George A. Romero Quotes

A zombie film is not fun without a bunch of stupid people running around and observing how they fail to handle the situation.

People called '28 Days' and '28 Weeks' zombie movies, and they're not! It's some sort of virus; they're not dead.

Everybody knows the rules, even though some break those rules.

My opinion of a good zombie walk is to loll your head as if it's a little too heavy and the muscles have begun to atrophy.

I expect a zombie to show up on 'Sesame Street' soon, teaching kids to count.

Somehow I've been able to keep standing and stay in my little corner and do my little stuff and I'm not particularly affected by trends or I'm not dying to make a 3D movie or anything like that. I'm just sort of happy to still be around.

When I was old enough to go to movies alone, I got to see 'Frankenstein' and 'Dracula' on the big screen. I just fell in love with them.

I also have always liked the monster within idea. I like the zombies being us. Zombies are the blue-collar monsters.

First of all, in the old days, if you wanted to show someone getting shot on film, all you could do was place an effect in the original take. And if you wanted to brighten somebody's face and leave the rest of the room dark, that was a very expensive process.

Movies are about escape.

I've always felt that the real horror is next door to us, that the scariest monsters are our neighbors.

My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines. I'm not a student of the genre. I don't care what anybody else does.

You can fall on your face easily if you go off in a certain direction. The Birds is a good example, some people are really phobic about birds flying over their heads, and some don't care. So, it's a personal thing.

I really liked the helicopter pilot in 'Dawn of the Dead', when he gets bitten and comes out of the elevator. That guy was amazing. He did this incredible walk that we didn't even know about until we started shooting.

As a filmmaker you get typecast just as much as an actor does, so I'm trapped in a genre that I love, but I'm trapped in it!

I can't really make fun of zombies. They're not liars. They're not cheats.

I thought Godzilla was a mess, the monster had no character and the humans didn't either. They forgot to make the movie that went along with all these wonderful effects.

I like guys who are understandable and good guys who are flawed.

What the Internet's value is that you have access to information but you also have access to every lunatic that's out there that wants to throw up a blog.

I go to conventions and universities and talk to young filmmakers and everybody's making a zombie movie! It's because it's easy to get the neighbors to come out, put some ketchup on them.

My zombies will never take over the world because I need the humans. The humans are the ones I dislike the most, and they're where the trouble really lies.

Collaborate, don't dictate. Every department head has something to offer. Listen and gratefully accept their offerings. They're moviemakers, too.

Nothing's ever real until it's real.

Horror will always be there, it always comes back, it's a familiar genre that some people, not everyone - it's sort of the cinema anchovies. You either like it or you don't.

I don't like the new trends in horror. All this torture stuff seems really mean-spirited. People have forgotten how to laugh, and I don't see anybody who's using it as allegory.

The neighbors are scary enough when they're not dead.

I always thought of the zombies as being about revolution, one generation consuming the next.

I sympathize with the zombies and am not even sure they are villains. To me they are this earth-changing thing. God or the devil changed the rules, and dead people are not staying dead.

Ever since 'Lassie' and 'Old Yeller', I won't watch animal movies. Animals in movies always die.

Just because I'm showing somebody being disemboweled doesn't mean that I have to get heavy and put a message behind it.

On the other side of that coin, and far outweighing it, is the fact that I've been able to use genre of Fantasy/Horror and express my opinion, talk a little about society, do a little bit of satire and that's been great, man. A lot of people don't have that platform.

I've gotten letters, but mostly from Bible-belt types who say, you must be Satan! They come right out and call me Satan and hope that I'm damned to hell.

For a Catholic kid in parochial school, the only way to survive the beatings - by classmates, not the nuns - was to be the funny guy.

The most realistic blood I've seen is when Marlon Brando gets beat up in On The Waterfront.

I keep a little notebook of things that I can do to the zombies that might be silly and fun.

I grew up on DC Comics, moral tales where the bad guys got their comeuppance. To me the gory panels or grotesque stuff just made me chuckle.

When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth.

Anybody who tunes into Rush Limabaugh already knows what he's going to say and is already inclined to agree. So it winds up creating tribes.

I'm like my zombies. I won't stay dead!

Zombies cannot run. I say this definitively as the godfather of zombies. Zombies cannot run.
So anyone who has a zombie running...don't listen to that person. Their ankles would snap. I mean what did they do, go and join a spa the moment they rose from the dead? Gimme a break. They're dead.