"George A. Romero has been called the "Father of the Modern Zombie Movie." His 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead, sparked an entirely new sub-genre of horror cinema. Along with this new medium of fright came a new way to interpret America. The Dead series brings in aspects of the American Dream including racial tensions, home ownership, and consumerism and how survivors must cope with the new menace and each other within an apocalyptic scenario. Each film offers a glimpse into the extra-filmic culture surrounding the films' release allowing the audience to interpret the socio-historical subtext. Romero's films demonstrate the inability for human cooperation to occur within a disaster scenario, and that this spells as the ultimate end for the status quo. As for the living dead, the shambling masses are the mirror of the human society that is on its knees, operating on an instinctual mode of mass consumption. As the films progress, the living dead become self-aware and move to protect their own society they have taken from the survivors. The American Dream, the fallen society followed, only turned humanity into the living dead, and those that kept with the American Dream after the beginning of the contagion were not capable of surviving within such a hostile environment."--Abstract.
