It's not every unfinished zombie flick that gets a black-tie screening at Cannes. But when George Romero unspooled the first 14 minutes of his about-to-be-released Land of the Dead at this year's festival, he got the full red-carpet treatment: velvet ropes, uniformed honor guard, flashing strobes. The preview shared the bill with Midnight Movies, a documentary about such early underground films as Pink Flamingos, Eraserhead, and Romero's own series-spawning Night of the Living Dead. Low-budget pics all, these movies found their cult followings in the '70s at midnight screenings in grungy theaters thick with marijuana smoke.
The Cannes screening was held at the same hour, but no one was smoking pot here. Loudspeakers played the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs" at top volume as the audience waited for Romero to arrive. Though many in the crowd were as-yet unborn when midnight movies had their first runs, the lip piercings and tattoos they wore with their tuxedos showed they got the idea. Finally, Romero appearedé at the grand staircase, an iconic figure wearing wildly oversize glasses and a limp gray ponytail, his star zombie-killersé, Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo, at his side.
Romero asserts in Midnight Movies that most horror flicks are about fear of science: If the nukes don't get us, the 50-foot-tall mutant women will. Having grown up on DC Comics, however, he thought tales should have a moral dimension. Night of the Living Dead, which he made for $6,000 after graduating from Carnegie Mellon, was his nihilistic response to the failure of '60s radicals to change the world. Trapped in a Pennsylvania farmhouse, a handful of the living find themselves besieged by ghouls with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. The story was inspired by Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, the 1954 vampire novel that later served as the basis for Charlton Heston's Omega Man. Romero turned Matheson's bloodsuckers into flesh eaters to express literally the idea of a new society - the shuffling ranks of the undead - devouring the old.
In Land of the Dead, the fourth in the series, the undead have all but taken over. Hopper plays the dictator of a walled city that's the last redoubt of the living; Leguizamo is the gung-ho aide who guns his motorbike through the lurching hordes while foraging for supplies in the zombieé-held suburbs. The undead are easily distracted by fireworks, so the supply run that opens the picture is routine - until the launcher malfunctions. Romero's zombies may not move fast (they're dead, after all), but let one tear into your flesh with its rotting teeth and you're a goner.
Humans tend to root for their own, but not Romero, who walks with a bit of a shuffle himself. "The villains in my films," he told the press, "are always the living." The zombies in Land of the Dead repreésent a reality that those living in gated comémuénities (or going to screenings at a glamorous film festival) are trying to ignore.
"My characters are concerned with their own situation. They're missing the big picture."
- Frank Rose
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Zombies at Cannes
