Sight and Sound Magazine – Blood and Porridge

June 23, 2025June 23, 2025

Favourite southern gothic movies (Part 1)

© Paul Gregory Productions / United Artists

The smash-hit movie Sinners (2025), which I wrote about recently, has got me thinking about other films that fall into the ‘southern-gothic’ category. Southern gothic is a genre Wikipedia defines as a work “heavily influenced by Gothic elements and the American South”, commonly featuring “deeply flawed, disturbing, or eccentric characters sometimes having physical deformities or insanity; decayed or derelict settings and grotesque situations”; and ingredients like “poverty, alienation, crime, violence, forbidden sexuality, or hoodoo magic.”

So, here’s the first half-dozen entries in my list of favourite southern-gothic movies. I should say I’ve left out ones that are just as classifiable as horror movies or lean heavily into the supernatural. Otherwise, the list would be twice as long. For that reason, there’s no Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Lucio Fulchi’s The Beyond (1981), Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994) or Bill Paxton’s Frailty (2001). I’ve even omitted Sinners, the movie that inspired this list in the first place.

Similarly, I’ve left out a couple of potential southern-gothic films that more comfortably exist as fantasies, for example, Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where art Thou? (2000), Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003) and Ben Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012).

Anyway, boys and belles, let’s cut to the chase and wade into that cinematic bayou…

Swamp Water (1941)

A clean-cut, somewhat naïve young lad (Dana Andrews) goes looking for his lost dog in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp one day and discovers a dishevelled fugitive (Walter Brennan), who’s been hiding out in the wilderness since being accused of murdering a deputy. Andrews forms a partnership with Brennan. In the local town, he sells the hides of the animals Brennan hunts and traps in the swamp whilst also keeping a protective eye on the fugitive’s vulnerable daughter (Anne Baxter). Later, Andrews learns that Brennan wasn’t responsible for the deputy’s death and the real killers – whose number include Ward Bond and John Carradine – decide to go gunning for Brennan and eliminate him before the truth comes out.

© 20^th Century Fox

The first American movie made by the great French director Jean Renoir, Swamp Water doesn’t frighten the horses too much and even has a happy ending. But its setting, the murky, alligator-and-snake-ridden swamp, earns it its southern gothic spurs. Walter Brennan, whom I knew and loved in my childhood as Stumpy, John Wayne’s gnarly old deputy in Howard Hawkes’ Rio Bravo (1959), is fine; though I find the hero played by Dana Andrews – later to star in Don Siegel’s masterpiece Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – a bit of a simpleton and rather annoying. Meanwhile, parts of this film seem to have inspired the 2012 movie Mud featuring, in the Brennan role, one Matthew McConnaughey. Of whom we will hear more later…

Night of the Hunter (1955)

Based on the just-as-good 1953 novel by Davis Grubb and directed by legendary thespian Charles Laughton, Night of the Hunter, more than any other film on this list, deserves the title ‘cinematic classic’. The 2022 Greatest Films of All Time poll in Sight and Sound magazine, for instance, ranked it at number 25. Sadly, it was Laughton’s sole credit as director. Despite its massive reputation later, the critics of the day couldn’t get their heads around it and slagged it off and the film was a flop, deterring him from directing again.

Night of the Hunter focuses on phony preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), really a murderer and crook. During a sojourn in a West Virginia prison for stealing a car, Powell learns from a cellmate, who killed two men during a bank robbery and is awaiting execution, that the bank money he stole is hidden away somewhere in his household. Once he’s a free man again, Powell proceeds to his late cellmate’s town, does his preacher act, ingratiates himself into the community, and ends up marrying the dead man’s widow Willa (Shelley Winters). The key to finding the hidden loot, it transpires, is Willa’s young son John (William McClellan Chapin) and even younger daughter Pearl (Sarah Jane Bruce) – but John is instinctively distrustful of his new stepdad. After Powell kills Willa, John escapes with Pearl and they take the money with them. They find refuge in the home of a tough but kindly old woman called Rachel (Lillian Gish), and it’s Rachel who has to withstand both the charms and the wrath of Powell when he comes hunting the children.

Laughton imbues the film with a weird, off-kilter feel that’s almost fairy-tale-like at times. This is most evident in the sequence where the kids escape from Powell in a rowing boat. Powell’s ogre-ish silhouette appears above the nocturnal riverbank and comes loping down towards them. They barely manage to get the boat into the river and Powell flounders in the mud behind them, emitting a bloodcurdling bellow of rage. Then things get really phantasmagorical. Little Pearl, oblivious to the danger she’s been in, sings a lullaby while their boat drifts beneath a hauntingly starry sky and past spider’s webs and croaking toads that loom spookily in the foreground.

© Paul Gregory Productions / United Artists

As Powell, Robert Mitchum is unforgettable. He’s by turns magnetic, devious, deranged and, Terminator-style, terrifyingly unstoppable. His warped charisma is best displayed in the famous scene where he explains why the words ‘love’ and ‘hate’ are tattooed on his knuckles. (“H-A-T-E… It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low…”) Mitchum’s performance here is the standard against which all other cinematic southern-gothic villains get measured.

Incidentally, Shelley Winters didn’t have much luck as a single mom who re-marries a guy who proves to be a wrong ‘un. A few years later, she was in Stanley Kubrick’s version of Lolita (1962), playing the title character’s hapless mother who weds James Mason’s Humbert Humbert.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Robert Mulligan’s film, like the 1960 Harper Lee novel on which it’s based, is more a legal drama, a coming-of-age story and a meditation on the evils of racism than it is a work of southern gothic. But one character links it to the genre: the reclusive, rarely-seen Boo Radley who’s the subject of a thousand scary stories and rumours among the kids in the Alabama neighbourhood where To Kill a Mockingbird takes place. Watching this film in my boyhood, I was scared shitless by the scene where the kids sneak onto Boo’s premises at night and, suddenly, his shadow rears up behind one of them.

Boo seemed so impressively scary that I was almost disappointed when the twist about his real nature came at the end, though obviously that twist is important for the story’s message about looking beyond appearances and trusting in human decency. (The fact there was a 1990s indie rock band called the Boo Radleys, whose music I found lame, also lessened poor old Boo’s mystique for me.)

© Brentwood Productions / Universal Pictures

Now that I think about it, as a kid, I found the scene where the saintly but short-sighted Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) has to go out and shoot a rabid dog pretty frightening too.

Cape Fear (1962)

Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell and Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch may be the two most famous characters in southern-gothic movies. Thus, Cape Fear is the King Kong vs. Godzilla of the genre in that it pitches Mitchum (again villainous) against Peck (again heroic). This time, Mitchum plays ex-convict Max Cady, out of prison after eight years’ incarceration and possessed by hatred for Peck’s Sam Bowden, a respectable Georgia man who testified against him at his trial. Cady gets revenge by waging an escalating war of nerves against Bowden, his wife and teenaged daughter. The latter he identifies as a particular weak spot and soon he’s hinting disgustingly to Bowden about what he intends to do to her.

Mitchum’s Max Cady is a less complex villain than Harry Powell. But with his hooded eyes, bemused expression, trashy sartorial style (safari jacket, Panama hat and cigar at all times), slurred but laconic voice, slow but relentless gait and general, oily smugness – leavened with bursts of psychotic violence – he’s as memorable. Peck doesn’t have a lot to do apart from look harassed and, later, outraged as he discovers Cady has spent his prison-time studying law and knows exactly how to needle and threaten the Bowdens without crossing the line into illegality. As Bowden’s exasperated police-chief buddy (Martin Balsam) tells him, “You show me a law that prevents crime.” And when Cady’s actions do reach the point of homicidal criminality, he has the Bowdens cornered in an isolated houseboat at Cape Fear, the North Carolina headland that gives the film its title.

© Melville Productions / Universal-International

Cape Fear isn’t the work of art that Night of the Hunter was but, tensely directed by J. Lee Thompson, it’s lean, compelling and, for its time, nasty. I prefer it to the 1991 remake helmed by Martin Scorsese, which has Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte playing Cady and Bowden respectively. Scorsese’s version has many good features, including a great cast (also Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis, Joe Don Baker and, wonderfully, Mitchum, Peck and Balsam in supporting roles) and a haunting opening-credits sequence by Elaine and Saul Bass. But I find it too pumped-up – there’s predictably more bloodshed, sex, sleaze and histrionics. Its ending is particularly over the top and De Niro, simply by being De Niro, brings too much baggage to the role of Cady. For me, it’s one of Scorsese’s least interesting films.

Actually, Cape Fear was remade a second time in a 1993 episode of The Simpsons, where Sideshow Bob conducts a very Cady-esque campaign of revenge against Bart Simpson. And supposedly there’s a new TV show in the works called Cape Fear, to star Javier Bardem and Patrick Wilson. Guess who plays Max Cady and who plays Sam Bowden.

The Beguiled (1971)

I’ve seen The Beguiled, starring Clint Eastwood and directed by Eastwood’s frequent collaborator Don Siegel, described as a ‘horror western’. But it’s set during the American Civil War, not out in the wild west, and it’s more broodingly gothic than scary. It begins with Eastwood’s character, an injured Yankee soldier, arriving on the grounds of a boarding school in Louisiana. The southern belles in the school – staff and pupils are all female – decide to hand him over to the Confederates, though not before he’s recovered a bit and is less likely to die in the Confederates’ grim prison-camp.

However, sneaky Clint soon starts flirting with, wooing and manipulating the ladies around him: a middle-aged headmistress tormented by a guilty secret (Geraldine Page), her gawky, virginal second-in-command (Elizabeth Hartmann), a loyal black maid (Mae Mercer), the regulation school hussy (Jo Ann Harris) and the eccentric twelve-year-old who first discovered him (Pamelyn Ferdin). But his schemes backfire. By meddling with the repressed emotions of his rescuers / captors, he suffers unpleasant consequences. The womenfolk amputating his leg in an amateur surgical operation is just the start of it.

Wonderfully atmospheric, The Beguiled is a reminder that Eastwood deserves respect for refusing to play it safe, in his westerns at least, with his popular, macho cinematic persona. As well as the duplicitous prat he plays here, he’s played ones who are barely-reformed alcoholic murderers (1991’s The Unforgiven) or, basically, ghosts (1973’s High Plains Drifter and 1985’s Pale Rider). Meanwhile, in 2017, Sofia Coppola directed a remake of The Beguiled, with Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman, which was also atmospheric and well-acted. But I found it so similar to the Eastwood / Siegel movie I wondered what the point of it was.

© The Malpaso Company / Universal Pictures

Deliverance (1972)

Yes, I know… Duelling banjos… “Squeal like a pig…” John Boorman’s Deliverance, the story of four Atlanta businessmen (Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox) whose canoe trip down a remote north Georgian river goes horribly awry when they have a run-in with the locals, has been referenced and parodied in countless other movies and TV shows. As a result, it’s now difficult to appreciate what a punch to the solar plexus the film felt like when it first appeared. I remember seeing it on TV for the first time when I was 11 or 12 – an age when, really, I shouldn’t have been watching it – and being utterly disturbed by it.

What you expect to be a straightforward, good-guys-versus-bad-guys adventure in the wilderness is something much more complicated. The gorgeous landscapes are juxtaposed with a brooding, then claustrophobic, finally suffocating atmosphere of dread. It’s also disconcerting how Deliverance coldly disregards cinematic notions of heroism and masculinity. The ‘city boys’, exemplified by would-be macho, would-be outdoors man Lewis (Reynolds), think they can handle the natural environment here. In a conventional film of the time, they probably would handle it, eventually. But in Deliverance, they find themselves hopelessly out of their depth when confronted by the products of the environment they’re traversing, mountain men formed – or malformed – by its harshness. Meanwhile, poor old Bobby (Beatty) gets his notions of masculinity overturned, hideously, in the film’s most notorious scene.

Ironically, the modern civilization the four men represent is hellbent on destroying the place they’re vacationing in, for the river is about to be dammed – the water stored and electricity generated will no doubt be channelled to some faraway city. As Lewis says, “Do know what’s gonna be here? Right here? A lake. As far as the eyes can see. Hundreds of feet deep. Hundreds of feet deep.”

It wasn’t the ‘squeal like a pig’ scene that upset me most when I first saw Deliverance in my boyhood. Possibly I was too young then to fully understand what was going on. No, it was the bit near the end where Ed (Voigt) has a nightmare about the river, now a lake, and sees a pale, bloated hand rising out of its water. The image of that emerging hand creeped me out for weeks afterwards.

And that’s the first half of my list. More southern-gothic goodness will appear on this blog shortly.

© Elmer Enterprises / Warner Bros.

October 23, 2024October 31, 2024

Dad of the dead

From wikipedia.org / © Nicolas Genin

As Halloween approaches, here’s another entry with an appropriately creepy theme. This time it’s a piece about one of my all-time favourite filmmakers in the horror genre.

George A. Romero’s 1968 debut was Night of the Living Dead, a movie that’s been stupendously influential in at least three ways. Firstly, it was filmed during nights and weekends over a period of seven months for a paltry $114,000. The famous opening sequence took place in Pittsburgh’s out-of-town Evans City Cemetery for the simple reason that Romero figured he could film there for free, on the quiet, without getting hassled by the police. Its success became a lasting inspiration for low-budget filmmakers everywhere, showing that with enough ingenuity, determination and talent you could accomplish something out of next-to-nothing. No doubt when things were getting tough during the shoots of landmark but ultra-cheap horror films like the $300,000-budget Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or the $350,000-budget Evil Dead (1981) or the $60,000-budget Blair Witch Project (1999), their respective directors Tobe Hooper, Sam Raimi and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez consoled themselves with the thought, “If old George could do it, so can I.”

Secondly, Night of the Living Dead wrestled horror movies away from the gothic costume dramas made by the likes of Hammer Films in Britain, Mario Bava in Italy and Roger Corman in the USA, which by the mid-1960s had become their comfort zone. It dragged the genre into the present day and made it visceral, nihilistic and properly frightening. The human characters having to cope with the horrible events in Night were ordinary Joes like those sitting watching them in the cinema audience. This could happen to you, it was telling them. And as none of those human characters got through the titular night alive, you really didn’t want it to happen to you.

Thirdly, Night introduced the world to zombies as it knows them today. And today popular culture is swarming with them, not only in blockbuster Hollywood movies like World War Z (2013) but in other media like TV shows, computer games, books and comics. Whereas before Night zombies had been depicted as poor, lost souls brought back to life by cruel, capitalist zombie-masters using the power of voodoo and put to work in flour-mills and tin-mines, as in Universal’s White Zombie (1932) and Hammer’s Plague of the Zombies (1966), after Night they had a new template. They became apocalyptic. They rose from the dead in hundreds, then thousands, and then millions, and fed on living humanity in scenes employing as much blood and gore as the movie-censors would allow. If they bit you, you got infected, died and became a zombie yourself. And the only way to stop the shambling, bite-y bastards was to “shoot ’em in the head”.

What I like about zombies of the Night of the Living Dead variety is that though they are mindless creatures, the movies themselves don’t have to be mindless. Those shambling zombies can be a metaphor for all sorts of things – for proletarian workers, consumers, oppressed peoples, whatever – giving filmmakers endless opportunities for social comment. Thus, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) reflects a modern Britain where anger is an increasingly common social phenomenon and terms like ‘road rage’ and ‘air rage’ have entered the popular vocabulary; its sequel Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later (2007) is an allegory about the post-war occupation of Iraq; and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) satirises a twenty-something slacker generation who can’t tell if someone’s a zombie or just pissed, hungover or stoned. And again, Romero set the agenda with Night, which channels the fears of late-1960s America. The country’s racial tensions are symbolised by the fate of the black hero (Duane Jones), who survives the zombie onslaught only to be mistaken for one himself and shot dead by a supposed rescue-posse of trigger-happy rednecks. Meanwhile, the rednecks’ zombie-shooting / burning activities are not unlike things going on in Vietnam at the time.

© Image Ten / Laurel Group

However, Night of the Living Dead wasn’t the first George A. Romero film I saw. That honour belongs to a movie he made five years later called The Crazies, which turned up on late-night British TV in the 1970s. The Crazies has similarities to Night but isn’t a zombie movie because it features people turning into murderous lunatics rather than into murderous walking corpses. The story of the US Army trying, and failing, to contain a virus that gradually infects the population of a small rural town and drives them insane, The Crazies sees Romero giving the military a kicking.

It’s the army who’ve secretly developed the virus as a potential biological weapon; who accidentally let it escape into the town’s water supply; and who prove useless in trying to maintain order – this is a rural American community and there are a lot of guns, and before long it isn’t just the infected townspeople who are violently resisting the gas-masked, biohazard-suited soldiers. The army also bring in scientists to try to develop a vaccine but give them hopeless facilities – the local school’s science lab – and when one of them accidentally does stumble across a vaccine, more military bungling leads to his death and the smashing of the vital test tubes. At the film’s end, they even fail to do an immunity test on the hero, who by now is the only uninfected person left in the town.

The Crazies isn’t perfect. Its low budget sometimes means there’s a visible gap between what Romero aspires to and what he achieves on screen. But to my 13-year-old mind its blend of anarchy, violence, rebelliousness and, yes, humour was astonishing. I’ve never forgotten scenes like the one where a soldier bursts into a rural homestead and encounters a sweet old granny doing some knitting, who then stabs him to death with a knitting needle. A remake appeared in 2010 and, while it has some good moments, it’s ultimately unsatisfying. This is largely because it focuses on the civilian characters and hardly shows anything of the military ones. It’s the soldiers and their half-comical, half-horrifying ineptitude that makes the original so effective and enjoyable.

In 1978, Romero returned to bona-fide zombie moviemaking with Dawn of the Dead. The shopping malls spreading across the American landscape at the time inspired him to revisit Night’s zombie apocalypse and film a more expensive and expansive sequel. This has four survivors, led by black actor Ken Foree, taking refuge in an abandoned mall and fortifying it against the living dead. Romero uses the setting to poke fun at the sterility of consumerism, with the foursome’s lives rapidly growing tedious despite their unlimited access to everything in the mall’s stores. He also shows its idiocy. When more survivors show up, the two groups fight for possession of the building, though it contains enough supplies for everybody. The zombies, meanwhile, become irrelevant.

The shots of zombies shuffling mindlessly through the mall’s aisles and thoroughfares, staring with glazed eyes at the goods on display, aren’t subtle. The satire is sledgehammering. But hey, Romero’s satire works. 45 years on, whenever I find myself in a shopping mall, I soon start imagining the shoppers around me not as human beings but as lumbering cadavers. Also, in keeping with its theme of excess, Dawn piles on the bloodletting, courtesy of Romero’s regular special-effects man Tom Savini. In the opening minutes, Romero and Savini treat us to a close-up of an exploding head and the gore rarely relents after that.

Dawn has been remade too, with a Zack Snyder-directed Dawn of the Dead appearing in 2004. It’s a film I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, the first 25 minutes are terrific and I love the credits sequence, which shows a montage of clips and images of unfolding zombie carnage accompanied by Johnny Cash singing The Man Comes Around (2002). On the other hand, the film is devoid of satire. The living dead spend nearly all the film not being in the mall, so there’s no identification of shambling zombies with shambling shoppers, and you get a general impression of things being played safe. It’s a shame, as Naomi Klein’s anti-globalisation polemic No Logo (1999) had been published a few years earlier and a big gory horror movie poking fun at brainless brand-hungry consumerism and mindless corporate greed would have been just the ticket.

In 1986, Romero wrapped up his original zombie trilogy with Day of the Dead, which like The Crazies shows his utter contempt for the military – though by now his contempt for humanity generally seems intense too. Day has the world overrun with zombies and focuses on an elite band of scientists and soldiers holed up in an underground nuclear missile silo, desperately trying to find a solution for the mayhem happening above. Bitter arguments between the obsessed scientists and the brutish military eventually escalate into all-out warfare. When the zombies swarm in at the end, they seem the least mindless members of the cast.

Admittedly, Day has a couple of sympathetic humans, namely a philosophical Jamaican pilot played by Terry Alexander – Romero’s third black zombie-movie hero – and a somewhat alcohol-pickled Irish radio operator (Jarlath Conroy), both of whom realise the battle has already been lost. They just want to escape the silo, abandon the mainland and start afresh on a desert island. However, the film’s most likeable character is actually a zombie, one nicknamed Bub (Sherman Howard) who’s been captured by the scientists and domesticated… sort of. He can listen to music, pick up a phone and almost whisper a couple of words. He has vague memories of his former life, when he was a soldier, because he knows how to salute and hold a gun. He’s very fond of the scientist who looks after him (Richard Liberty) and when that scientist is murdered by the repellent Captain Rhodes (Joe Pilato), he’s genuinely upset and you feel genuinely sorry for him. And a climactic scene where Rhodes is torn apart by Bub’s zombie compadres while Bub looks on and gives him a farewell salute is one of the most satisfying moments in horror-film history.

On a more intimate scale than Dawn, with more talk and less action, Day was regarded as a disappointment by Romero enthusiasts when it was first released. However, over the years, its reputation has improved. It’s my favourite Romero movie and one of my favourite horror movies generally. Meanwhile – surprise! – a remake appeared in 2008. Unlike the other remakes I’ve mentioned, this one is absolute shite.

After Zack Snyder’s version of Dawn of the Dead made a lot of cash in 2004, Romero got the go-ahead, and considerable studio money, to make his first zombie picture in nearly 20 years. The result was 2005’s Land of the Dead which, although it received some decent reviews, was disdained by many hardcore horror-film fans who saw it as evidence that Romero had sold out or lost his touch. I think that’s unfair as, to me, Land is three-quarters of a good movie. Its opening sequence is superb, showing an abandoned (by humans) suburb whose zombie inhabitants now potter around in the way they did when they were alive. A zombie commuter lumbers out of his front door with a dusty briefcase, some zombie musicians pathetically try to play their old instruments at the local bandstand and a zombie gas-station attendant shuffles dutifully to his pumps whenever something sets off the motion-sensor bell in his hut.

I also like the movie’s set-up. Presumably taking place several years after Night, Dawn and Day, Land has Dennis Hopper as a megalomaniac who’s created a human sanctuary (bounded by a river and an electric fence) in the middle of a decaying city. There, the rich and powerful humans live in a luxury apartment block called Fiddler’s Green while the less well-off live in Dickensian squalor in the streets below. To keep his society going, Hopper regularly sends out a military force into the surrounding wasteland in a huge armoured vehicle called the Dead Reckoning, which is half-tank and half-truck, to scavenge for supplies. Trouble is, the zombies inhabiting the wasteland are developing rudimentary powers of thought and self-organisation and, miffed at getting splattered by Hopper’s military expeditions, they start to march towards his little enclave. Their leader is the afore-mentioned petrol pump attendant, played by black actor Eugene Clark. In a series where the hero has always been black, this suggests Romero has now totally sided with the zombies.

Parallels with America’s growing wealth inequalities, its oil-driven foreign adventures and rising anti-American sentiment in the Middle East during the noughties are no doubt fully intentional. I’d assumed that the Dennis Hopper character in Land represented George Bush Jr. However, as the critic Kim Newman pointed out in an obituary for Romero in Sight and Sound magazine, the character is actually a property developer. So maybe Romero had a premonition of who’d be sitting in the Oval Office at the start of 2017 (and quite likely again at the start of 2025).

Land’s main problem is that it’s anti-climactic. The end scenes where the zombies penetrate the human enclave and then Fiddler’s Green are suitably gory and carnage-ridden. But you’re waiting for the military force in the Dead Reckoning, led by Simon Baker and Asia Argento, to ride to the rescue and start kicking serious zombie ass. When Baker, Argento and the gang finally arrive, though, all they do is blow up the electric fence to allow a few survivors to escape. And that’s it.

Still, Land is way better than the two zombie pictures Romero made subsequently. 2007’s Diary of the Dead has an interesting premise. It’s a found-footage movie about a group of young filmmakers who’re working far from home when a zombie apocalypse breaks out; and they decide to record their adventures on film, documentary-style, as they journey across an increasingly chaotic landscape. What’s particularly interesting is how they intercut their own story with clips that people around the world are simultaneously uploading to the Internet. This being Romero, those clips often show human beings taking advantage of the mayhem to act appallingly. However, after a gripping opening section, the middle of the film becomes predictable; and its final stretch is talky and ponderous to an extreme.

Survival of the Dead followed in 2009. Set on an island off America’s northwest coast where a feud between two families escalates while society breaks down around them, it resembles an especially scrappy episode of The Walking Dead TV show (2010-22) and is a sad final instalment in Romero’s zombie sextet.

In between zombies, Romero made other types of movies and a couple are very good indeed. That said, I’m not a fan of his two collaborations with Stephen King, Creepshow (1982), an anthology film scripted by King in the style of the old EC horror comics, and The Dark Half (1993), an adaptation of one of King’s novels. Creepshow has its admirers and features an excellent cast – Adrienne Barbeau, Ted Danson, Ed Harris, Hal Holbrook, E.G. Marshall, Leslie Nielson and Fritz Weaver – but I find it unnecessarily hokey and slightly unworthy of Romero’s talents.

But Martin (1978) is excellent. It’s about a modern-day American teenager (John Amplas) who, clearly mentally disturbed, believes himself to be an 84-year-old vampire. He ends up living in the Pittsburgh suburbs with his great-uncle, an elderly Lithuanian immigrant. Steeped in the lore and superstitions of his old country, the great-uncle is only too happy to take him at his word. A disorientating mixture of blood-spilling, dreaminess, humour and melancholia, Martin is worth seeing as a tonic to those wimpy Twilight books (2005-20) and movies (2008-12) that have defined teenaged vampires in the 21^st century.

Also praiseworthy is Romero’s 1981 non-horror movie Knightriders, which has a young Ed Harris in charge of a travelling medieval-style fair where the central attraction is the re-enactment of knightly jousting tournaments. The gimmick is that there isn’t a horse in sight. The knights doing the jousting are bikers riding (and regularly falling off) motorcycles. Furthermore, Harris, who sees his fair not as a business but a community, tries to live according to a knightly code of virtue and honour. This does him few favours as the fair suffers money problems and attracts unwelcome attention from bloodsucking promoters and talent scouts, sensationalist journalists, crooked cops, rival motorcycle gangs and redneck crowds who just want to see motorbikes getting smashed. Knightriders is overlong and meandering, has about 15 characters too many and is sometimes sentimental, melodramatic and hippy-dippy. But it’s also endearingly high-minded and decent-hearted. It again shows Romero’s disdain for materialism and mindless conformism, though this time in human rather than metaphorical terms.

And Harris’s struggles in Knightriders reflect Romero’s uncomfortable relationship with the wider moviemaking industry, an industry that was all-too-happy to ignore him, exploit him, mess him around and rip him off. It was still doing this to him near the end of his life. Indeed, during the years before his death in 2017, Romero’s work that saw the light of day was in computer games and comic books. None of his film projects came to fruition after 2009.

In closing, I’ll say this to the spirit of George A. Romero. Sir, you were responsible for half-a-dozen movies – the original Dead trilogy, The Crazies, Martin and Knightriders – that are special ones for me. I salute you.