Legacy of the man who created the walking dead

The movie went on to become a phenomenon, scaring the pants off America (and the wider world) and raking in millions at the box office. Along the way the film – the Citizen Kane of the horror 'B's – and its sequels turned New Yorker George A Romero into the resident king of the zombie flicks.

Forty years on, Romero continues to rattle out zombie movies featuring ever-more inventive methods of dispatching the recently ambulatory deceased.

His latest is Survival of the Dead, the sixth in his undying saga and the third in five years. There there's The Crazies, a bleak and brutal remake of his 1973 chiller. Throw in a DVD re-release of 1985's Day of the Dead and Romero is truly resurrected.

Yet the 70-year-old veteran never really stopped working. There was a seven-year hiatus between The Dark Half in 1993 and Bruiser in 2000 followed by another five years before Land of the Dead in 2005. Since then Romero has been given the copycat treatment. Everyone, it seems, wants to emulate this gentle 6ft 4in giant. And he doesn't mind one little bit.

Of The Crazies, on which he picked up an executive producer credit, Romero says "I have nothing to do with it. They pay you for it. My agent said 'Sure, why not?' For some reason the publishing world, the gaming world and the movie world (are] insisting this is the year of the zombie. It's become a popular character, mostly because of video games."

Romero never set out to be the maestro of the zombie genre; the films took on a life of their own. And while he's often found it hard to secure funding to make his own films, he's been far from inactive. "I was involved in developing the first Resident Evil film," he reveals. "I wrote several drafts. My partner and I had a deal at New Line for two years but they never made a movie with us.

"There was a seven-year period where we were making more money just developing things. Nobody ever made a movie."

Such is the life of the itinerant working filmmaker that Romero developed a $12m version of The Mummy, taking as his inspiration the classic Universal version of the 1930s starring Boris Karloff. The project was green-lit but Romero couldn't get out of a deal with MGM. His version crumbled to dust.

"My script was completely different – much smaller, creepier and way more romantic."

Romero is a purist when it comes to horror. Credited with inventing the accepted zombie lore – shuffling legions of the undead advance slowly towards humanity before devouring it – he has little time for the fast-moving villains of 21st century flicks. "Some people think fast-moving zombies are more terrifying," he smiles. "But what used to get me as a kid was stuff like The Mummy. Moving slow… but he just keeps coming!

"I almost stole the idea for (Night of the Living Dead] from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. I said 'He used vampires, so I better use something else'. I never called them zombies in that film. So I came up with the idea of the dead coming back to life."

Survival of the Dead is Romero's latest, an independent project shot in just 28 days and a take on the classic Hollywood Westerns of yesteryear. Romero borrowed the central themes from The Big Country and pits two elderly patriarchs against one another. Their feud continues beyond the grave. "There's these two old guys. They're dead and they're still shooting at each other. They're not pro-active, particularly. Sometimes they do the right thing. Sometimes they do the wrong thing. There's nobody I really like. I get a chance with these films to make my own observations (and] do a little social criticism. It's a pretty good gig. I'm not tired of doing it. I love the genre.

"There's a couple of gags in here that are right out of Looney Tunes. That's another thing: people don't get the humour or aren't willing to see that in the context of a horror film. I go back to the early comic books before they were restricted. They were really, brutally gory – but always had a moral. That's what I grew up on: chuckles. It used to make me chuckle."

Survival of the Dead (18) receives a sneak preview at Sheffield Showroom on March 4 as part of Celluloid Screams. The Crazies (15) is on nationwide release from today.