With the mall brightly lit, almost glowing, and the stores all closed and the hallways deserted save for a few wandering zombies, I began to mentally slide into the fantasy Romero had working here. We walked through the mall’s upper level, toward Penney’s, where the night’s ﬁrst scene was being shot, Since it’s hard to ﬁlm gun battles with the mall full of customers, the crew was shooting every night from midnight till dawn. Some of these zombies around here don’t care that much.” “I could see,” he said, “that you really wanted to be a zombie and I appreciated that, I can see you’re into it. Clayton Hill, one of the “lead zombies,” came over and slapped me on the back. I looked in a mirror and almost fell over: there was a living corpse staring back at me, with a terrible gaping wound across its cheek.

When that blade shaved that head, it was like slicing an egg, it was beautful.” A little bit of yellow hair spray and he was done, “OK, you’re dead.” “You didn’t get to see the zombie that walked into the helicopter blade, did you? We made a foam latex head full of gore, with two ﬁre-extinguisher pumps full of blood off camera.

Next he started working a latex mold onto my cheek, along with gray lipstick and brown eye makeup. I mean, there is no way to reason with those creatures. Glassy-eyed stares and lunging arms that can smash through a wall to grab you and rip your arm off and beat you to death with it. Run them over with a truck and they get right back up and keep lurching after you blast hell out of them with an elephant gun and they reel for a moment but keep on coming. I kept it all down but there were moment when I thought I wouldn’t, for that is one strong movie – the banality of evil personified slow, deliberate zombies coming after you and catching you and eating you alive. The day before, I had watched the uncut version (it’s heavily edited for TV) in his New York ofﬁce – right after eating a hearty lunch. He’s directing a sequel to 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, which is a terrifying chronicle of the dead coming back to life and eating the living. He’s a large, bearlike, affable man who looks more like he should be directing Benji than what he’s doing right now What he’s doing right now is hanging out in the Monroeville Shopping Mall, near Pittsburgh, up to his armpits in blood and gore. Night of the Living Dead has been described a “the most horrifying, stomach-churning charnel in the history of horror.” That description makes its creator, George Romero, chuckle. This story originally appeared in the March 23rd, 1978 issue of Rolling Stone.

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