The monster master

George A Romero is to horror movies what Andrew Lloyd Webber is to musicals: the man who changed the course of the genre. With his first film, in 1968, Night of the Living Dead, he brought zombies, gore and gallons of fake blood to the screens.

The camp thrills of Hammer House were instantly forgotten in favour of horrific horror. Audiences loved it, fright flicks became big business and he turned into a legend.

After making a handful more in the same vein, his name became so wellloved and respected that producers were - and still are - falling over themselves to get his name attached to their films. "I wound up doing years in development deals on big projects like The Mummy," says the 65-year-old director in his trademark big specs. "I made a lot of money but I wasn't making any movies."

Now, nearly four decades on, he is reclaiming the genre in a new film, the gory, apocalyptic Land of the Dead. This is thanks, partly, to the resurgence of interest in zombies which was sparked by Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later in 2002.

Romero's new film is easily one of the most inventive zombie movies of recent years, save for, perhaps, the British spoof Shaun of the Dead, which Romero was much taken with. "I thought it was terrific," he says. "I thought, they really get it." He was so impressed he gave the writers of Shaun cameos in the new movie, which received a standing ovation when it was screened in Cannes.

He has come some way since 1968. For the new film he was working with a reported budget of $15million. Back then, he and nine friends pitched in their savings to make Night of the Living Dead. One of them, a butcher, supplied off-cuts and sausages which made very convincing entrails. But flesh-eating zombies, it turns out, were not part of the original plan.

"I originally had the idea that I could do this Bergman-like, Virgin Spring kind of thing," Romero recalls. "It was set in medieval times and was an artsy-fartsy kind of thing. I still think it's a pretty good idea, but nobody got it, you know? So I said, 'All right, let's do something commercial: let's do a horror film.' I'd written a short story that I'd ripped off from a Richard Matheson novel called I Am Legend, so I took the first part of that story and started to write the screenplay for Night of the Living Dead."

The result was one of the greatest horror films ever made - a relentless, claustrophobic endgame that is the stuff of nightmare, precisely because there is no escape, no happy ending, no triumph of the survivor. The black-and-white photography and so-so performances make it, if anything, more real and more frightening.

That, however, was a long time ago. If he had known then that he'd still be making zombie movies four decades later, how would Romero have felt? "It would have made me happy to realise that I might be alive 40 years from then because I didn't think that I would be," he says. "But, no, I resisted it for years: I didn't want to do another horror film. I didn't want to get pigeon-holed."

But horror comes hunting for him - and sometimes he has to turn it away. Land of the Dead was originally to have been made at 20th Century Fox, (UIP finally took it up), who had just picked up Danny Boyle's London-set zombie movie, 28 Days Later, and thought it might be onto something.