Films of the Dead: Romero & Co.

Few film subgenres have proven more resilient than the zombie horror movie, the modern version of which began with George A. Romero’s deathless 1968 indie masterpiece Night of the Living Dead. That film’s mixture of low-budget innovation, shocking horror, and political commentary launched a quarter-century-plus of zombie movies, including a remarkably generative cycle of films from Romero himself: brainy movies about the brain-dead—satires on contemporary American life that used the zombie as metaphor. Romero’s work has been so influential that it’s inspired hordes of fascinating, funny, gross, and thoughtful movies. In conjunction with MoMI’s Living with The Walking Dead exhibition (which examines a series that itself owes a clear debt to Romero’s work), we present Romero’s cinematic zombie corpus, plus a delirious selection of modern variations from filmmakers as varied as Edgar Wright, Zack Snyder, Jim Jarmusch, and Shinichiro Ueda. Please note: Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) will be scheduled at a later date.

Tickets: $15 / $11 senior and students / $9 youth (ages 3–17) / Free or discounted for MoMI members ($7-11).

Ticketholders may add on a visit to the Living with the Walking Dead exhibition for $10.

Coming soon: White Zombie: Nightmares of Empire—This series, beginning with the Bela Lugosi horror classic White Zombie (1932), will chart the zombie’s propensity to mirror not just the horror of imperialism but also a multitude of its anxieties, from miscegenation to war.

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