How zombie director George A Romero predicted Hollywood's real monsters

Frequently dubbed "zombie king" or "the knight of the living dead", George A Romero was also a prophet of Hollywood's doom.

"Hollywood is dead," Romero told the Filmmakers Newsletter Magazine in 1972, in an interview posthumously published.

"You have people who've been attorneys. You have people who've been in other cut-throat businesses and who are looking at it from a purely business point of view," he explained.

What the father of the modern zombie meant, was that Hollywood was being taken over by an army of flesh-eating ghouls who would eventually destroy the film industry.

Looking at recent allegations against Harvey Weinstein, which he denies, and the resurfaced claims of paedophilia in Hollywood , I'm thinking maybe he was right.

On Wednesday, he was posthumously awarded with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Romero's fans made it happen. They launched a crowd funding campaign to pay for it. The star, the ceremony and the maintenance cost around $60,000.

Half a century after changing the face of the horror genre forever and three months after passing away at the age of 77, the industry finally made him justice.

Once seen as the master of the B movie, the low-budget director, the cheap-trickster, Romero is now credited with not only inventing a genre, but creating a new form of monster.

His zombies walked slow, were cheap to make and easy to enjoy. They also raised from the dead, something which previous zombies didn't.

"I didn't call them zombies in Night of the Living Dead, and I didn't think they were," Romero told the Telegraph.

"Because those films - the traditional Haitian voodoo zombie - is not dead. And I thought I was doing something completely new by having the dead rise."

Romero's living dead served as inspiration to big budget hits like World War Z and The Walking Dead, but those were never the zombies he was looking for.

He once described the show as a "soap opera with an occasional zombie", and called the network's decision to part ways with Frank Darabont, the show's creator, "something political".

This was Romero. Always a critic, always an observer of the politics behind each scene, each set and each studio.

For him, zombies served as an allegory for consumerism - America's deadliest disease.

Anyone who remembers Dawn Of The Dead, his second film of the zombie trilogy, will recall an army of zombies strolling through the shopping mall. Walk around a regular mall on a Sunday and spot the differences.

With a sarcastic tone and a political theme, Romero prophesied the downfall of his country and his industry. Drooling monsters whose obsession with money and power has detached them from reality.

In a word, Hollywood.

The floodgates have opened after the Weinstein scandal, and we are now forced to face the fact that the industry we once saw as the epitome of the American dream could end up its epitaph.

Behind the sweeping kisses, the dancing routines, the dramatic overtures and the heartfelt speeches, Hollywood hides a horrid reality of abuse, fear and evil.

Romero, I believe, wouldn't be caught off guard. He was always suspicious of Hollywood, and always refused to shoot there.

"I really didn't want to do that," he told Sight And Sound magazine in 2014. "I've never shot a film there".

One of his last and biggest films Land Of The Dead was eventually picked-up by Universal Studios, but Romero insisted on shooting it in Canada, far from the greasy hands of big studios.

"They were starting to be involved during production, but they never made a script change or anything like that. They did insist on cast," he said.

By keeping his distance and making smaller films outside Hollywood, Romero managed to spend most of his life avoiding the monsters creeping in the industry.

On Wednesday, he was briefly brought back in a Hollywood memorial. Just in time for its funeral.