Original subtitles

Anytime any of us are working on anything,

I think it's very difficult to predict what the outcome of that work product

will be.

Sometimes a project gets lucky. In the case of Night of the Living Dead, I

the project and we got very lucky.

They're coming to get you, Barbara.

Usually Night of the Living Dead is talked of in...

regards to its relation to previous zombie movies, but it doesn't actually

the word zombie.

I mean, one of the problems with pre -Night of the Living Dead zombie films

what to do with zombies.

And so you get movies like White Zombie or I Walked with a Zombie or Plague of

the Zombies, which are all about the evil people who exploit zombies rather

zombies themselves, who are walking furniture.

Now when people say zombies, it means something different.

I didn't see one of the most famous zombie films. I walked with a zombie

relatively recently.

That, I'm afraid, I'm sorry to say, doesn't stand up awfully well today

because the lead zombie is little more than a catatonic woman, completely

harmless. She doesn't eat anyone.

Romero changed the rules and Night of the Living Dead was a

very, very important film. There's no doubt about it. I think it makes as much

sense to relate Night of the Living Dead to...

Invisible Invaders or The Last Man on Earth, which is an Italian film based on

an American novel, I Am Legend, as it does to relate it to White Zombie or

of the Zombies or even Plague of the Zombies.

Those are kind of a different thing.

The notion of the zombie apocalypse, the flesh -eating ghouls, the idea of an

infection, all of those come from other stories. They're sort of from vampire

stories. That's what Richard Matheson in I Am Legend does with it.

And if you look at most zombie apocalypse movies, zombies are like the

They could be an earthquake or a hurricane or a volcano.

for all the difference that would make to the plot.

And that distinguishes them from most monsters who have some kind of human,

moral, relatable dimension. Maybe it's what makes zombies the nightmare

for our time.

Okay, an admittedly hokey premise.

Recently dead people coming back to life.

However...

If such a phenomenon could happen, how would it play out and affect the lives

of the people around them? And that we tried to depict as we thought people

might react.

And that strategy and that storytelling, certainly in the case of Night of the

Living Dead, did pay off.

Romero's Night of the Living Dead was a superlative horror film and I

can still remember distinctly seeing it in a cinema in London's

Piccadilly in 1970.

I remember that it seemed so real that just for a

moment when I came out of the cinema I expected to see zombies walking down

Piccadilly. And then, of course, I clicked back into reality, and I felt

that was the mark of a truly great horror film.

Johnny, you're still afraid.

Stop it now, I mean it.

It was our first attempt at a narrative feature film, and we wanted that to be

portrayed in a way that was as realistic as possible.

Night of the living dead. The dead who live on living

flesh.

Associated theaters were the first theaters that played Night of the Living

Dead. And George Stern, who was one of two cousins who operated Associated

Theaters, the night after it opened in their theaters,

called and he said, you boys are going to make a million dollars with this

picture because we have never seen a first night turnout for

what actually was a drive -in movie, a neighborhood theater movie.

And in his experience, he knew right from the very beginning that there was

something special about this film, so much so.

that he picked up the phone and he called his exhibition counterparts in

Philadelphia and Cleveland and Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and other

and said to his exhibition compatriots, you have to book

this picture, we are doing, our opening night business was phenomenal, and

ultimately that connection from the,

a man who was responsible for the Pittsburgh exhibition, spread through

movie business like wildfire. So it did pretty much right from the jump.

Get launched into something more than just, oh, it's just another drive -in

movie.

It was everything that we got was from hero worship to...

People thought that we were satanically inspired and that we had made a

movie of absolutely no social redeeming value and that we had no place

as movie artists, as film artists.

And everything in between.

I personally did not pay

as much attention to other films that came in the close footprint

of Night of the Living Dead.

But I did know that Night of the Living Dead, although we certainly could not

have planned for or predicted it to be so groundbreaking, it was.

Night of the Living Dead essentially creates its own

Zombie movies started to hit home, and in between Night of the Living Dead and

before we got to, like, Romero's opus of Dawn of the Dead, you had the Spanish

-produced movie, Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, there was the Amanda

'Othorio's Blind Dead.

I think there's four or five of those. A beautiful young girl is trapped by the

evil forces.

No one is safe from their curse.

They touch base with what Romero did. They use bits and pieces of the other

film. And because they're in different contexts and because some of them are

made by sort of interesting filmmakers, they have stuff going on in them.

Imagine, if you will, that something has gone terribly wrong.

Shoot it, man. Now, accept the fact that there's no escaping the horrible

consequences.

George Romero brings back the dead.

Night of the living dead has ended.

Dawn of the dead is here.

Night of the living dead, I saw when I think about it.

When I saw Zombie, I saw it with Dario Argento, who was editing it,

because Dario...

When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.

My favorite version of...

So between the American version, the one shot by Romero, and the Italian one,

there's a big difference.

because the girl who is pregnant in the film of Romero is seen every nine months

of pregnancy, while here you see the two who get married, the mention of

pregnancy, then we are already at the end, that is, the middle part, which is

the part, let's say,

of stabilization, that is, they live in the supermarket, armored and the zombies

are out, so for a period of time apparently nothing happens, the living

to live within the consumerism, as soon as they manage to consume, the dead are

out and want to enter to be able to consume.

Then at some point the balance breaks and the dead eventually enter.

But while Romero's film has a very high sociological value,

And then it was more of a mass

horror, I don't know how to say it, of a sensation.

Worldwide then the Italians did their usual thing of slipping in into the

and doing their own sort of imitations And you know and it brings us around to

thought she's gonna be flesh eaters or zombie as it's known in the u .s

Zombie 2 was a rip -off, as the Americans call it, on

Zombie, George Romero's film, directed by Dario.

The film by

Fucci came out before Romero's, and above all it was written a year and a

before.

The film Zombie 2 was born in 1978,

more or less in the summer, in June or July, because a producer, who is

now dead, Gianfranco Cuglian, asked me

made me read an Italian comic, Tex Wheeler, where there was an adventure of

in the Valley of Death where he met a kind of living dead.

Then he asked me if it was possible to make a film, a commission between horror

and western.

So I said no, this was not possible, but that it would have been possible to

make a commission between adventure

and horror.

The film is shot with the original title which is The Island of Living Deaths.

In June, when the film is finished,

they have news that Dario Argento is shooting Zombie with Romero.

Then, Ugo Tucci makes a joke, changes the title to

exploit the notoriety of Dario and the film of Romero.

because they didn't accept the idea that others would follow a film of theirs

and they sued the Rome Tribunal asking for the change of the

title because they said that Zombie was ours and they couldn't follow our film.

But the Tribunal rejected their request saying that Zombie wasn't a title

invented by them but a common word.

In Italy, Dawn of the Dead was released as Zombie, and Fulci's came out as

Zombie Due.

But if you get past the title, there's really no comparison, because Fulci's in

the Caribbean dealing with voodoo, and Romero's Dawn of the Dead is the

continuation of Night of the Living Dead. I mean, what the hell's going on

Have you ever heard of voodoo?

Voodoo?

Doctor, you gotta be joking.

That's kid stuff.

I mean, voodoo is just plain superstitious bullshit.

So that

stirs back

in something from...

So you can't say it's a sequel.

It's not a sequel.

Casme is a prequel. It's what happens before the events narrated in Romero's

Zombie.

because Fulci decides to set his story in the land of voodoo and black magic,

the Caribbean.

My film, which was an adventure, was shot like a yellow.

And so I wrote this story set in the Caribbean, where I actually did a little

bit on the island of Dr. Moreau and other things, because there was actually

doctor who was more or less crazy, who did experiments and so on, and therefore

has Caribbean legends.

I think the main similarity between the two films

is the big siege.

ending.

And that's kind of a common thing in zombie movies.

I mean, you have to find somewhere to kind of hole up. You have to figure out

strategy. And the best strategy seems to be find somewhere you can defend, block

yourself in.

Although it is kind of the worst strategy because as soon as you do that,

just keep coming and they know you're in there. They know there's food in there

and they just kind of mill around aimlessly and they're never going to go

What both films are suggesting is that, you know, there is no stopping the

zombie apocalypse.

There is no way to end it. Both films are saying we can't stop this, we can't

fight it. That it is the true apocalypse. There is no happy ending to

these stories.

which is very much linked to the end of Romero and precisely the end, that is,

the zombies on the bridge of Brooklyn.

Because at that moment you see a mass of zombies walking towards a city that at

that moment represented the maximum of consumerism, of these things here, and

therefore obviously reattaches itself to the theme of Romero.

George Romero's Dawn of the Dead was a kind of an allegory about, you know,

the shopping generation and I think the Italians kind of dropped all those

metaphors and went back to more like classic ghost stories and it was all

the mood and the atmosphere and the pacing and the music and it was very

more almost like a gothic horror, sort of the classic horror with, you know,

smoke and fog and much more stylized, I suppose.

What was lost in perhaps more sophisticated narrative.

It's found stylistically.

He's very deliberate in where he places the camera, very deliberate on what you

see. The long lingering shots of somebody getting their eye poked out.

know, he loves watching the eyes getting poked out. Those are very, you know, he

really pays attention.

It's very much about his style. I mean, that lingering shot of the boat coming

into New York Harbor is amazing. I mean, in New York is often used in horror

films. But actually people really forget that New York is on the open ocean.

The harbor is there, but this is the first time that it took an Italian to

in and say, no, New York, you are connected to the ocean where some evil

come up a long way. And he takes his time with that thought.

He understands the space that these people are inhabiting much better than

Romero does.

But then Romero's got the advantage of a really strong story.

Stay where you are, mister.

Put your hands on the deck there. I told you not to move.

Romero's is more of a solid story piece with effects pieces, whereas Fulci's

movie is, after you get to the island, sort of halfway through, it's the

abattoirness of the effects and it's...

you know, the crunchiness of those special effects.

The look of the zombies is interesting in the different types of films.

I mean, the Romero ones, they have this kind of just generic blue or green

paint, and then the closer ones, they've got the more elaborate stuff.

And in Zombie Flash, they look like they've been buried for a long time.

look rotten and rotting.

Their fingers are all sunken and bony, and there's just bits missing off them.

I think that's because in the first two Romero, it's just kind of started.

So they haven't had time to decompose as much.

They do a bit more of that in Day of the Dead. They've kind of been rotting for

a while. But in the Fulci ones, you get the feeling they've been just hanging

around for hundreds of years, most of them. Even the recent ones, it's so hot

and humid and disgusting.

They're falling to bits already and crusty and horrible.

Even if they don't bite you, you don't want them touching you. They're just

horrible. They're really nasty.

They do become much of a muchness in terms of their presence.

The zombies in Romero's films, you're kind of warm to them. I mean, I really

felt for the zombies. And whereas the zombies in the Italian films, they were

kind of just...

They were more like monsters in a classical way. I didn't really warm to

couldn't really see the original person, the original human being before the

zombie. Zombie Flesh Eaters is, I suppose, not without interest. I'll go

far as to say that it's obviously a very stylish film, and you can tell that

from the opening scene, which has been much commented on. I saw it when it was

first released in the cinema.

on a double bill with the toolbox murders and both films were butchered by

british board of film censors which annoyed me intensely i remember that the

audience loved zombie flesh eaters and every time there was an attack by the

zombies they screamed with delight but of course every attack had been ripped

shreds by the censors

You know what? It was better in widescreen, in the cut version, than it

VHS, panned and scanned, and with all the effects in it. Because it's a film

that sort of depends on its look.

I don't think those Italian zombie movies, the horror boom

pictures of the early 80s, were particularly well served by video as a

because they were widescreen.

Oddly enough...

George Romero wasn't shooting in widescreen. So Dawn of the Dead really

VHS. And you can see why that really took off through the roof during the

rental era.

Because it had a smaller frame and the look was slightly grottier. And

so it didn't really matter that the image was slightly degraded. But I think

those Italian films lost out a lot.

And it was only really when...

They started coming out, actually probably on Laserdisc first, that people

realised how good they looked.

We were in the midst of the so -called video nasty scare, and the director of

public prosecutions had decided that Zombie Flesh Eaters, along with many

films, was obscene, and what developed was an underground movement of

aficionados who would pass...

illegal videotapes from one to the other. It was a very exciting thing to

course, because you could, in theory, be prosecuted if you were found with these

obscene materials on you.

And that was when I first saw the uncut zombie flesh eaters complete

with the scene probably it's most famous for, where...

The woman has her eyeball skewered on a wood splinter. That had been cut

completely from the original British release, so that was astonishing.

We'd seen a lot of films around that time where they do the build -up and

they cut away and then they show the aftermath.

So we were kind of used to that cinematic language where you cut away

the after -effects.

So we were not expecting them to show the entire thing.

So it kind of took us by surprise that we weren't thinking, oh, my God,

Rubberhead. So as soon as it appeared, half the people in the audience looked

away. The rest of us were watching, going, wow, cool effect.

I think there's a moment where it goes from being one of the most upsetting

things you're ever going to see in a cinema to, oh, that's Rubber.

the sensor cut actually snips out the rubber effect so you get enough you get

the idea you get the upsetting bit but by removing the fakey punch line it's

actually a much more yeah um seriously disturbing moment for me i mean i

prefer the uncut version to that over the cut version purely because

I must admit, I'm a bit of a sucker for gore. For me, that was like, wow, how

did they do that? And it's one of those things that I've got to put my hand up

and I think I must have watched it a hundred times, frame by frame, just to

how that special effect was done.

Practical special effects, you cannot beat it. And the Italians, hats off to

them. They were the best at it.

I remember the discussions between him and the director of the autograph,

because to be able to have a fire,

to have the change of fire on the screen that entered, they needed

a particular lens, because they had to pass, I don't remember now, maybe it's

stupid, from a certain type to a 9, and so we needed a transducer, I remember

this thing, the user said, you have to use a transducer because otherwise I

don't have it on fire.

So he was a great technician.

I designed the scene,

I described it in detail, but he did it perfectly.

I'm almost sure that I'm not sure that any other director would have done it as

well as him.

I think only Lucio could have done it that way.

I think he made a film, among other things, with one of his best, in my

because it is distressing, claustrophobic.

all the part set on the island, where the action really takes place.

It's a kind of terrible western horror, where the

deaths come back live, there are some beautiful special effects by Giannetto

Rossi, there are some actors...

Another standout piece in Zombie Fleshy has got to be the scene where Aretha

Gray is diving.

Producers of Piranha 3D think they have cornered the market in underwater

topless ballet, but Zombie Fleshy just got their way before this with a very

long, slightly unnecessary, gratuitous, nearly naked woman swimming around for

no apparent reason. And then all of a sudden a bull shark comes in as well.

It's such a clever scene because...

you think the shark is going to get her and that's kind of presented as the

threat and there's lots of ominous shots of the shark and you think that's going

to be the thing that gets her and then it's a kind of a classic bait and switch

the zombie appears and now there's a zombie and a shark

who is a Mexican specialized in shark scenes.

And I bought 30 minutes of sharks and I don't know what to do.

So see if you can invent something so that I can use these

20 minutes.

The thing can only work if we turn it around, that is, the white shark, the

fearsome white shark, goes to bite and instead it is bitten.

It's a very clever writing trick where you have two threats, but then one of

threats is used to combat the other threat. So it's a very nice kind of neat

around it.

That's got to be one of the best things I've ever seen in a zombie film. A

zombie is wrestling a shark, which is amazing. It took Romero how many films

get his zombies underwater?

He didn't do it to Land of the Dead.

And here, already, you've got a zombie wrestling a shark. It's a brilliant

device, just showing how outrageous it can be. And this is not too far off the

time of Jaws as well.

are on people's minds so you know the italians are really looking at

that's happening an american film is saying how can we pull out something for

it's so crazy and so stupid it doesn't really make much sense you know but i

love the idea that there's millions of zombies under the sea attacking sharks

you know

It's done very well and I think it's one of the highlights of the film.

Zombie 2 went very well, just like Zombie 1,

but the Italian production noticed that a film with zombies was sold quite well

abroad.

It was easy to make money, and it was also easy to make money, because you

had to take ten pieces, cover them with blood and go.

So there were a series of productions, but much smaller, that in Italy

practically had no success, no follow -up, because they were mainly aimed at

sales abroad, films made with very little money.

because the zombie trick allows you to shoot with little expense.

After that, given the success of that scene, then Lucio

got involved, because it's a bit like the zombie thing.

It was like saying...

Let's repeat the things that happened.

Since the audience wants zombies, since the audience wants the eye, let's give

it to them.

And so there was some repetitiveness, which is what, in my opinion, destroyed

our cinema.

really the floodgates opened and as the whole slew you know uh with fucci with

the beyond and city live and dead at the house by the cemetery

You can see the progression between

Zombie flesh eaters, then City of the Living Dead, then The Beyond, then House

by the Cemetery.

You can see they become more abstract, more peculiar, more pretentious and

arty in a way that I sort of respond to.

Maybe less coherent as narrative and maybe less effective as exploitation.

I actually believe Fulci had a bit of fun with his zombie quartet because

the pure zombie movie of zombie flesh eaters, in City of the Living Dead you

teleporting zombies blink and they're not there, open your eyes and if you

them, that's it, they'll bite your neck off. There's a whole lot of stuff in

City of the Living Dead that is sort of random, isn't there?

Even the way the characters are regarded as utterly disposable.

Then if you go to The Beyond, which is a masterpiece in its own right, if

you actually look at the history of that movie, it was never going to be a

zombie movie.

It was because the German backers wanted zombies, and zombies were so popular

that Fulci was almost forced to write the scenes at the end of the movie in

hospital where you've got Warbeck and Catriona running around to please the

German audience.

If that film wasn't actually co -produced in Germany, what would that

been? A haunted house picture, maybe?

The UK marketing on House by the Cemetery, can anyone escape the

zombies? Well, we all know there's only one zombie in House by the Cemetery.

and he's kind of not your typical zombie because why would he stay in the cellar

because if it was me i'd be coming up the stairs breaking into the house and

eating the whole household not waiting for them to come down the stairs and

me

key two important figures even if different from each other like the

frankenstein or the doctor frankenstein and freud obviously joining them

together because he hated us psychoanalysis and therefore I had to do

unnecessary slander, which he also did other times in his thrillers in his

precisely at the psychoanalysis however freudstein is actually a living dead but

at the same time it is a creature now supernatural because who is

He has a voice almost like a child, but he has a repellent body composed

of pieces, practically a kind of human mosaic with pieces of corpses that he

obviously rips off to his own victims.

It's not a zombie movie, in the purest sense of the word, because in that

Fulci had already made

Fear in the State of Wind Deaths and The Beyond, which are, on the other hand,

other zombie movies, more linear, definitely more defined

within their genre.

Zombie II, on the other hand, is a film that has remained, of all those, the

first of its kind. And it's the best, in my opinion. Some others are beautiful,

very beautiful.

But I think they're always incomplete.

Maybe they lack a clear idea of what they wanted to do, or they didn't let

them do everything.

The producers often intervene in these productions and forced them to change

things. The result isn't as perfect as Zombie 2, which is a great film and

beautiful to watch.

Certainly, when I was honored for the Cannibal

Holocaust, I was invited to all the festivals, I went to the conventions,

entered a world that didn't belong to me, a world that I didn't know, because

I've never been a follower of zombie movies or horror movies, absolutely not.

But I began to see them, I was forced to see them at the beginning and

I understood the bravery of one and the other director.

For example, I found the films of Fulci extraordinarily better than many

zombie films made by...

by other directors who are unqualifiable.

I like everything about Fulci, apart from being a great friend, he was a

director who, wherever he put his hands, pulled something good out, even in the

comic.

He is someone who has written films that are in the history of Italian cinema,

so I can't say anything bad about Fulci.

I love him.

I also went to see his zombie movies, because he has a different hand.

It's an element of elegance, of turning it into a real job.

Elegance, that's the important thing.

Never being lazy.

Always following the path of...

films, even with little budget, but to do it well.

Clearly after Zombie 2, which had a notable success in Italy and abroad, as

said before, distributors and Italian producers continue on this false line,

on this path, launched by Fulci.

This is the same thing that happened to me.

Those who followed me in Cannibal Holocaust, I saw someone who used

the same kind of shooting as in Cannibal Holocaust and I liked it, but then they

used the means to make cannibal porn, zombie cannibal

and all the rest.

I never liked it.

And they made these films that then became a cross between the zombie genre,

cannibal genre. Even the cannibal genre in Italy has never gone well, it has

never achieved results at the box office, but abroad it sold very well.

There were many events and even that did not cost much because you went to a

wild place, you took some local digens, local people and you made the

film. and makes a series of horror movies one after the other.

Zombie Holocaust, for example, directed by Marino Girolami, is a

very atypical zombie, very anomalous, very strange.

I found it very funny because it actually unites the theme of the Mad

that of the cannibals who at that time were very...

very popular in Italy and in general in international genre cinema, and the

theme of zombies that had arrived roughly in those same years.

So, combining three film situations, three different narrative

plots, such as the Mad Doctor who creates terrible monsters, creates the

cannibals himself and the zombies,

just zombies wasn't enough so you have things like zombie holocaust which is a

zombie movie in a cannibal movie and a mad science movie uh yeah it's bluntest

as the erotic knights of the living dead which is a zombie movie in a porno

movie

So, Joy D 'Amato, on the other hand, combined in his own way

two other film elements of that period, two subgenres in some way,

namely the exotic Eros and the zombies, shooting the erotic nights,

the death of the wind.

This is a film also very anchored there.

It's basically a pornography film.

The zombies have very little to do with it. But it's the strangest pornography

film you'd ever seen. Like, if a person just wants to watch porn, they should

not watch this film, because it's incredibly disturbing.

It starts off at a psychiatric hospital, where you think two inmates have just,

you know, gotten together to go at it. Then you go back into the past, and it's

all a porn film. This man wants to buy this island to set up as some sort of

brothel, and you see him, you know, it's got everything a porn film wants.

Explicit shots of sex.

three ways girl on girl on this island and then all of a sudden there's this

other woman who turns out to be a ghost and everybody but two of them get killed

by the zombies the last 20 minutes it's all the zombies the porn goes completely

out the window until the end and the two people who survive go insane and start

fucking on the beach and then they do it again later and they're the two people

we see in the psychiatric hospital it's extremely bizarre like I don't know if

they were trying to market it to zombie horror fans who might want to have a

little bit of porn in with their movie as well.

It's a very strange take on that. Let's throw some zombies into a porn film and

try to get two markets at once.

But people who are into porn but not into horror movies would not like this

film.

A Cannibal Apocalypse, that's an infection movie and it works kind of

zombie picture and it has zombie elements.

in it but it's also a vietnam veteran crazed psychopath movie put it down

it's the only cannibal movie i've ever seen where the virus of being a cannibal

is transferred through the the action of biting someone and i guess that you

know antonio margariti really kind of flipped the genre there sometimes

by the time the movie comes out the

the genre lineage becomes so scrambled that interesting things can happen in

interstices.

And so that was why it was sort of fun at the time to catch up on these movies.

God help us all.

I'm a big fan of Nightmare City, and I think that brought something sort of new

to the genre.

There you got zombies at the airport running around with axes, machetes and

the rest of it.

And the zombies run out and they have guns and they begin attacking.

They are a coordinated force.

So it's not just that the zombies are running, but they obviously have some

level of intelligence.

So again, it's like...

Are they truly zombies?

Well, it doesn't really matter because all we know is that they're attacking

everyone and everybody's going to die. And they go into a television studio

where this dance show or aerobics show is going on and somehow they manage to

get all the way into this building and attack.

That, of course, is reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead, the original film, which

starts off in a moody studio where a scientist is trying to tell everybody we

have to prepare and everybody's ignoring.

So, you know, it's sort of a...

something to that. It's saying, yes, it's invading our media.

If you look back at it after all these years, it actually does, you know, it's

one of the more sort of favourite and fun zombie movies to watch.

Many have been seriously injured and hundreds of lives have been lost.

Nightmare 50, I think, was the first film with zombies that run.

And so, obviously, 28 days later, you know, like 28 weeks later, they picked

on that. And now...

It's kind of like most zombies you see now are running zombies, you know, so I

obviously just love the walking ones. In a way, I find the walking ones more

scary.

And I'm not quite sure why zombies do run, you know, because most people in

world can't run that fast. So I don't understand why you turn into a zombie

you can suddenly run really fast.

I think maybe if you're a marathon runner zombie, maybe.

What's interesting about the Romero films is that Zombies are pretty much

the same, put in a different context as Romero explores different social and

political situations.

What the Italian zombie films do is they change the zombie.

Like, first, you have just the regular zombie that we all know, slow -moving,

trying to eat your brains. But then with each subsequent film, you know, there's

teleportation, then they have guns, they learn how to use weapons. They change

the zombie. They change the monster.

I think, obviously, once you get into the 80s boom, when there were so many of

these things crowding together in such a brief time, a certain numbing rote

repetition sets in.

You need to hit their heads! I told you! See? Like this!

Get away!

I'm not a big fan of zombie creeping flesh, and to me that was kind of a

of all the other zombie films.

Perhaps it was getting a bit stale, a bit bored, and maybe people realised

No! No!

Another one that jumps to the forefront of my mind is Burial Ground,

with a rather weird Peter Bach playing a young kid, but I think in real life he

was in his 30s.

casting a man who I assume is just extremely small in stature as a boy.

But then I suppose that had to do with the incestuous content of the film and

that sort of misogyny, the child returning to the mother's breast and

devouring the mother. It was mainly shot around one location.

Let's get a few people off the street in to be the main actors and actresses.

And it had some, but you know, it's only saving grace really was it had some,

you know, it had some half decent effects by Gino De Rossi.

And of course, going forward, Romero did Day of the Dead, which for me is, I

personally feel it's the best zombie movie of all time.

Savini's work basically on the special effects, I don't think it has ever been

beaten. It's just grimy and nihilistic.

Apparently he was in the military.

Return a salute and see what he does.

You want me to salute that pile of walking pot?

Salute my ass.

And then really the whole boom really fizzled out and unfortunately Fulci and

Bruno Mattai cobbled together, zombie free.

Zumbi 3 is a film certainly a bit different from the filmography of Fulci

because in reality he did not finish it, that is, it is a film by Fulci for

sure, because most of the shots were made by him in the Philippines.

a horror set in the Philippines.

At that time many films were made in the Philippines, especially Vietnam movies

inspired by American success, such as Rambo, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, etc.

So many Italian directors went there, such as Antonio Margheriti and Bruno

Mattei, for example.

The producer of the film then decides to entrust

additional sequences

because, in his opinion, the film did not reach a full minute, to

Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso, who return to the Philippines to play

They are the scenes of the laboratory, with the men in white shirts, many

shooting scenes, there are also parts of the final scenes.

There are certainly more things, so it is not easy to write completely Zombie 3

in Fulci, but undoubtedly there are very strong, very violent elements, very

recognizable, the head that comes out of the fridge and slashes the throat of a

victim. There is the imprint of the master, you can feel it anyway.

Return of the Living Dead, which was 85, and Zombie 3 in 88, they both show the

cause of, you know, the world being overrun by zombies caused by a chemical

spillage. Return of the Living Dead was a big box office hit, so the Italians on

their sort of tired and sort of almost waning sort of zombie movies obviously

picked up on this and thought, OK, let's chuck the chemical radioactive ash

spillage into our own sort of...

pot of madness and they came out with you know with zombie free which has got

dive bombing seagulls flying heads um it's just it's quite a bizarre movie

in the whole sort of canon of zombie movies then followed Zombie 4 and Zombie

But the weird thing is I've never really got my head around it. Zombie 5 was

actually made before Zombie 4.

So go figure.

It's all to do with the titles and cashing in still on Zombie Due from

I think at that point it just had run its course. But then most...

Films do, even though zombie films are being made today, it's only maybe every

10 years you get one that's actually any good.

Look, Sarah, look.

It wants me. I think today especially, you know, we've invested so much of the

earlier America, not as more recent ones, which unfortunately they've really

gone down in quality, but as early ones we've invested them with so much.

political and social undertone, where the Italian ones, they're just fun.

They're just fun B -movies, but they're really well shot.

They're really cleverly staged. And because they are much more grotesque,

more violent, a lot more blood, and in cases of some of them, a lot more sex,

which is sex not a factor in the Romero, any of the, you know, North American

zombie films, whereas they are in the Italian films.

We don't take them any sort of serious political or social way that we do with

Romero films. To us, they're just fun, fun horror movies.

There are a little clump of movies that exist on their own, but that's how

Italian exploitation cinema seemed to work. One year, everybody would make

crime films.

The next year, everybody would make cannibal films.

Then they'd make, you know, Nazi exploitation films.

Then there'd be zombie films. Then they went on to something else. I think it

was Mad Max movies came after. Or was it Conan imitations? But anyway, there's

these sort of tent poles and everybody, yeah, all the people we now think of as

Italian exploitation auteurs would go and make one of these pictures or one or

two.

There wasn't...

that much attention being paid to them when they came out.

I mean, in a way, one of the sad things that happened was by the time there was

an organised fandom, by the time people were writing about these films, the boom

had died.

There had been a whole bunch of zombie booms. You know, we've had Shaun of the

Dead, we've had The Walking Dead, we've had...

28 Days Later and The Door of the Dead remake, Zombieland, and yet there are no

Italian filmmakers out there able to revive the Italian boom.

I mean, all subsequent zombie movies, I think they look back to these films

sometimes. You can see...

I mean, one of the things I find strange is that Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead

is as influenced by Italian zombie movies as by Romero's films, partly

because one of the things he does is completely strip out any notion of

political or social context and just kind of gets gruesome and miserable. And

think that...

Yeah, he relates maybe to demons is the urtext of that.

Yeah, a bunch of awful people get mashed on by monsters.

But yeah, I don't think that it was ever going to be something that would last.

There's just something about zombies.

There's just something wrong and weird about them.

And also like vampires.

The biggest threat from a zombie, the thing that you don't want to happen, is

become one of them. And that's the worst thing. It's not that they'll kill you.

They will turn you into one of them.

And that's more frightening. If you're trapped in a building and there's 100

tigers outside, the worst that can happen is they kill you. With the

outside, even one of them, a tiny bite or a scratch...

and you're going to become one of them, and you'll either become one of them

straight away, or you'll have this kind of long, lingering, living death, where

you know you're going to turn at some point, and everyone's kind of watching

with their fingers on their guns, ready, and you know that they're going to have

to kill you.

Or you're going to have to kill your best friend, or your wife, or your dad.

And I think that's the thing that keeps them exciting and scary and interesting.

One of the things that happens in the Italian zombie pictures that was later

taken up by the rise of zombie video games

and then the films based on Resident Evil, House of the Dead, that kind of

thing, is the idea that zombies become cannon fodder. They become the

perfect modern version of what...

a certain type of matinee western used to use apaches for and what world war ii

films use nazis for they look like people but you're allowed to kill them

you don't have to feel bad about it i

kind of uh

got tired of zombies i have to say uh zombies have been um in my view

overexposed since romero changed the rules of the game and although i've

to keep up with them um and i have seen the rest of the romero films i have to

say um They've never had the same impact as that first film, and I suppose it's

inevitable. To me, especially now, it seems as though people are just

desperate to try and alter the formula, but without

much success, without that huge impact that Night of the Living Dead had.

Forty -some years later, people are still...

making movies about it, about zombies, doing interviews about it, and doing

scholarly critiques of zombies.

I've kept in touch with the zombie genre and I have to say I'm not really very

impressed with what people have been doing.

They've been trying to introduce zombies into other environments and it hasn't

been entirely successful. I'm talking about films like Zombie Strippers and

Zombies of Mass Destruction.

I don't think it's just me. I think these are films that are very unpopular

the fans.

They like the idea of the films but when they go and see them...

They're disappointed.

And I have to say that anyone coming to zombie flesh eaters for the first time

is probably not going to be disappointed. I think it's a film that

goods. I think it's got its problems. I think it's got some pretty ridiculous

dialogue and some ludicrous scenes.

But ultimately, I think it's a satisfying zombie film. It's a stylish

Lucio Fulci. He isn't the greatest horror director in the history of

he's one of the greats. And I think it's very important to see one of his best

films as it was meant to be seen, a pristine print, uncut.