Films Directed By George A Romero

"How the Hell come we stick these low-life bastards in these big-ass fancy hotels anyway? Shit, man! This is better than I got!"

"We're still pretty close to Johnstown. Those rednecks are probably enjoying this whole thing."

"[Sarcastically] I would have made you all coffee and breakfast but I don't have my pots and pans."

"[On a TV set, Dr. Millard Rausch argues with a TV reporter about doomsday scenarios] It's really all over...isn't it?"

"[To Peter] I see you, chocolate man!"

"Say goodbye, creep!"

"David Emge - Stephen"

"Ken Foree - Peter"

"Scott H. Reiniger - Roger"

"Gaylen Ross - Francine"

"David Crawford - Dr. Foster"

"David Early - Mr. Berman"

"Richard France - Dr. Milliard Rausch"

"Dawn of the Dead is one of the most prophetic and disturbing films you’ll see, and I challenge you to find anyone who can find another film from that era which provides the same level of social commentary."

"A film critic at the New York Times walked out of "Dawn of the Dead" (1979) after the first 15 minutes, complaining of a pet peeve" against zombies. A film critic at the Dallas Times Herald described the film as "without any doubt the most horrific, brutal, nightmarish descent into Hell ever put on the screen." A film critic at the Village Voice thinks it's one of the most important films of the year. They all have a point. "Dawn of the Dead," which opens here Friday, is an ultimate horror film, one that takes traditional images of zombies and ghouls, makes them uncomfortably real, and treats them with a certain poignant humor."

""Dawn" is a carefully crafted work that shouldn't be confused with run-of-the-mill horror exploitation films. If we can survive the gruesome imagery and see beyond the obligatory scenes of the horror genre, Romero gives us a savagely satiric vision of America that's not easy to forget. This is both a very difficult film and a very good one."

"Some audience members at Dallas complained that the film never offers any rational explanation for the sudden plague of zombies. But of course not. No explanation would be rational, and any explanation would undercut the creepiness of the danger. What the film does do is raise sneaky questions in our minds. It's impossible, for example, to watch the zombies marching through a shopping mall, accompanied by Muzak, and not find a satiric statement on the mildly trance-like state Muzak is supposed to inspire in shoppers. It's disturbing to see images of horror juxtaposed with the gaudy artifacts of a lawn furniture display. And it's difficult to make up our minds about the endless violence inflicted on the zombies. They are shotgunned, run over, hacked to bits, decapitated by helicopter blades . . . and after a while we notice that our reaction to this mayhem is curiously complex. On the one hand, the violence isn't as disturbing as it would be against "real" human beings: Since the victims are without intelligence or personalities (and, for that matter, are already dead), their fates are less compelling. And yet, at the same time, we feel a sympathy for them: It is not their fault that they're zombies, and their activities aren't deliberately anti-social. It's just in their nature to eat human flesh."

"With 'Dawn,' I wanted the slick look, I wanted to bring out the nature of the shopping center, the retail displays, the mannequins. There are times when maybe you reflect that the mannequins are more attractive but less real - less sympathetic, even - than the zombies. Put those kinds of images side by side, and you raise all sorts of questions."

"Hill was carrying a Thompson submachine gun as we walked. A retired Air Force officer, he’s the film’s weapons coordinator, but he really likes being a zombie. “This is supposed to be a horror movie,” he said, “but it’s also an action thriller It’s a whiz-bang. We’ve fired thousands of rounds of blanks; every type of weapon available. “Now, let me tell you about being a zombie, When you go into your zomb, you’re in a fantasy. I go into the role feeling I am the living dead, I can’t focus on things, I can’t get it together. I researched it in books – the wide-open eyes, the clutching hands, the slow movements. Then I made my own zombie. I asked George and he said, ‘Be your own zombie.’ I intend to be the best zombie there ever was. I want people to come away from this movie saying, ‘Wow, he was a good zombie.’ Sharon, the nurse zombie, got into her zomb so heavily the other night, she made herself sick. We’ve got some good zombies. When we were shooting the exteriors and it was zero degrees, there was this 300-pound guy showed up every night in a bathing suit. He said, ‘I’m not cold. I love it.'”"

"“Maybe the bad guys win here,” he said, “and I like the switch – but I’m not sure the zombies are the bad guys because we can’t help being zombies. I love zombies.”"

"As I listened to the dialogue in the scene in front of Penney’s, I caught one line that began to offer an explanation. The four heroes are trying to figure out what’s going on, and one of them says, “It’s something my granddaddy, who used to practice macumba in Trinidad, told me: ‘When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.'” “George,” I asked, “where did you get that line?” He laughed: “I just made that up. Truly. On a drunken night when I was really crashing to finish the script and I thought that was kind of nice. It was from something Dario Argento [the Italian director of Suspiria, who’s doing the sound effects and score for Dawn] told me. My family is Cuban and Dario said, ‘Well you have a Caribbean background and that’s why you’re into the zombie thing; zombies originated in Haiti.’ I said, well, all right, and I just figured that’s something a voodoo priest might say. Whee! I’m just having fun, man.”"

"I stationed myself in the Pup-A-Go-Go stand and the minute Romero yelled “action” something remarkable happened: my eyes went out of focus, my hands clenched grotesquely, and I developed a lurching gait as I went after that motorcycle. I wanted that food and I almost got it. By the time the scene was shot twice – once with a mannequin that is beheaded – I was our of breath and my pulse was pounding."

"Sharon Ceccatti, the nurse zombie, came up to congratulate me as I caught my breath. “Is it always like this?” I asked. “You bet,” she said. “Most mornings I go home and I shake. I can’t sleep.”"

"“This is beginning to feel like Dachau,” a man beside me was saying later as we watched a zombie get his hand – very bloodily – cut off in a door. “This is far beyond Sam Peckinpah.” The man speaking was Gary Zellet, who supplied the weapons for the film and handled explosives and breakaway special effects. Among many other projects, he worked on both Godfather films. He is one of the few crew members not acting in the film. “I didn’t want to,” he said, “this is getting depressing. Twenty gallons of blood used, animal intestines for the zombies to eat – this morning I was eating a corned barf sandwich and somebody said, ‘Hey that’s a prop.’ We use corned beef in some of the artificial arms. Real amputees volunteered, makes it look real. I’ve rigged over 500 bullet squibs. We kill ’em every possible way, burn ’em, shoot ’em blow their heads off. It’s good there’s some comic relief now and then because this movie runs like a machine gun."

"I mentioned to him that I liked the mall better at night, that the zombies seemed to have more purpose than the shoppers. “That’s how I got the idea!” he said. “I know the people who own it and I went through the mall, empty, one time and I said, ‘Holy shit! That’s the perfect place for the fulcral episode where we can show the false security of the whole consumer America trip. That’s why this is in color – Night was black and white – because of the mall. So I wrote a little sketch about it and then put it in a drawer while I did some other things I’m really surprised no one else picked up on the idea, because now there are these shopping developments where you can live on top and work and shop down below and never have to leave the building. That’s a trip. In this film, the mall becomes the cause. The four heroes get in there to get some Civil Defense water and food and then they rack out and this consumerism, it’s too tempting for them to resist. They arm themselves heavily, they become banditos fighting for all that stuff.” Are the bikers then supposed to be an antidote for them or are they actually an exaggeration of that; racing through the mall at l00 miles an hour and scooping up color TVs? “I think they’re the ultimate of what the heroes are becoming, fighting for control of the Mothership. In fact, when they first see the raiders, the bikers coming over the hill, Peter takes off his new watch and all his other shit and that’s a flash toward realization. The raiders are consumerism at its extreme and they just storm in there and go bananas and then of course that causes the downfall. But the heroes, even though Roger is dying at that point, he still has his candies and radios and shit … and that’s why they’re so extreme in their garb during the attack scenes, all the crossed gun belts, fighting over microwave ovens, I mean…” He doubled over with laughter. Romero has a weird slant on the world, to say the least. With Night and Dawn he has filmed some of the most explicit violence imaginable and yet he can argue, convincingly, that it’s detached violence because it’s directed at things rather than people; that the zombies become merely so many insects to be swatted aside. At the same time, he’s starting to make the zombies smarter and more sympathetic because he genuinely likes them. On a set, he resembles a giant, bearded shepherd with his poor dead flock shuffling after him. Sometimes he refers to his zombies as “sharks,” which is a startling but dead-on comparison."

"Despite Romero’s avowal that he’s just making “comic books,” I reminded him, he gets very close to a message when he talks about “human sellouts” and “operatives” versus the “alternate society.”"

"“The sellouts,” he finally continued, “the scientific community is saying, ‘Let’s feed ’em. They’re wasteful. They eat only five percent of a body and then the body’s intact enough to revive and it comes back as a zombie. The government says we should feed them and control that pattern – which seems probably what those cats would do. So if someone has died in your family, cut them into meal-size bits.” He was roaring with laughter and the businessmen at breakfast around us began throwing odd looks toward our table. George wiped tears of laughter from his eyes and went on: “That’s probably the way it would go. My idea to take it further is to actually have human operatives that are trying to preserve their own kind of operative situation and in fact using the zombies initially, training them to serve their own needs. There are beginnings of that in Dawn. I show a few flashes of intelligence or at least a learning capability in the zombies. If there are human sellouts that first start teaching them to do things so that they become really operative, then it’s over. But that is also what’s happening to us, those kinds of monsters, our corporate monsters that prey on us more as we fear them less. I mean, that’s this whole false security concept of the mall, being funneled into it, the temple to consumerism, the mall. And being perfectly happy, you know, absolutely lulled by it and yet eaten by it like that.”"

"[Last Line] Take us North."

"Shawn Roberts - Mike"

"Tony Munch - Anchor"

"Max McCabe - Mouse (as Maxwell McCabe-Lokos)"

"Boyd Banks - Butcher (Zombie)"

"Jennifer Baxter - Number 9"

"Tony Nappo - Foxy"

"Joanne Boland - Pretty Boy"

"Krista Bridges - Motown"

"Pedro Miguel Arce - Pillsbury"

"Eugene Clark - Big Daddy"

"Robert Joy - Charlie"

"Asia Argento - Slack"

"Dennis Hopper - Kaufman"

"John Leguizamo - Cholo"

"Simon Baker - Riley"

"John Leguizamo: I didn't know what to expect working with George. I mean, I admired him of course; Night of the Living Dead is one of the great movies of all time; outside that it's a horror movie and it started the whole zombie genre; but it's still a great movie and I used to watch it in New York. I saw Chiller Theater, we used to have that in New York, and Creature Feature. I didn't know George was going to be, how he was going to be with real actors. I know he's got the horror thing down and he's got certain rules he has to have how a zombie's got to move slow, because they have rigor mortis; how can they move fast? He doesn't tell them how to move because he doesn't want them all to [look] like CGI armies, so he lets everybody find their inner zombie, which is pretty cool, and he's good with the acting. You know, he really let us loose, but he would also reign us in, you know, he was really watching the acting. I was really impressed with that, so I was making up s*** all over the place. Some of it stuck, some of it will be on the DVD. It will go somewhere. It's never wasted."

"[Near End] Sky flowers don't work no more."

"Put some flowers in the graveyard. How come you call them that, Riley? I don't get it. There here ain't the kind of flowers you lay on the ground, these here are sky flowers. Way up in heaven..."

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? YOU HAVE NO RIGHT!!!"

"[shoots Cholo who gets back up and continues toward Kaufman] Nah, you're dead! [sees that Cholo has turned into a zombie] Oh my god, you really are dead."

"In a world where the dead are returning to life, the word "trouble" loses much of its meaning."

"Zombies, man. They creep me out."