I know a guy in his early twenties who thinks about George Romero's zombies all the time. Whenever he enters a room, a little careful part of his brain makes him scope out all entrances and exits. He doesn't like to be alone, and facing the door or ground-level window only makes it marginally better. Outdoors isn't so bad, but there needs to be a lot of open space. Even then, he keeps in mind that Romero's first victims were in a big cemetery, and could see Doom come shambling a long way off: When Johnny jokes with his sister Barbara that "They're coming to get you," the guy I'm talking about figured Johnny was including him.

When he confessed this fear to me, no doubt during one of my ecstatic outpourings on movies, I probably wasn't even talking about Romero, but something in my wide-eyed rush of words provided him an opening to tell me of his fear. One madman to another.

At first, I almost congratulated him. After all, here we are in a time when we've slopped around in every evil, twice, and come up grinning, like those pretty young people I saw triumphantly clenching dead rats in their teeth on TV's Fear Factor. Think about it: We're even too Gonzo for the Good Doctor Hunter S. Thompson--who stared down the slavering jaws of the Were-Nixon. And we're too twisted for Bruno Bettelheim--who survived Buchenwald and Dachau and knew what the wolf dreamed of while waiting for Little Red Riding Hood to show up. And simply too much for Karel Capek (the Czechoslovakian writer who gave us the word "robot"), who wasted away, his heart broken, when it was clear no one was going to stop Hitler in time. You'd assume that after all those affronts, nothing could faze anybody under thirty anymore.

I thought it was good to see a little atavistic fear still tinkling the ivories of the spine. Of course, though, the more that young zombie-phobe talked, the worse I felt for him. This fear dogged him, silent in the underbrush of his life, always out of sight but never out of mind.

I have nothing new to say here, except to acknowledge how thoroughly George Romero understands the nature of the terror of evil, at least when he's making zombie movies. And he knows dread, how it's linked to the rooms we sit in and the scenery we move through, and how dread comes at us, its Karloff-as-The-Mummy gait laughably slow--but so darn inexorable, like plate tectonics, so that you cannot escape the object of dread: consumption.

In Romero's Dead movies, evil may be silly or slimy, but it is always as close as the dinner table or the shopping center, the personal and social feeding grounds. So when that young man admitted he was always thinking of zombies, he was just seeing Romero's version of the post-everything age. I'm reminded of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (by the way, made into a 1979 movie that needs to be on DVD). In the novel, the rootless veteran Hazel Motes founded the "Church of Christ Without Christ," where "the blind don't see, the lame can't walk, and the dead stay that way." I wish someone would tell that to Romero; in the meantime, we'll keep our eye on the door.

Ed/Pub:LisaM