Tell them, my song.

George A. Romero, the father of the modern zombie movie, died on July 16, 2017. He was the director of one of my most favorite movies of all time, the original Dawn Of The Dead, the movie that lit my imagination as a teenager in ways like nothing else before. This is not an exaggeration: I was so hooked that only after the 100th time I actually stopped counting how often I had watched Dawn. Mind you: I merely stopped counting. I didn’t stop watching the film or letting it run in the background so that I could suck up more of its atmosphere while I was doing something else.

Dawn Of The Dead is the end time movie, and no other director could ever create such a cold, apocalyptic atmosphere in a film as Romero. He didn’t need a huge Hollywood budget to bring the end of the world on your screen, he didn’t need big name actors to make you believe that the end of civilization had come. And he didn’t need cheap close-ups on gore scenes to scare you for nights and days to come – but his movies use an almost comic-style, bizarre version of violence nonetheless; not because of cheap showmanship, but to make a point, to emphasize the dire reality his characters – and his audience – cannot escape from.

Romero knew how to capture his vision of the downfall of mankind on film, and he knew how to plant those images into your brain in a way that makes it impossible to shake them out of your mind.

He was an artist, a filmmaker extraordinaire, and he was the creator and unrivaled master of what we later came to call the zombie apocalypse. Attempts at copying his unique style were made countless times, and some decent movies, books and computer games were created along the way, but nothing ever matched Romero’s total vision or could hit you with the same impact his Dawn Of The Dead did.

We have lost one of our greatest movie writers and directors.

Farewell, George. You will be missed.