Hello, my name's Justin McClue, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club.

I'd like to say that the zombies are a symbol of patriarchal capitalism.

Okay, thanks for clearing that up for me.

And that's it for this week.

Who's the episode on? We're doing an episode on George Romero. Rest in peace. Who recently passed away last week, who happens to be the man who made my favorite film of all time, no question. And he's also a man. And that film is Bruiser. Love it. What is identity?

You don't know, but Bruiser is going to explore those questions.

But that brings up a good point that George Romero gets talked a lot about in the context of Nine Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead.

Everything else is just kind of, you know, the other movies people watch.

And I have to admit that for most of my life, that's kind of been my attitude around him,

which I know is wrong, but I'm mostly unfamiliar with his non-zombie movies,

even though his zombie movies have always been very important to me.

The thing about George Romero is that he never really had a chance to penetrate mainstream filmmaking in the way that you would have thought he would have, having made Night and Dawn and Day of the Dead. He was always an independent figure in everything that he did. And a very regional figure, too. So many of his early to mid-period movies are very Pennsylvania-centric movies.

So many of his late-period movies are very Toronto-centric movies.

There are some studio movies in between there,

but they are on the low end of reputability for the studio system.

So George Romero started his career doing commercials and industrials, creating a kind of

commune around creating this kind of art. And they always wanted to make movies. And the first

movie that they ended up making was Night of the Living Dead. That was not their first choice.

George Romero was actually shopping around a Bergman-esque

art house drama about a young man going through, I believe, a plague-riddled countryside

looking for love. This seems to be the case of so many of these guys, like Wes Craven,

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