I liked the '28 Days Later' films, but they're not zombies; they're not dead. They're not using it in the same way.
I also have always liked the monster within idea. I like the zombies being us. Zombies are the blue-collar monsters.
I have a very quiet life. There's nothing weird.
I saw 'Dracula,' 'Frankenstein,' 'The Wolf Man,' 'The Invisible Man.' I saw all those guys on the big screen at RKO in the Bronx. I just always loved that stuff. I loved other stuff, too. That's the thing. That wasn't all I wanted to be.
I've never had a zombie eat a brain! I don't know where that comes from. Who says zombies eat brains?
Collaborate, don't dictate.
When we made 'Night of the Living Dead,' we got riddled. There was this famous article Roger Ebert wrote just blasting the film because he had gone to see it at some screening where there were all these kids in the audience. I don't know why that happened. We didn't make the movie for kids.
A lot of my friends are people who do horror films: Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Stephen King.
If one horror film hits, everyone says, 'Let's go make a horror film.' It's the genre that never dies.
Nothing's ever real until it's real.
To me, the zombies have always just been zombies. They've always been a cigar. When I first made 'Night of the Living Dead,' it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion. The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon's Silent Majority or whatever. But I never thought about it that way.
Film is a very expensive medium.
I grew up in New York City. And I lived in the Bronx in a place called Parkchester.
Anybody who tunes into Rush Limabaugh already knows what he's going to say and is already inclined to agree. So it winds up creating tribes.
The grotesque has never really affected or frightened me. I guess it's real-life stuff that frightens me much more.
My zombies will never take over the world because I need the humans. The humans are the ones I dislike the most, and they're where the trouble really lies.
People say you're trapped in this genre. You're a horror guy. I say wait a minute - I'm able to say exactly what I think. I'm able to talk about, comment about, take snapshots of what's going on at the time. I don't feel trapped. I feel like this is my way of being able to express myself.
If I fail, the film industry writes me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart.
Zombies to me don't represent anything in particular. They are a global disaster that people don't know how to deal with.
My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines.
