Writer Of The Dead

The Criterion Collection has released a brand-new 4K scan and restoration of George romero’s classic NIGHT oF THE LIVING dEAd. restored by the Museum of Modern Art and The Film Foundation, the zombie film that started it all is now available the way it was meant to be seen, along with a plethora of extras, including a work-print edit of the film entitled NIGHT oF ANUBIs, as well as commentary tracks from the 30th anniversary, interviews, and behind-the-scenes stories. seing as how this marvellous release is now available, and considering the film also celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year, we spoke with the film’s co-screenwriter JoHN A. rUsso about the restoration and the film’s long, influential history.

- Nick Spacek

STARBURST: Night of the Living Dead was your start in the horror world, and you’ve really become noted for your work in the zombie subgenre. Was horror always an interest for you, or did it come out of your involvement with this film?

John Russo: Well, George Romero, Russ Streiner, and I were moviemakers. George said once that when you want to be a filmmaker, you don’t say you want to be a horror filmmaker, you just say you want to be a filmmaker [laughs]. We frequented the art houses in the ‘60s, because Hollywood was making a lot of Doris Day and Rock Hudson fluff, and to see anything good, you had to see the French, Italian, and British films mostly. So, that’s what we did. We saw just about every movie that came round.

My old hometown of Clarendon, Pennsylvania was a booming steel town back then, and it had three movie theatres, and the theatres changed pictures twice a week, and a lot of them were double bills. It was cheap to go to the movies - when you’re a kid, anyway - and so I saw just about every movie.

With horror movies, you were hoping to see something good. It was all ballyhooed, of course, but when you saw the thing, it was disappointing. They were doing a bunch of radiation movies, and it was all the same: Attack of the Giant Grasshopper, Attack of the Giant Praying Mantis, Attack of the Giant Caterpillar, and all that kind of stuff. The town drunk would see something, and nobody would believe him. Then the town drunk would be killed, and the scientist would find a glob of something, and he would be all: “This looks like caterpillar slime! I’ll be damned, it is caterpillar slime!” Then the National Guard would come in with tanks and flamethrowers and things at the end of the movie and destroy the thing. That’s how they all went.