For our last post of the month, we wanted to recommend some further viewing for Dawn of the Dead fans. But what to recommend? If you’re here reading this, you probably don’t need any recommendations on zombie films. So we decided instead to provide you with some films recommended by the zombie master himself, George A. Romero.

Attempting to sum up the cinematic output of one of America’s beloved filmmaking heroes is difficult, particularly in a short article as this. Particularly difficult would be to attempt to deconstruct the thematic elements of Romero’s works, film by film, and to understand what motivates the symbolism in each. Few have tried, and those works can be found for anyone looking. For my part, what I admire most about Romero is his inability or unwillingness to deconstruct his own work. In interviews, the man is exceedingly humble, and immensely downplays the cultural and psychological impact of his films.

Popular Symbolism has a huge and immensely interesting post on zombies as metaphors for human fears throughout the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st. We highly recommend reading it. (It even has footnotes!)

What kind of music would play in your suburban apocalypse?

Mention Day of the Dead to horror fans and you’re likely to be met with a dismissive, “I liked it” or “Oh yeah, that’s a good one.” The truth is, many horror fans (and particularly zombie fans) can’t say what they really feel: Day of the Dead is no Dawn of the Dead. They’re absolutely right about that.

Sometime in the early 80s, George A. Romero famously migrated from his proud filmmaking home of Pittsburgh to the Sunshine State, Florida. While there, George concocted another sweeping screenplay for what many believed would be the close to the thematic trilogy that began with Night. It’s easy to forget that two decades passed before yet another dead film, Land of the Dead, brought luminaries like Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo into the fold. Allegedly Romero was offered 7 million to produce a hard R rated version of Day, but when he pressed to release the film unrated (as Dawn had been, to great success) the budget was halved to 3.5 million.

Josh had one request when we set out to cover Dawn of the Dead this month: that we should “stay far away from The Serpent and the Rainbow stuff, talking about the ‘real’ Haitian voodoo zombies,” because it had “been done to death.” Pun not intended, as far as I know.

But White Zombie is just too classic and too awesome not to mention, so I’m breaking the rules. To my mind, the film belongs aside Dracula and Frankenstein as one of the founding pillars of the horror genre.

Zombies are undoubtedly all the rage these days — thanks, of course, to Mr. Romero — and you don’t have to wait until Halloween to find fellow horror fans willing to shuffle along, decked out in their best zombie gore.

Not many films from the pre-DVD era have their own feature-length documentary with on-set visits, interviews with actors and a deconstruction of the directors style, but Document of the Dead offers just that. The film was directed by Roy Frumkes, perhaps best known for being the screenwriter behind the seminal gross-out flick of the 80s, Street Trash. As presented in the film, Frumkes was a student during the production of Dawn of the Dead and was invited along with a small crew to document the process of making the film. Though Dawn was shot in the late 70s, Document of the Dead was not released until 1985, around the same time as Romero’s third film in the Dead trilogy, Day of the Dead.

There isn’t a lot of gore in a Kelly Link short story. Nor is there a lot of blockbuster style action. And yet, for my money, no one gets closer to capturing the unmitigated eeriness of Romero’s zombie-infected world. These stories belong to the slowly lurching black and white nightmare of Night of the Living Dead, or the bizarre and panicked newsroom and the ravished tenement building of the first act of Dawn of the Dead.

One common, immutable truth has remained present throughout the whole of recorded human history; If you are a success at something, someone will inevitably line-up to attempt to recreate your success or at the very least try to steal a bit of your thunder. So it goes that the unexpected success of Dawn of the Dead brought wave after wave of imitators hoping to cash in on the dearth of zombie films at the cinemas in the late 70s.

Growing up you hear all kinds of things about the horror films you aren’t allowed to see. Though my parents did not provide me ample access to see them, eventually I stayed up late enough at night to catch any of the various slasher sequels that were flooding the box office throughout the 80s. Needless to say, as I aged, the fright factor in these films soured like a gallon of milk. It’s hard to watch a Nightmare on Elm Street movie without giggling. At a certain age, something like that would have given me legitimate nightmares. Now it’s just ridiculous.

When I first watched Dawn of the Dead as a kid, there was one thing that stuck in my mind. One song, actually.