Films of the Dead: Romero & Co.

Few film subgenres have proven more resilient than the zombie horror movie, the modern version of which began with George A. Romero’s deathless 1968 indie masterpiece Night of the Living Dead. That film’s mixture of low-budget innovation, shocking horror, and political commentary launched a quarter-century-plus of zombie movies, including a remarkably generative cycle of films from Romero himself: brainy movies about the brain-dead—satires on contemporary American life that used the zombie as metaphor. Romero’s work has been so influential that it’s inspired hordes of fascinating, funny, gross, and thoughtful movies. In conjunction with MoMI’s Living with The Walking Dead exhibition (which examines a series that itself owes a clear debt to Romero’s work), we present Romero’s cinematic zombie corpus, plus a delirious selection of modern variations from filmmakers as varied as Edgar Wright, Zack Snyder, Jim Jarmusch, and Shinichiro Ueda.