Thanks for the thoughtful post. Plague of the Zombies reminds me of what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might have done with the zombie genre. And all of Val Lewton's films are so special, Cat People probably being my favorite - but The Seventh Victim, about devil worship, might be the most disturbing and morbidly effective…

Right, but I believe Romero has said that novel was an influence on Night of the Living Dead. That's all I was saying.

Lifeforce is one of my go-to guilty pleasures, but as insane as the movie is, there's no question that's the movie he wanted to make.

For me he will always get a lifetime pass for Chain Saw, and I have to respect that when he had his arm twisted into making a sequel, he did it in a most original way - something no other director of Leatherface and his clan has been able to do.

I just watched The Funhouse a few weeks ago and I second your opinion. It's actually wonderfully directed (even if the story doesn't add up to much) - he really captures the feel of an authentic small town carnival as it would actually appear to the young characters walking through it, with lots of POV shots, noisy…

The three films I recommended are all examples of living corpses (used as slave labor). EDIT: Maybe not White Zombie, on reading the plot summary from Wikipedia. It's been a few years since I watched it last. But definitely in I Walked with a Zombie and Plague of the Zombies.

You must be referring to the Tom Savini-led biker gangs always driving their motorcycles through the mall. Hooligans.

Not sure I quite follow you (or if we're disagreeing). Zombies were reanimated corpses, not just "voodoo related people." Romero's innovation was adding flesh-eating to the mix and linking them to Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend" concept of a post-apocalypse horde. He definitely changed the definition and invented the…

Add a heaping dose of general racism as Hollywood writers would struggle to figure out how to handle voodoo. But there are some worthwhile pre-Romero zombie films: Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur's atmospheric "I Walked with a Zombie" and the Bela Lugosi feature "White Zombie." Hammer's "Plague of the Zombies" is good…

I went about 10 years ago - specifically making a point to visit it since we were driving through Pittsburgh. It's pretty big, but at the time we visited it it was also very empty (granted, it was probably a week day in the middle of the day). I bought a copy of Dawn of the Dead there, and we visited the zombie museum.

On NPR's obit yesterday they had a clip of Romero saying they learned of MLK's assassination while driving to the premiere (or maybe not the premiere, I can't recall - but he was making the same connection you were).

Good point, and I also don't think zombies were "obscure" before Romero. There was "White Zombie," "I Walked with a Zombie," "King of the Zombies," "Revenge of the Zombies," "The Plague of the Zombies," etc. The fact that "zombie" was used in the title is proof enough that the monster was an exploitable property.

My least favorite Spielberg movie is his short from The Twilight Zone, if that counts.

I recall War of the Worlds being pretty great up until the very last scene (this is a problem with latter-period Spielberg I guess).

I will be standing here in the empty corner of the room assigned to unapologetic fans of the Tintin movie, thanks.

I like that idea! Bring back Short Round, recast him with an actor the same age Jonathan Ke Quan was when he played Short Round in 1984, have Harrison Ford play Indiana Jones, and never address the age discrepancy at all. #WhyIShouldDirectMovies

I saw "Always" in the theater and liked it (but I was 13, and that's the only time I've seen it). Watching "Hook" when it came out was the very first time I realized I was disliking the Steven Spielberg movie that I was watching. I realized not everything he made was going to be good. It was a seminal moment for me as…

The score by John Williams is also one of the best he ever did.

After that film I felt like I needed 300 showers.

I watched OUIJA at about 6am on a Sunday and now I believe that's the perfect time to watch this genre. At 6am on a Sunday, my brain is as stupid as the teens in the movie.