Although he’s the zombie filmmaker, George A Romero didn't even call his undead characters zombies in his first movie. “When I did Night of the Living Dead, I called them ghouls, flesh-eaters. I didn’t think they were. Back then zombies were still those boys in the Caribbean doing the wet work for Lugosi. So I never thought of them as zombies. I thought they were just back from the dead. I ripped off the idea for the first film from a Matheson novel called I Am Legend, which is now back with us after a couple of incarnations prior. I thought I Am Legend was about revolution. I mean, this is a ‘60s guy sitting there [pretending to have a toke]. I said, ‘If you’re going to do something about revolution, you should start at the beginning.’ Richard starts his book with one man left. Everybody in the world has become a vampire. I said, ‘No, man, we gotta start at the beginning and tweak it up a little bit.’”
“I couldn’t use vampires because he did, so I wanted something that would be an earth-shaking change, something that was forever, like this awful s--t, something that was really at the heart of it. I said, ‘What if the dead stop staying dead?’ Again, it’s just an idea that comes to you. I just never thought of them as zombies in the first place.”
“This film goes back, theoretically, to that first night. I mean, I didn’t use the word until the second film and that’s only because people who were writing about the first film called them zombies. I said, ‘Maybe they are in a way…’ But to me zombies were separate in the rainbow. They were not even undead; they were just people that were…you blew this s--t up with blowfish powder, which would put someone in a state of suspended animation, and then you get them to do your chores for you. I just thought it was completely different.”
“Because this film goes back to that first night, nobody knows what to call them yet. By the time of Land of the Dead, they had this slang already – ‘stenches’ they called them. But I felt this is just too early for anybody to know what they were or to have any sort of identifying moniker for them. I used actually some of the old soundtracks from Night of the Living Dead. They never called them zombies. It’s ghouls and flesh-eaters. They’re dancing around. They didn’t know what to call them. ‘Those things!’ which is always a good fallback position.”
