Quotes

If I fail, they [the film industry] write me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart.

[on his fourth installment of the "Living Dead" series, Land of the Dead (2005)] The idea of living with terrorism--I've tried to make it more applicable to the concerns Americans are going through now.

If one horror film hits, everyone says, "Let's go make a horror film!" It's the genre that never dies.

If you have 60 people dress like zombies and you show them something that you like, you get 60 people doing the exact same thing. My opinion of a good zombie walk is to loll your head as if it's a little too heavy and the muscles have begun to atrophy.

I'm like my zombies. I won't stay dead!

My zombie films have been so far apart that I've been able to reflect the socio-political climates of the different decades. I have this conceit that they're a little bit of a chronicle, a cinematic diary of what's going on.

I'll never live long enough to arrive at some sort of peaceful co-existence of some kind. That's probably the only way you could end it on a note of promise, which would mean the zombies would learn how to eat Spam or chicken livers, instead of your liver. But I'll never get to that point.

Yeah, I'm seen by the studios as a genre guy. I've made several non-genre films, but nobody went to see them. I guess I'll never be a member of that club.

I'll never get sick of zombies. I just get sick of producers.

Just because I'm showing somebody being disemboweled doesn't mean I have to get heavy and put a message around it.

I don't try to answer any questions or preach. My personality and my opinions come through in the satire of the films, but I think of them as a snapshot of the time. I have this device, or conceit, where something happens in the world and I can say, "Ooo, I'll talk about that, and I can throw zombies in it! And get it made!" You know, it's kind of my ticket to ride.

I guess in my pictures you're either doomed or you've got yourself a hell of a job.

I don't think you need to spend $40 million to be creepy. The best horror films are the ones that are much less endowed.

I always thought of the zombies as being about revolution, one generation consuming the next.

[on Night of the Living Dead (1968)] At first I didn't think of them as zombies, I thought of them as flesh-eaters or ghouls and never called them zombies in the first film. Then people started to write about them, calling them zombies, and all of a sudden that's what they were: the new zombies. I guess I invented a few rules, like kill the brain and you kill the ghoul, and eventually I surrendered to the idea and called them zombies in Dawn of the Dead (1978), but it was never that important to me what they were. Just that they existed.

[on The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)] It was the filmmaking, the fantasy, the fact that it was a fantasy and it had a few frightening, sort of bizarre things in it. It was everything. It was really a movie for me, and it gave me an early appreciation for the power of visual media--the fact that you could experiment with it. He [Michael Powell] was doing all his tricks in-camera, and they were sort of obvious. That made me feel that, gee, maybe I could figure this medium out. It was transparent, but it worked.

People say, well, what underlies this film is a satire about consumerism. Underlies?? I mean, God, it's like a pie in your face, it's just way up front. And I thought when I made the film, God, I went a little too far, I mean, this is too obvious. And yet, you know, people dig it, the high kicks, it's always the Rockettes that get the applause.