Land of the Dead (2005)

Much as Romero has evolved into a peerless horror filmmaker, his zombies have advanced from the stumbling, somewhat mindless creatures to ones that now possess a slowly dawning consciousness and rudimentary planning and organizational skills. Once Big Daddy (played by Eugene Clark)—an aptly named walking dead man of rather large stature—decides to fight back, he becomes a galvanizing force within the zombie ranks. After he witnesses a routine slaughter of a “stench” (one of several less-than-flattering synonyms for zombie), he begins a march toward the city, signaling to other walkers to join in the ever-expanding army. Their unspoken aim? Retribution.

Once word was out that the Romero was indeed making another film, the production office was deluged with an ongoing stream of requests by those wanting to be a Romero zombie—and not just from actors. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg (whose film, Shaun of the Dead, was a loving tribute to Romero’s oeuvre) made the pilgrimage to the set to appear in the arena scenes as Photo Booth Zombies. Makeup specialist Tom Savini (responsible for designing the look of Romero’s early zombies and now an actor and director in his own right) also makes a cameo appearance as a machete-wielding zombie. A Strange New Land: Creating Romero’s World

Special effects makeup supervisor Greg Nicotero (half of the team that also included Howard Berger, both of KNB EFX Group) received his first job in the industry on Romero’s Day of the Dead in 1984, working on Tom Savini’s team. Since then he has become one of the industry’s elite cadre of special effects makeup experts. Nicotero relished the chance to put his imprint on Romero’s cult creatures and says, “It’s amazing—given that I started my career on a George Romero movie—to get the opportunity to take everything that I have learned over the past 20 years and apply it the newest Romero zombie movie.”

Romero, Grunwald and Nicotero spent hours discussing the particular look of the zombies—“We wanted to make sure that the zombies still felt fresh and different,” explains Nicotero, “if you can use that terminology with the walking dead. A lot of the designs of the characters were done with that in mind.”

Nicotero feels obliged to differentiate the film from the spate of zombie films released in recent years: “It’s not a movie with zombies running 90 miles-an-hour, and you never get a chance to look at them. Romero zombies are slow, so the camera is on them for extended lengths of time. So each zombie has to look great.”

Romero adds his own perspective: “Karloff’s prosthetic makeup in Frankenstein was great—but that was just one makeup. Nicotero and his team had to do that about 15 times every day, for our ‘hero’ zombies, the ones on-camera the most.” The use of radio-controlled animatronic heads also gave Romero more flexibility in designing the stunts possible. By varying the level of decay from zombie to zombie, Nicotero was also able to expand the look of the crowd scenes.

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