![]() ![]() The people now living in the walled city of Pittsburgh may lead a shabby, dingy existence if they’re not part of the small, ruling aristocracy ensconced in the comfort of the “Fiddler’s Green” high-rise ruled over by a scenery chewing Dennis Hopper, but at least they have a reliable barrier between themselves and the threat of being eaten alive on a daily basis. Land of the Dead makes an interesting choice here-years have apparently passed, and it depicts a setting where humanity has seemingly clawed its way back from the brink, at least in some locations. This trilogy of films builds in a direction of ever-mounting hopelessness, as it seems humanity is destined for eventual extinction … or at the very least, obsolescence. Day of the Dead vaults forward again, depicting an America swept clean by the zombie hordes, with only a handful of human survivors cowering in bunkers and struggling with the overwhelming malaise of knowing that no one is coming to rescue them. Dawn of the Dead moves the timeline forward a few weeks, as members of the police and media desperately try to hold the country together in the face of seemingly imminent collapse. On the most basic level of continuity, Land of the Dead is important because Romero chooses to directly continue the same timeline we first saw in Night of the Living Dead, which occurs in the opening hours and days of the zombie outbreak. It’s also the only one of the 2000s efforts to genuinely pick up where the themes of Day of the Dead left off, and for this in particular it deserves its place in the zombie movie pantheon. This is perhaps Romero’s strangest, most uneven zombie film, but it’s also the last entry in the series to truly contain a spark of the divine. ![]() But Land of the Dead … well, now that’s a more interesting case. The truth of the matter is that Diary and Survival in particular didn’t possess the incisive cultural relevance the series was known for, being both insular and burdened with the expectations of fandom. Those three were considered a near-perfect “trilogy” by many for 20 years before the arrival of 2005’s Land of the Dead, 2007’s Diary of the Dead and 2009’s Survival of the Dead asked fans to consider a Romero zombie epilogue, and the reception was mixed to say the least. With that said, however, the back half of Romero’s iconic “of the dead” series certainly doesn’t receive the same attention as the initial three films: 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead and 1985’s Day of the Dead. There’s simply no way to separate modern zombie fiction, and its themes, from the template Romero gifted us with. The greatest zombie films made in the more than half century since 1968’s Night of the Living Dead are all indebted to Romero’s original vision of horror and the subsequent evolution of that concept through several sequels. Some subgenres simply have this kind of foundational figure, whose seminal works shaped everything to come in the decades that followed. In the annals of zombie cinema, it would be foolish to even suggest another auteur ever standing on a higher pedestal than George A. ![]()
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