'Night of the Living Dead' director George Romero hates AMC's 'The Walking Dead.' Calls in a 'Soap Opera'

George Romero is the creator of the zombie film and therefore the father of the genre. His 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead holds the framework for any project attempting to tackle the horror genre, so when he has an opinion on a current zombie-themed project, people listen. That said, Romero doesn't have anything that nice to say about the AMC hit series The Walking Dead!

 In a new interview with Romero, the father of zombies revealed that he was asked to helm an episode or two of The Walking Dead, but declined.

They asked me to do a couple of episodes of The Walking Dead but I didn't want to be a part of it," Romero explained in the interview. "Basically it's just a soap opera with a zombie occasionally. I always used the zombie as a character for satire or a political criticism and I find that missing in what's happening now."

Uh oh! How do you think the team at AMC will take this criticism? Clearly he isn't far off with his assessment, but that doesn't make it any less harsh. I wonder what Daryl Dixon would have to say about this?

But like The Walking Dead, Romero never referred to his living dead creatures as zombies.

"No, never did," he said. "I never thought they were zombies. To me back then, zombies were those voodoo guys who were given some sort of blowfish cocktail and became slaves."

Romero added: "And they weren't dead so I thought I was doing a brand new thing by raising the dead. Not that the dead haven't been risen before... It goes back to Jesus, doesn't it?"