George A. Romero dies 16 JULY 2017, the creator of the zombie cinema

In the sixties, a group of filmmakers dynamited the conventions of horror films, taking advantage of social change in terms of violence and obscenity. Some did it from within Hollywood, like Roman Polanksi, Brian de Palma or William Friedkin. Others created their products from outside the majors, but they attracted the public in the same way: through that commercial slump John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, David Cronenberg and George A. Romero, who died in Toronto at 77 years. Romero is for fans the creator of modern zombie cinema thanks to his precursor The Night of the Undead, shot in black and white with just over 100,000 euros in 1968. According to his partner Peter Grunwald, Romero died of cancer Of lung, which he has devoured very aggressively, in the company of his wife Suzanne Desrocher Romero and his daughter Tina Romero, while listening to the soundtrack of the film El hombre tranquilo. Since 2009 he had dual Canadian and American citizenship.

After graduating in 1960 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he began filming short films and television programs. Along with his friends John Russo and Russell Streiner set up a production company to shoot commercials, until he was fed up, the trio decided to take a leap to what Great and produce in Pittsburgh a horror film, inspired by one of the best 20th century novels, I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson.

For this, ten friends were associated and created the production company Image Ten Productions. They did not complicate the life thanks to a very simple history, in black and white, developed in a town invaded by cannibal zombies. In The Night of the Living Dead, there is blood, as imposed by the creator of the film Gore Herschell Gordon Lewis, but also action and a clear political message through an African American hero who will die by mistake by a policeman. The film premiered in a few autocines and soon caught the fuse in its followers: Craven saw it in a room in Times Square, Carpenter in Los Angeles and Dario Argento, then working as a film critic in Rome (eventually Italian would become his friend and collaborator). The three realized the whole background that hid that film, which by the way was never mentioned the word zombie. For Cahiers du cinéma the prodigious was hiding in its political cry of war on the racism in the USA. In that film the rules of the zombie myth are constituted: if they bite you they infect you, they want to eat you and if you do not shoot them in the head do not fall eliminated and come back to life.

During the seventies, Romero and his friends continued to release films of similar content. He attempted a turnaround in his career with Martin (1977), a vampire drama that ridiculed all the supernatural as a creator of terror. In the film, the child protagonist believes that he is a vampire because the cinema and his family have thus affirmed it. But it is? Its passage by the festival of Cannes did not have much repercussion because it was swept by John Carpenter, that premiered in that edition of 1977 Assault to the police station. So Romero and his friends from Pittsburgh returned to their theme and success with Zombie: The Return of the Living Dead (1978), which cost just over a million euros, grossed more than 40 million worldwide.

He never stopped working, although sometimes, as at the beginning of this century for six years, he could only write screenplays - not directing them - or comics. For decades it did not achieve another great success in terror and it worked better in the mix of gore and humor. Nor did he feel comfortable in Hollywood, despite some estimable titles like Creepshow (1982) or Diabolical Attraction (1988).

In 2005 he directed the fourth film in the saga, The Land of the Living Dead, and as he ended up dissatisfied with the result he directed the fifth part two years later, The Diary of the Dead, skipping the chronology of the saga. His last work as director was The Resistance of the Dead 2009, and his latest credit as a writer is seen as the creator of the characters of Day of the Dead by Héctor Hernández Vicens, pending release.

In 2007, during his visit to the Sitges festival, he confessed in an interview with Jordi Costa that he was astonished at the founding father of modern American horror films: "When I am told, I do not believe it. Been a modest director, who has developed his work outside of Hollywood and below the industry radars and suddenly I want to become the Godfather. Only in my last two or three films have I noticed a certain mastery of the art of directing John Ford made 250 films and I, for the moment, have done only 17. So I still have a long way to go. "