Romero says he never set out to make 'zombie movies'

George Romero's classic, about the dead rising with a nasty appetite, continues to inspire spin-offs, homages and rip-offs. Romero himself is back this week with "Diary of the Dead," an indictment of new media that includes plenty of the old blood-and-guts -- and eating of same -- we've come to associate with the modern zombie he introduced with his first, and still best, version.

Whether a stand-in for mindless followers or just plain scary, the zombie is essential, vital and relevant to modern horror, and it shows no signs of fading away. In such films as the "28 Days" series, a loving spoof like "Shaun of the Dead," the recent remake of "I Am Legend" or "Diary," these monsters continue to walk among us, at least in theaters.

What's funny is, the guy who started it all didn't mean to. Not the zombie part, anyway.
"We never even called them zombies" in "Night of the Living Dead," Romero says. "We called them flesh eaters, ghouls. Zombies to me was always, you get a blowfish, dry it out and blow it up somebody's nose and they get in a state of suspended animation."

Of course, what Romero calls them isn't as important as what he makes them do, which is shuffle around aimlessly -- well, they do have one aim, which is to eat people.

"There has to be some kind of threat," Romero says. "It's no fun if they're just walking around selling newspapers."

Romero often sounds like an old-time hippie when he talks, and while he resists assigning any overt political motives to his creatures, to hear him describe what he was going for when he created them certainly suggests echoes of bell-bottoms and peace signs.

"All I wanted was some revolutionary change in the world," he says. "Well, what would be the most revolutionary thing? If they stopped staying dead ...

"They were the walking dead. They're the neighbors. They have some identity. They're us. That's the point I was trying to make -- they're us."

And that's what makes them so darn scary.

"The audience can relate to zombies, in a peculiar way of thinking," says F. Miguel Valenti, the assistant director of the Arizona State University School of Theater and Film. "While most of us cannot really imagine ourselves as vampires, homicidal, mask-wearing maniacs or aliens from other worlds, we have all had days when we felt that shuffling, dragging feeling, that monotony and distrust of other humans that zombies embody.

"How often have we all said, 'I'm brain dead,' or, 'I'm dead tired?' Zombies are the Nth iteration of these feelings, and can often both scare us and make us laugh at ourselves through identification."

So who are they, exactly?

"To me, if the zombies represent anything, they're just sort of the working Joes," Romero says. "They're the people nobody listens to, and then all of a sudden they're too strong."

Note the "if." Romero clearly resists metaphors when dealing with his creatures. He leaves that to others.

"People have defined the zombies," Romero says, even if he hasn't. "In the early days, it was the silent majority. Later it's this (or that). ...The zombies are not the important ones to me. I'm always concerned more with the human characters and how they fail."

Romero also takes pains in his films not to labor over what caused the dead to wake up and wander, hungry.

"It doesn't matter what's causing it," he says. "What matters is that it's there. It's like any other disaster, and people are just failing to respond to it in any effective way. ... You ought to be able to defeat these things. But everyone always winds up being hoisted on their own petard."