"Just in case society crumbles". George A. Romero and Marxism

1	Meeting necessities. A historical necessity brought forth Night of the Living Dead and made it a worldwide success. Only by grasping the multifaceted nature of this necessity — as sedimented in the film's form and content — is it possible to explain Romero's stylistic power and the critical potential of his horror. The first episode of the Dead Trilogy — already glowing with the desperate fatalism of its successors — finds itself at the crossroads of fatal epochal trends. It succeeded, though, in turning itself into an expressive vehicle for these necessities, instead of impotently falling victim to them — a failure to deal with the dialectic of freedom and necessity that often ruins both "light" culture-industry products and "obscure" artistic cryptograms. Its frightening chiaroscuro showed a third way that the post-modernists, enchanted by the high art status they long for and unable to understand the real nature of the market, desperately were looking for but never really found. Like other American subversives — Frank Zappa, Philip K. Dick —  Romero questions the schematic oppositions between art and commercialism, showing how artistic consistency can be actually achieved by responding with real-time creativity to the reified demands of the market.
	Far from being a b-movies assembler, Romero lived and lives on the dream of being a fine director (Gagne, 1987: 23). He was notoriously driven to direct Night of the Living Dead by economic necessity, after the commercial failure of a pretentious picture entitled Whine of the Fawn. This subjective necessity to "sell out" reached its goal thanks to an objective necessity, i.e. the existence of that push-over audience, ferociously longing for novelties, that shapes the horror movie market. The very existence of this market witnesses the persistence of a collective desire to experience monstrosity. Such a desire has a double, schizophrenic meaning: it both satisfies the general need for escapism — promptly fulfilled by Hollywood and its cheaper ramifications — and expresses the urge for a sort of hallucinated realism, the need to face what lies behind everyday life and its cinematic double.
	Horror has always played this eccentric role inside the culture industry: its negativity brings to expression the vague and yet insuppressible instinct for truth from an audience perpetually filled with lies by media. For those who cannot avoid the culture industry's prefab pleasures and don't want to suffer the self-flagellation of the avant-garde, this need for truth manifests itself sensually as self-punition, the masochistic pleasure of seeing oneself tormented by fear and gore. However, rather than endless repetitions of an infantile shock (regression), such masochistic thrills look for an access into the real beyond capitalist deception. Horror movies try to dissipate the opium populi dialectically, i.e. through the extremization of filmic illusion. A progressive element is involved: schizophrenia does not so much characterize the movie-goers as well as reality itself. Romero's idea of filming Dawn Of the Dead (1978) in a shopping mall was not a product of his schizophrenic imagination: "[T]hey had sealed-off rooms upstairs packed with civil defence stuff, which they had put there in the event of some disaster — and that's what gave me the idea [...] I mean, my God, here's this cathedral to consumerism, and it's also a bomb shelter just in case society crumbles" (Romero, quoted in Colson, 2004: 9).
	The whole environment of contemporary society is, in fact, designed to exorcise "horror" — a by-product of its own cultural, political and economic logic — but since horror can't be annihilated, its traces are perceptible almost everywhere. Subsequent anguish — the vague and yet frightening intuition that something "out there" could make our usual world fall apart — is a concrete historic-sociological condition rather than an existential category.
	No less important than "what" the film showed, was the way it did it, i.e. how the film fitted the audience's need for thrills. Turning a lack of means into a possibility for creative solutions, Night of the Living Dead (1968) resulted in an Aufhebung of the form-content opposition. Budget restrictions and "artistic integrity" forced Romero and his talented collaborators to avoid the cheap renditions of 1950s "rubbers monsters," opting for a more realistic approach to gore (Gagne, 1987: 23). The stylization of gore that resulted reveals its specific social essence post festum. Whereas traditional scary movies used to mask reality in order to make it horrible, Romero strips the flesh off of it, revealing its grim and sick bones. Simplification, a brutal and obsessive reductionism, gives Romero's nightmare its astonishing formal power.