{"id":22598,"date":"2020-10-28T20:10:57","date_gmt":"2020-10-28T20:10:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=22598"},"modified":"2020-11-02T11:17:02","modified_gmt":"2020-11-02T11:17:02","slug":"3-things-i-learned-from-teaching-students-about-horror-pioneer-george-romeros-movies-during-these-scary-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/3-things-i-learned-from-teaching-students-about-horror-pioneer-george-romeros-movies-during-these-scary-times\/","title":{"rendered":"3 things I learned from teaching students about horror pioneer George Romero&#8217;s movies during these scary times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/profiles\/carl-kurlander-998977\">Carl Kurlander<\/a>, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/institutions\/university-of-pittsburgh-854\">University of Pittsburgh<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m no fan of horror movies. At least I wasn\u2019t until I moved <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=NfbLcIhvRsc\">from Hollywood<\/a> back to my hometown of Pittsburgh, where I met the legendary independent filmmaker <a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/how-george-a-romero-made-humans-of-violent-brain-devouring-zombies-81107\">George Romero<\/a>, best known as the inventor of the modern-day zombie and movies like \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0063350\/\">Night of the Living Dead<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I had avoided seeing George\u2019s movies for two reasons. First, they\u2019re scary. Second, when I was a teen, my mother had a role in a Romero film initially titled \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=n5l3tfxT_GA\">Hungry Wives<\/a>.\u201d After seeing some raw footage in which I saw a woman in the movie disrobe, I feared that my mother was naked in it. (Spoiler alert: She wasn\u2019t.)<\/p>\n<figure class=\"align-right zoomable\"><a href=\"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/365934\/original\/file-20201027-19-9cjuz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip\"><img src=\"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/365934\/original\/file-20201027-19-9cjuz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=237&amp;fit=clip\" sizes=\"(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px\" srcset=\"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/365934\/original\/file-20201027-19-9cjuz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=675&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 600w, https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/365934\/original\/file-20201027-19-9cjuz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=675&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1200w, https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/365934\/original\/file-20201027-19-9cjuz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=600&amp;h=675&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 1800w, https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/365934\/original\/file-20201027-19-9cjuz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=849&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=1 754w, https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/365934\/original\/file-20201027-19-9cjuz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=30&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=849&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=2 1508w, https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/365934\/original\/file-20201027-19-9cjuz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=15&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;h=849&amp;fit=crop&amp;dpr=3 2262w\" alt=\"Two men pose for a photo\" \/><\/a><figcaption><span class=\"caption\">Carl Kurlander (left) and George Romero in 2017.<\/span><br \/>\n<span class=\"attribution\"><span class=\"source\">Steeltown Entertainment Project<\/span>, <a class=\"license\" href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-SA<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>This past year, I gained a deeper appreciation of his work while teaching \u201cMaking the Documentary: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/01\/23\/travel\/pittsburgh-horror-filmmaker-george-romero.html\">George Romero and Pittsburgh<\/a>,\u201d a course in which my students had access to the newly acquired <a href=\"https:\/\/romero.library.pitt.edu\/\">Romero Archives<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Some students were big fans of the great filmmaker, who shot 14 movies in Pittsburgh. Others had no idea who he was. Together, we learned three important lessons about survival and the human condition. I believe they are especially important today because of the coronavirus pandemic and the damage it\u2019s unleashing.<\/p>\n<figure><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/OZnJtny6C6w?wmode=transparent&amp;start=0\" width=\"440\" height=\"260\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><figcaption><span class=\"caption\">An interview with filmmaker George Romero.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h2>1. He was a visionary<\/h2>\n<p>Romero, who <a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/george-romeros-zombies-will-make-americans-reflect-on-racial-violence-long-after-his-death-81583\">died in 2017<\/a>, didn\u2019t make just popular zombie flicks. His other films, which garnered less acclaim and profits, transcend horror movies.<\/p>\n<p>Many of today\u2019s filmmakers producing socially conscious hit thrillers, like \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/heat-vision\/get-flips-night-living-dead-head-1084105\">Get Out<\/a>\u201d creator <a href=\"https:\/\/www.slashfilm.com\/jordan-peele-interview-us\/\">Jordan Peele<\/a> and \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.kcrw.com\/culture\/shows\/the-treatment\/guillermo-del-toro-the-shape-of-water\">Shape of Water<\/a>\u201d creator <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/movies\/movie-news\/guillermo-del-toro-george-romero-created-an-entire-subgenre-in-cinema-199364\/\">Guillermo Del Toro<\/a>, credit Romero for pioneering this genre.<\/p>\n<p>Take \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.shudder.com\/blog\/season-of-the-witch-and-the-dissatisfied-woman\">Season of the Witch<\/a>,\u201d the official name of that Romero movie my mother was in \u2013 fully clothed. It features a suburban housewife who dabbles in witchcraft to explore her feminist powers \u2013 and uses it to dispose of her abusive husband.<\/p>\n<p>Another good example is \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0077914\/\">Martin<\/a>,\u201d Romero\u2019s favorite. Romero shot it in a once-thriving steel town outside Pittsburgh. The titular main character, a young man who may or may not be a vampire, represents the threat of generational change to a community literally having the life sucked out of it.<\/p>\n<p>Particularly prescient is \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.7312\/will17354-007\">The Crazies<\/a>,\u201d which tells the story of a mysterious virus that infects the citizens of Evans City, Pennsylvania, driving some of them mad. The government calls in the military and quarantines the town. It\u2019s soon hard to tell who is crazy because of the virus and who went insane because of the circumstances.<\/p>\n<p>The government ends up losing the vaccine that could save everyone. Let\u2019s hope this isn\u2019t a case of art predicting real life.<\/p>\n<figure><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ZyHyp7hmmsA?wmode=transparent&amp;start=0\" width=\"440\" height=\"260\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><figcaption><span class=\"caption\">Trailer from \u2018The Crazies,\u2019 George Romero\u2019s 1973 film about \u2018madness unleashed by human error.\u2019<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h2>2. He established a powerful metaphor for the human condition<\/h2>\n<p>What makes Romero\u2019s vision unique is that his worst monsters aren\u2019t aliens or creatures menacing humanity. Instead, those <a href=\"https:\/\/risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk\/portal\/en\/researchoutput\/normality-is-threatened-by-the-monster-robin-wood-romero-and-zombies(541fbac2-588d-4d78-b296-a184cfa71d00).html\">monsters are us<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/10.1525\/rep.2010.110.1.105?seq=1\">Night of the Living Dead<\/a>,\u201d strangers gather in a farmhouse. The fighting among the humans themselves leads to their demise as much as the attack of the undead in what is widely considered the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scmp.com\/culture\/film-tv\/article\/2166113\/first-zombie-movie-10-classic-horror-films-celebrate-night-living\">first modern zombie flick<\/a>. Interestingly, Romero never used the term \u201czombie\u201d in the script. He called the creatures \u201cghouls.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When Romero shot \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/muse.jhu.edu\/book\/62828\">Dawn of the Dead<\/a>,\u201d as a hippie at heart he decided to use a local <a href=\"https:\/\/maps.roadtrippers.com\/us\/monroeville-pa\/points-of-interest\/dawn-of-the-dead-mall\">shopping mall as a set<\/a>. It also served as a prop to make a statement about the mindless consumer culture that all Americans seemed trapped in \u2013 even in the afterlife.<\/p>\n<p>For \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0088993\/\">Day of the Dead<\/a>,\u201d Romero converted an abandoned underground mine shaft in Wampum, a small Pennsylvania town about 40 miles from Pittsburgh, into a bunker. There, the last <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/10.5749\/j.ctt1pwt6zr\">survivors of a zombie apocalypse<\/a> hunker down while the military and government officials fight with scientists trying to better understand the undead. Meanwhile, a zombie that scientists are trying to \u201ctrain\u201d seems more humane than the folks on whom the fate of our species rests.<\/p>\n<figure><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/4BKJHtobSvE?wmode=transparent&amp;start=0\" width=\"440\" height=\"260\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><figcaption><span class=\"caption\">The \u2018Day of the Dead\u2019 trailer.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h2>3. He was a truly independent and maverick filmmaker<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/livingdead.fandom.com\/wiki\/George_A._Romero\">Romero and nine of his friends<\/a> each initially pitched in US$600 in seed money to make \u201cNight of the Living Dead.\u201d The film later grossed more than <a href=\"https:\/\/m.the-numbers.com\/movie\/Night-of-the-Living-Dead-(1968)\">$30 million<\/a>, on what according to many reports was a total budget <a href=\"https:\/\/livingdead.fandom.com\/wiki\/Night_of_the_Living_Dead\">of only $114,000<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But neither Romero nor his investors would pocket much of that bounty because of a dispute with the distributor. The movie became upon its release one of only a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mentalfloss.com\/article\/92931\/11-classic-films-public-domain\">handful of films without copyrights<\/a>, because of a last-minute title change. (The original title was \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/indiefilmhustle.com\/night-of-the-living-dead-copyright\/\">Night of the Living Flesh Eaters<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p>Romero could have leveraged the unexpected fame that came without a fortune into a ticket to Hollywood. Instead, he stayed in Pittsburgh, working with low budgets and small crews and retaining creative control over his projects.<\/p>\n<p>My students were inspired by tales of Romero\u2019s ingenuity. For example, because Romero decided that zombies must walk slowly, he faced a problem with how the first zombie would catch up to one of the film\u2019s protagonists in the first scene of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=1BU9anY26fI\">Night of the Living Dead<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When it turned out the car the production had borrowed had been in an accident, instead of having it fixed, Romero used the dent as an excuse to have the car hit the tree. The staged accident make it easy for the zombie to nearly catch \u2013 and terrify \u2013 her.<\/p>\n<figure><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/wHmWOSj0U4g?wmode=transparent&amp;start=0\" width=\"440\" height=\"260\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><figcaption><span class=\"caption\">A tribute to \u2018Night of the Living Dead\u2019 25 years after its original release.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h2>An inspirational legacy<\/h2>\n<p>After the pandemic turned my students\u2019 lives into something out of a Romero movie, they found inspiration in how the horror pioneer made the most from what was around him. They kept interviewing subjects over Zoom and developed their own remote way of sharing footage and editing to complete their film.<\/p>\n<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/us\/newsletters\/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&amp;utm_medium=inline-link&amp;utm_campaign=newsletter-text&amp;utm_content=deepknowledge\">Sign up for The Conversation\u2019s newsletter<\/a>.]<\/p>\n<p>Many of them now aspire to make films independently as Romero did and see where their imaginations take them without decamping to Hollywood. While steering clear of COVID-19, they are figuring out how to survive just as the heroes of his movies did.<!-- Below is The Conversation's page counter tag. Please DO NOT REMOVE. --><img loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;\" src=\"https:\/\/counter.theconversation.com\/content\/148614\/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic\" alt=\"The Conversation\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" \/><!-- End of code. If you don't see any code above, please get new code from the Advanced tab after you click the republish button. The page counter does not collect any personal data. More info: https:\/\/theconversation.com\/republishing-guidelines --><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/profiles\/carl-kurlander-998977\">Carl Kurlander<\/a>, Senior Lecturer, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/institutions\/university-of-pittsburgh-854\">University of Pittsburgh<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>This article is republished from <a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\">The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/3-things-i-learned-from-teaching-students-about-horror-pioneer-george-romeros-movies-during-these-scary-times-148614\">original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Carl Kurlander, University of Pittsburgh I\u2019m no fan of horror movies. At least I wasn\u2019t until I moved from Hollywood back to my hometown of Pittsburgh, where I met the legendary independent filmmaker George Romero, best known as the inventor of the modern-day zombie and movies like \u201cNight of the Living Dead.\u201d I had avoided [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":22599,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[8125,1499,8875,8874,7664,2856],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22598"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22598"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22645,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22598\/revisions\/22645"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}