9 Horror Directors Who Deserve An Honorary Oscar

John Carpenter credits Alfred Hitchcock as the director who took the horror film out of Eastern European castles and placed it in modern day America, but it fell to George Romero to add the subversion that was hitherto missing from the genre. In Night Of The Living Dead and its sequels, authority, religion and even the family unit are all proven to be useless against the encroaching apocalypse. The only thing that works: shoot the zombies in the head.

Romero is the only director to have made two masterpieces in the same series, and when Dawn Of The Dead proved a hit a decade later, he became arguably the most imitated genre director of all time. Every zombie film, book, video game or TV series you see today is an nth generation copy of his contribution to the genre.

Even if he’d never directed his Living Dead films, Romero would be remembered for The Crazies (1973), Knightriders (1981) and Creepshow (1982), though his most horrifying film is surely Martin (1978), which Kim Newman calls “the most sophisticated re-examination of vampire lore yet attempted.”

Along the way, he helped launch the careers of Tom Savini (who made his acting debut in Martin, and also provided the effects), John Russo (who co-wrote NOTLD, and later directed 1981’s Midnight) and a jobbing actor named Ed Harris, who he cast in Knightriders and Creepshow.