Night of the Living Dead

Dan O'Bannon's film grew out of John Russo's half of the Living Dead rights after he and Romero went separate ways, and it builds its premise on the original: a warehouse worker explains that Night of the Living Dead was based on a true story the army covered up, and then opens one of the canisters. It also gave the zombie its taste for brains, which Romero's never had.

Black Summer strips the zombie series back to what Romero's first film actually is: strangers who do not know each other, no explanation, no cure plot, no military resolution, and the other survivors as the greater danger. It also reproduces the 1968 film's refusal of catharsis. Characters established as protagonists are killed without a scene to mark it, and the ending resolves nothing. The series is shot in long takes with almost no score, which is a modern method reaching for the same documentary flatness Romero got from a low budget and black and white.

Every modern zombie narrative descends from Romero's 1968 film, which is where the creature stopped being a Haitian folklore figure controlled by a master and became an anonymous reanimated corpse in a crowd, spreading by bite. Z Nation takes that inheritance and plays it as a road series: a cross-country escort of the one person whose blood might be a vaccine. The rules it runs on, the bite that converts, the head as the only reliable target, and the group that fractures from inside, are all Romero's and are treated as given rather than explained.

The Romero template moved onto a KTX train: a sealed space that cannot be left, the carriages falling one by one standing in for the farmhouse rooms, and the passengers who lock a door against other passengers doing the film's real damage. The class reading is Romero's too. His survivors turn on each other along the lines society already drew; Yeon's do it along money, and the businessman who has spent the film protecting his own is given the ending that implies. Filed MEDIUM: this is inheritance through a genre rather than a stated debt.

Boyle and Garland have both acknowledged Romero, while being careful that these are not zombies but the living infected. What carries over is Romero's whole argument rather than his monster: the dead are the setting, and the film is about the survivors turning on each other indoors. The soldiers at the manor house are 28 Days Later's version of the posse who shoot Ben. Boyle has also named The Day of the Triffids for the empty-city opening, which is why this is MEDIUM rather than HIGH.