George A. Romero's zombie legacy

Director George A. Romero died yesterday, after a battle with cancer at the age of 77, in Toronto where he'd been living since 2004. 

Romero was the man behind 1968's Night of the Living Dead. It was a cult film that only cost about $100,000 to make, but it spawned a generation of zombie films and TV shows all the way up to AMC's hugely popular series, The Walking Dead. Night of the Living Dead and its sequels weren't the first zombie films, but they created a lot of what we now think of as classic zombie stuff: undead humans who move slowly, infect other humans by biting them and can only be killed by a shot to the head. 

Romero's films also helped bring in the idea of zombies as metaphors for everything from conformity to fear of the other. However you look at them, his movies were a huge influence. 

Today, Canadian novelist and screenwriter Tony Burgess speaks to guest host Ali Hassan about Romero and how he revolutionized the zombie genre. 

— Produced by Austin Webb