George A. Romero, a Pittsburgh native who managed to band together a team of the world's last surviving filmmakers to write, direct, and produce films that vividly illustrate the stories of survivors and the zombies who want to eat them is still creating movies that both inform and entertain.  In pre-zombie invasion days, Romero's movies were only slated for drive-ins and midnight movie festival fanfare, as a result his work was not taken all that seriously by a public interested in only feel-good films.  But then, in an era where the dead walk, Romero's films eerily seem to have predicted the undead apocalypse thirty years previous, leading some to herald him as a prophet and others to revile him with suspicion.  Whatever the case, one thing is for sure; without his films, the public would not have been warned in time enough to avoid complete devastation.  With the release of Night of the Living Dead in 1968, devoted fans of Romero quickly learned how to fortify their homes and places of business, avoid suspicious-looking slow-moving people, and set their racial bigotry aside to better establish focused, determined groups to combat the undead menace.

In 1978, in the decade just before the outbreak, Romero (produced with the help of legendary Italian horror film director  Dario Argento), made Dawn of the Dead which launched the "blood splatter" craze of horror movies set in the early '80s.  With the tagline "When there's no more room in HELL the dead will walk the EARTH" Romero excited a whole new generation into zombie mania.  Presented on an international market, the film was Romero's most successful to date, but who would have thought that it would become a precursor to the apocolyptic days to come!

Shot entirely in a shopping mall in the Philadelphia area -- that would later become the epicenter of a major zombie plague -- critics considered it a film that provided a commentary on contemporary consumer society.

But now we know better.

The zombies portrayed in Dawn of the Dead were not as slow moving as the originals in Night of the Living Dead. Dawn... introduced to the world a variety of undead specimens and even provided a few hints that the zombies could evolve and gain intelligence. This film also provided the audience the "what if" scenario of using a shopping mall as a place of refuge during a time of national crisis.  Shopping malls are now not a recommended place to be holed up in because today's zombies tend to gather around places that help them remember what it was like to be alive (or so we assume) and other survivors tend to loot them.  Both the living and the dead are drawn to such places and you have to decide what is better to deal with; raiding looters or bloodthirsty zombies. 

1985, five years before the real plague of undead would change our world forever, Day of the Dead would prove to be the ultimate prophetic vision of the American horror filmmaker.  The story takes place on a military establishment underground where a mad scientist carries out bloody experiments on zombie subjects and a dwindling, but unrelenting team of soldiers sadistically bullies each other for dominance. 

Dramatic evolutionary changes occur within the zombie population in this film; despite their decay they have become stronger, appear more alert, and are beginning to imitate the living even more.  However these changes go unnoticed as the survivors in the army base continue to fail to cooperate with each other.

Although initially rejected by fans who were expecting more of what Romero presented in Dawn...,  Day of the Dead would soon be laurelled as a zombie film cult classic and essential viewing for the would-be zombie apocolypse survivor.  It clearly illustrates what could go wrong when survivors fail to work together.  The only way humanity will survive to see a future without the violent interference of hordes of bloodthirsty undead is to band together as a unified force and abandon the prejudices of the past. 

A Sanctuary in the LAND OF THE DEAD?

In the year 1992, while Romero was filming an adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Half, the unimaginable occured; the recently dead, for an unknown reason, had returned to life and began to attack the living.  It went unnoticed at first because the initial warnings were taken as a hoax by a society jaded by the Gulf War.  Lucky for Romero and his team, they survived with the help of the sophisicated, determined individuals of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who, with the funding of successful business men like Paul Kaufman, have established a sanctuary called "Fiddler's Green." The city was fortunate enough to already be bordered by large bodies of water; the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers which also conveniently border other towns and cities providing nearly zombie-free access to areas hard to get to via land travel. Bordered on three sides by the rivers and barricaded by an ultra sensitive electronic fencing system, the city has literally become a fortress against the undead threat and remains an example to live by for those still scraping out a living in less fortified towns. 

To further combat the undead, Kaufman financed the construction of Dead Reckoning, a heavily armored military vehicle filled to the max with ammo and video monitors designed by engineer Riley Denbo, the people of Pittsburgh have obtained a sure-fire way to minimize zombie contact while salvaging neighboring small towns for food and medicine.  However, there is still much unrest in this sanctuary.  It's rumored that Paul Kaufman is more concerned about protecting and nurturing the lives of his rich and powerful peers, leaving the majority of the sanctuary's residents to remain living in poverty.  We're not sure of the validity of this rumor being that communication between fortified cities is limited.  However, sources in the north have recently confirmed that there has been a sighting of Dead Reckoning's Riley Denbo distributing much-needed medicinal supplies to a survivor's outpost just outside Toronto, Canada.

George A. Romero is said to have just finished a film about Riley and the survivors of Pittsburgh.  Again, since communication is limited, we do not yet know when this film will be available for mass distribution.  We can only hope that the story will be even more hopeful and informative then the news we normally recieve about our fellow survivors.