If there’s one thing George A. Romero knows, it’s zombies. It’s no surprise, really—after all, he’s been working with them for more than 40 years.

Having pretty much invented the zombie genre with his 1968 masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead, the 70-year-old director is back with his sixth living dead film, the Ontario-shot George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead (out on DVD on August 31st). Set in modern day on a small island off the coast of Delaware, the film follows a group of National Guard deserters, survivors of a zombie apocalypse, seeking refuge among two warring families.

There’s a surprising twist, however—it’s, well, sort of a western.

“After I had written the first draft of the script, and I have these two old feuding characters in mind, I happened to see, on Turner [Classic Movie network], an old western that I loved called The Big Country,” Romero says on the phone from his home in Toronto. “I said, ”˜Wow! We can have even more fun if we tried to emulate this and try to really make it look like a western.’” Following a screening of William Wyler’s 1958 epic for his crew—to much enthusiasm—Romero went back and tweaked the script (“I wrote in horses instead of cars, basically”) and a new zombie subgenre was born.

Of course, Romero’s zombie films always have always been about more than just zombies. Or even straight horror, for that matter—as, through the decades, he’s consistently managed a thoughtful blend of thrills, social commentary, humour, and EC Comics–style gore.

Romero’s first feature, Night of the Living Dead, shot guerrilla-style in Pittsburgh on a shoestring budget, deftly encapsulated the turbulent times of its origin. “We were just children of the '60s and I think our anger, and our own bias, crept in to that film,” Romero recalls (although he readily admits that “on our minds first and foremost was to push the envelope a little bit and try to make a shocking little horror film”). And no one, it seems, was more surprised than Romero when a few years later, the prestigious French publication Les Cahiers du cinéma praised the film as essential American cinema. “Jesus!” he laughs, “Who knew?”

As Romero began preparing a sequel, Dawn of the Dead (1979) the project became greatly affected by a chance visit. “I socially knew the people in Pittsburgh who developed the first big indoor shopping mall,” he recalls, “and I went out to visit, before it opened. Trucks were rolling in, bringing everything you could ever possibly dream of into this ”˜temple’, none of us had ever seen anything like it.” As a result, Dawn of the Dead wound up with not only the greatest location shoot in horror history, but a nuanced subtext about consumerism and the American reliance on material trappings. “Ever since then”, Romero continues, “I’ve tried to make the films be about something, other than just shooting zombies.”

That's not to say that there isn’t plenty of zombie shooting in Romero’s movies. In fact, when Dawn of the Dead first came out it was, essentially, an absolute: the four-minute-mile or, if you will, the sixty-home-runs of gore. It was a film that made Sam Peckinpah look like Walt Disney, and a vision so shocking that the Motion Picture Association of America rated it X for its graphic violence. (Romero took the unusual route of releasing it unrated, thereby sidestepping the X-rating normally associated with explicit sex.)

Groundbreaking as Dawn of the Dead was, time has inexorably marched on. Horror movies today are more graphic, more gruesome, and when it comes to movies like Hostel and the Saw series (commonly hung with the handle ”˜torture porn’), much more cruel—something that doesn’t sit well with Romero, whose cinematic violence has always come with a wink and a nudge.

“They’re mean-spirited,” the normally jovial Romero says, turning serious. “I mean, are we supposed to have abandoned all mercy for each other? I don’t know what those films are about. I’ve seen a couple of them and sort of given up on them. My biggest disappointment is that people don’t use fantasy as allegory. It’s still wide-open for that.”

Looking at the rest of Romero’s zombie films, you can see just how much he values an allegorical and multi-layered script. Day of the Dead (1985) satirizes the military-industrial complex; Land of the Dead (2005) handles class divides; and Diary of the Dead (2007), a huge return-on-investment in video sales, explores the rise of social media and the role of the citizen-journalist. As for Survival of the Dead, Romero says that the idea of the feuding families serves to fashion “a more universal theme about war, enmities that don’t die, and conflicts where people don’t even remember what started it.”

Heady topics to mix in with flesh-eating zombies, to be sure, but Romero does love to examine human nature and all its self-defeating weaknesses. “My zombie films wouldn’t be nothin’ without some stupid humans running around,” he says, laughing. “People screw themselves up by not doing the right thing, or not addressing it properly, or not addressing it at all. It’s something, thematically, that I like to work with."

With Survival of the Dead, Romero moves into a brave new (and interconnected) world. “This is the first time I’ve been able to repeat characters,” he explains happily, “because the other films are all owned by different people. I have this conceit that if this film makes the kind of money that Diary made, and they want more, I’ll shoot two more and they’ll both use minor characters from Diary and in the end we’ll have this four-film saga with themes that cross and characters that cross.”

After years of expanding budgets, and time served in Hollywood, Romero’s four-film vision also represents a purposeful return to his younger days of independent, small-scale filmmaking (“in exchange for creative control,” he explains). With reduced budgets and tight shooting schedules, he's had to adjust the way he does things, including a switch from film to the Sony Red high-definition digital camera: “The resolution is just unbelievable,” he says enthusiastically. “You can blow it up fifty percent and not lose anything. You’re able to reframe and relight—it’s almost like having your own darkroom.”

Filming in Toronto and its environs also helps keep costs down. “I fell in love with the city,” he says, during a location shoot for his 2000 film Bruiser (“little-known, little-seen, but I film that I really love”) and decided to stay permanently. With a new close-knit family of Canadian friends and coworkers (including George Stroumboulopoulos, who has a cameo in Survival of the Dead), Romero shot his last three movies in Ontario. “I love it, I really love it,” he says. “It’s clean, it’s got all the cultural advantages, wonderful people, and it’s a great place to work.”

Advances in computer-generated special makeup effects have helped Romero’s bottom line, as well. “The most expensive time is the on-set time, and you need to get out of there as quickly as you can,” he says, explaining why he’s done away with much of the prosthetic effects used in his earlier films. “Even for just head shots, if you’re trying to use squibs, if it goes wrong or doesn’t synch up with the gun, you gotta clean the walls, it just costs you time. One actor aims the gun and one actor falls down, and the gun flash is CG and the splatter is CG, it just makes life that much easier.” It also ups the ante on Romero’s trademark zombie kills, with Survival of the Dead offering up some doozies. “I really went for some Looney Tunes humour. Real Chuck Jones stuff. No way can you do that without CG,” Romero says. “You have to dispose of zombies in clever ways in order to compete these days.”

Even so, it’s always been obvious that Romero has a great deal of fondness for the undead who populate his films. “They’re predators, but they’re like sharks. You can figure them out. They don’t lie, they don’t have agendas,” he says.

“I guess I’ve always been more sympathetic toward the zombies than I have the humans. It’s a Karloff thing, it’s a King Kong thing. The monster’s just doing what comes natural, you know?”