George A. Romero's Resident Evil

- A bizarre incident had occurred

near the end of the 20th century.

A German production company

called Constantin Film had purchased the rights

to a bestselling video game created by Capcom

with legendary director George A. Romero

hired to write and direct.

One year later, he was fired from the production.

The case was apparently closed

with the release of a feature film in 2002

directed by Paul W.S. Anderson,

but questions regarding Romero's unrealized film

and his removal were far from answered.

In 1968, Image Ten unleashed

a visceral experience upon the world

that shocked audiences everywhere.

- "Night of the Living Dead."

The dead, who live on living flesh.

The dead, whose haunted souls hunt the living.

The living, whose bodies are the only food

for these ungodly creatures.

- George Andrew Romero was born in February of 1940

in Bronx in New York.

His father was a graphic designer

and he used to make posters for films

and for Broadway shows, banners and the like like that,

so when George was growing up,

he was really in a household that kind of celebrated film.

- He was one that took that love of film

and actually acted on it.

He didn't say, "I just wanna grow up and be a filmmaker."

He started making his films at an early age,

and the famous story of throwing the flaming dummy

off the building and getting arrested at a young age.

George came to Pittsburgh

to attend what was then called Carnegie Tech.

It's now Carnegie Mellon University,

and he came here to be an art student.

Came, started taking his art classes,

and eventually kind of got rolled in

with some folks in the drama department,

started doing theater,

and eventually they kind of got swept up in

sort of emerging television.

Eventually they knew that sort of this crew

with Latent Image, which was sort of the company

that they had put together.

So you have George and Russ Streiner and Jack Russo

and a couple of the Ricci folks

kind of all together working to figure out

how they can kind of navigate this space.

And eventually the idea came to make a horror film,

that it'd be easier to get funding for, it'd be cheap,

they didn't need a lot of skills,

they kind of pull this off.

And they had a script that was adapted by Jack Russo.

He had written this "Night of Anubis."

It was the original title,

but it was this general story that we know as

"Night of the Living Dead."

- There was an aspect of it that was very surreal

and sort of dreamlike.

I remember when the character Ben is clubbing the zombies,

and the way he's hitting them

and the way the sound effects are kind of off sync a bit,

and it's just kind of strange.

It feels like you're watching it,

you're just slipping into some kind of nightmare.

- They really learned how to make a film together

sort of organically.

I think fans know that George did not go film school,

neither did any of the other folks in Latent Image.

They took their video production skills

that they had learned from television and applied it,

but they learned it sort of in a different way

and on their own.

- Some of the ways the characters speak are a little funny.

"They're coming to get you, Barbara."

It's kind of funny, but then it like,

it gives you a sucker punch and scares the shit outta you.

- And it's like, Roger Ebert's original review

of "Night of the Living Dead,"

he said, "These kids were dropped off in a matinee

thinking they're gonna see some spooky Vincent Price movie,"

and of course they're eating livers and stuff

and these kids were in shock!

There's a pretty safe scene

where they're shouldn't be anything of menace.

But then all of a sudden this zombie comes out for no reason

and starts killing one of the characters who you've just met

and you're like, "Wow. What's going on now?"

I wound up going to Scream Theater

and watching "Night of the Living Dead,"

and you know, the dead are alive to eat the living!

The weird thing is they made references

to all these other places

that my family would camp in when we'd go to Pittsburgh!

So it was utterly terrifying!

- I love that. I can't tell if "Night of the Living Dead"

is an old or a modern film.

It just kind of splits two eras down the middle.

I'm 14 years old

and they're having a convention in Monroeville,

and I see George Romero,

director of "Night of the Living Dead" is gonna be there.

And I was like, "All right, I wanna go meet this psychopath

that would make a movie

that would give somebody nightmares like this."

Met George, got an autograph from George,

realized George was one of the nicest people on the planet.

And then me, this 14-year-old, cornered George Romero,

literally cornered him in the hotel

and was asking him question after question after question.

And finally he just writes on a piece of paper,

"247 Fort Pitt Boulevard," the address,

and goes "Here, write me."

Then it was just, we became pen pals

and I still have those letters.

I just remember the immediacy

of the sequences with the zombies

and how it felt like you were under

a constant sense of terror and foreboding.

There were no R-rated movies

before "Night of the Living Dead,"

and "Night of the Living Dead," of course, has no rating.

That really made a big impact

because at the time it was released, of course,

on the news, you're seeing worse stuff in that every day,

people being burned with flame throwers

and you all the Vietnam with the napalm

and the skin falling off and shit.

And so suddenly the horror movies were not that horrific

because what you saw on the news

was a lot more frightening.

- I think George really took things

to the next level on that.

One of the most memorable scenes

is when the truck is burning

and there's flames flying everywhere

and somebody's taking a piece of flesh and gnawing.

We hadn't seen anything like that on camera.

- After "Night of the Living Dead,"

the definition of zombie would change.

No longer inspired by misconstrued Haitian folklore,

the zombie would now be your neighbors, your friends,

your family, the reanimated corpses

of the recently dead, seeking flesh.

- Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

- And while slow moving,

could only be stopped by destroying the brain,

- Beat 'em or burn 'em.

- Of course, it famously set the rules for zombie film.

How zombies work, how the brain is the zombie,

you shoot the brain, you kill it.

And that's been the common trope ever since.

- They didn't try to go back to New York City,

they didn't try to go to LA, they didn't go to Chicago,

they did it here in Pittsburgh.

The fact that we still have a film industry here

is because of the work they did.

- This is probably the most inspiring

independent film of all time.

- For Romero, attempts to branch out

into other genres were met with less enthusiastic results.

So in 1973, he returned to horror with "The Crazies"

about a chemical weapon unleashed upon the population

of Evan City, Pennsylvania,

turning them into violent psychopaths.

And "Martin."

My name is Martin.

I'm 84 years

- The 1977 Classic about a serial killer

that believed he was a vampire.

But it was his next film that cemented George Romero

in the minds of audiences worldwide.

- "Dawn of the Dead."

- Meet me on the roof at nine o'clock.

We're getting out. - But I don't believe it.