How George A Romero helped me to over­come an eat­ing disorder

As a teenag­er, hor­ror films were my home. They were a place to take refuge, a place to indulge myself and rewind, pause and stop images of bod­ies. As a 29-year-old adult, I still go back to the films of George A Romero because they hold a mem­o­ry of who I used to be, of what I used to do.

From the ages of 12 until I was near­ly 18, I had an eat­ing dis­or­der. I couldn’t swal­low food. I would chew it up and spit it out into my palm, the balls of food placed in my pock­ets and flushed down toi­lets, put behind radi­a­tors, out win­dows. I was inven­tive with the dis­pos­al of food. And so the din­ner table became a sort of hor­ror film in itself, where din­ner was a gru­elling tor­ture ses­sion of watch­ing oth­ers swallow.

So I retreat­ed. I would go to my bed­room and watch films for hours on end on a small 15-inch tele­vi­sion set with VHS combo.

So much has been said about Romero’s Liv­ing Dead films that per­haps I’d be retread­ing old ground by telling you what so many oth­ers have already. But I was always less inter­est­ed in the social com­men­tary aspect of these films and more by the bod­ies and the gore. I felt I didn’t have time to con­sume an entire nar­ra­tive. I had to con­sume only the essen­tials: guts being torn from someone’s rib cage; a neck being chewed on; the top of a zombie’s head being sliced off by a rotor blade.

In many ways, my eat­ing dis­or­der not only frus­trat­ed me but also made me inca­pable of con­sum­ing cin­e­ma in a tra­di­tion­al way. There were no begin­nings, mid­dles or ends: I start­ed wher­ev­er I want­ed. I moved through the nar­ra­tive like I was con­vuls­ing: for­ward-wind­ing and rewind­ing, for­ward-wind­ing, rewind­ing, paus­ing and focus­ing on frag­ments. Becom­ing fix­at­ed on paused faces and paused guts; notic­ing things that had no bear­ing on sto­ry but felt like a secret knowl­edge, access to a world I had con­trol over. 

I remem­ber see­ing the end­ing of 1978’s Dawn of the Dead for the first time. As the shop­ping mall is over­run with zom­bies and bik­ers, Romero begins to ramp up the vio­lence into some­thing sim­i­lar to an orgasm. I used to pause and watch how the con­sis­ten­cy of the skin was like that of a deflat­ed bal­loon as the zombie’s pierced their fin­gers through and tore the biker’s guts out.

In many ways, Romero made a film that spoke to me as some­body who did not eat sol­id food. As a young teenag­er who put food in his mouth but didn’t ben­e­fit from it in any way, I was the zombie. 

But it was the restora­tive pow­er of gore that made me con­scious of my body as some­thing that could be trained to over­come my prob­lem: the screen body being tak­en apart was like a table of con­tents to me, like a book to be read. I couldn’t digest the entire film, so here I was with scenes and moments, deaths and dis­mem­ber­ments, watch­ing bod­ies ​“being tak­en apart” and, in my own head, tak­ing myself apart and hop­ing, like Seth Brun­dle in The Fly, I could put it back togeth­er again. 

Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead are, to me, films of hunger and the frus­tra­tion of bod­ies. Both films are filled with images of zom­bies eat­ing and even now it seems strange that for a teenag­er who did not eat, I seemed to be obsessed with a film that was con­cerned with hunger and eating. 

In Day of the Dead, Doc­tor Logan dan­gles his hand in front of a zom­bie and says: ​“It wants me – it wants food. But it has no stom­ach.” This was me. I was the same, putting food in my mouth and smil­ing at the din­ner table pre­tend­ing that I was a part of a fam­i­ly whose bod­ies worked – but I wasn’t. Like the zom­bie, I ​“got no nour­ish­ment” from this charade. 

But the nour­ish­ment was the gore. Revis­it­ing the film today, I still feel that ​“pri­mor­dial instinct” that Doc­tor Logan speaks about. Its end­ing is, quite lit­er­al­ly, a ban­quet of blood as the zom­bies over­run the under­ground bunker and start rip­ping the soldier’s to shreds. Bod­ies are decon­struct­ed limb by limb, organ by organ. To me, these scenes were like my very own anato­my les­son, the vio­lence a way of artic­u­lat­ing what was absent in my life at the din­ner table.

When George A Romero passed away recent­ly, I watched Day of the Dead again and again. While the sto­ry is still grip­ping, I found myself get­ting into the old habit of paus­ing and rewind­ing the film to see the decon­struc­tion of the bod­ies again and again. These films are home to me, and always will be.