his non-zombie films flopped and partly because he refused to deal with the Hollywood studios, which he despised. “If I fail, they write me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart,” he observed wryly.

He was born George Andrew Romero in 1940 in the Bronx, New York, the son of a Cuban-born commercial artist and an American mother whose family came from Lithuania. A fan of horror comics and a self-confessed “film freak”, as a boy he took the subway into Manhattan to rent film reels. A favourite was The Tales of Hoffmann, starring Moira Shearer and based on Offenbach’s opera. On one occasion he found that the film wasn’t available because it had been rented out to another film-mad youth named Martin Scorsese.

He studied film at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and got his first professional work directing gig documentary segments for the public television children’s show Mr Rogers’ Neighbourhood. He later joked that he learnt the skill of how to use gore in his films while making Mr Rogers Gets a Tonsillectomy.

He married his first wife, Nancy, a costume designer and film producer, in 1971. They had one son, Cameron Romero, who followed in his father’s footsteps and directs horror films. He met his second wife, the actress Christine Forrest, when she was cast in Season of the Witch, which he directed and on which his first wife worked as a producer. They had two children, Andrew Romero and Tina Romero, who was an extra in her father’s film Land of the Dead and went on to become a director in her own right.

He married for a third time in 2011, to Suzanne Desrocher, whom he met while he was making Land of the Dead. After spending most of his working life living in Pittsburgh, where many of his films were shot, he took Canadian citizenship and spent his final years living in Toronto.

Away from his director’s chair he was as affable and easygoing as his films were shocking and scary. Tall, with a grey ponytail and a propensity to use the word “man”, he exuded a gentle hippy-ish quality and his own tastes in movies were far removed from the genre in which he excelled. He cited as one of his favourite films John Ford’s 1952 romantic comedy The Quiet Man. He died surrounded by members of his family while listening to the film’s gentle soundtrack of Irish airs. His death followed “a brief but aggressive battle with lung cancer”. He chain-smoked Marlboros for much of his adult life.

He shot Night of the Living Dead in black and white in the woods around Pittsburgh with a black actor, Duane Jones, as the heroic lead, playing a good man who is rewarded for his selflessness with a fatal gunshot from a lynch-minded mob. He recalled the night he finished editing the film: “We were driving to New York, with the print in the trunk of the car, and heard on the radio that Martin Luther King had been shot. We went, ‘Oh, no, this is good for us.’ All of a sudden the power of the film was ratcheted up.”

Blood-spattered and gore-strewn as it was, the film’s underpinning philosophy chimed with the hippy ethos of the time. “The message is, ‘Hey, why can’t we just get along?’, ” he noted. “If they pulled together, they’d all be OK.”

George A Romero, film director, was born on February 4, 1940. He died of cancer on July 16, 2017, aged 77