The basic traits are well-known. Their speech is unrefined. They dress poorly. They eat the living and congregate in malls. And while they usually stagger around shedding body parts, some have been known to run.

Right?

“Wrong,” says George A. Romero, shaking his head. “If they’re zombies, they move slowly. Their muscles have atrophied, some rigormortis has set in. Plus, it’s just scarier that way: When they’re slow but unstoppable.”

The 68-year-old dean of Zombie Studies is weighing in from a plush sofa in Toronto—hundreds of miles from his beloved former home of Pittsburgh, 40 years from the low-budget film that cemented his status as horror mandarin. His oversize glasses, scraggly beard, and ponytail suggest a tenured radical at office hours.

Forty years ago, on October 1, 1968, Romero’s debut film, Night of the Living Dead, first rose from the gurney to give birth to the modern horror film. In his memoir, Stephen King demarcates the time before and after “George Romero’s ferocious indie Night of the Living Dead came along and changed everything forever”—setting a new standard of explicit gore, primal terror, and social relevance that was soon taken up by a shock troop of young indie filmmakers like Wes (The Last House on the Left) Craven, Tobe (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) Hooper, and John (Halloween) Carpenter, establishing the core syllabus.

Today “of the Dead” knockoffs number in the hundreds, and zombies gnash their way through films like I Am Legend, Shaun of the Dead (which Romero loved), and 2004’s 28 Days Later (which he did not, but abided since the fleet-footed monsters aren’t dead but “infected”). Stalking through comedy sketches, music videos, Wii games, Facebook avatars, and undead flash mobs, the zombie remains the alpha-monster of the new century. But to Romero the undead aren’t monsters but a métier. He himself reanimated the concept several times after Night—once to critique mindless consumerism (1978’s hallowed Dawn of the Dead), once again to explore military groupthink (’85’s Day of the Dead), and later to take on class warfare (2005’s Land of the Dead). “I end up coming back to this franchise whenever I want to make a comment or take a snapshot of the time,” says Romero.

Earlier this year, Romero released Diary of the Dead—his fifth installment in the opus that makes up his life’s work. The film revisits the spirit and ideas of Night from a contemporary perspective, presenting itself as an ad hoc documentary by students at the University of Pittsburgh who—like a band of fledgling Romeros—were out shooting a student horror film when news of a grisly current event abruptly changed their focus. According to his longtime friend and collaborator, splatter effects guru Tom Savini, “He has not lost his ability to see what’s going on in the world and incorporate it as a subtext into his film.”

Romero’s creative reflowering occurs at a poignant time. As he nears 70, Romero knows full well that Diary appears a bookend to an era and a life in American horror. These days audiences are more likely to get their frights from torture-porn creepfests like Saw and Hostel than Romero’s nuanced, socially conscious offering. The recent film may examine the fracturing babble of the new-media world (the apocalypse seen via cameras of college film students), but its undercurrents lap up against something just as real and a bit more terrifying: death itself, which Romero happens to be viewing from his best vantage point thus far.

George Romero was born in the Bronx in 1940, the son of a Cuban-American commercial artist and a Lithuanian mom. “My father was Cuban, so I was considered Latino,” he says. “In an Italian neighborhood, I was the Shark among Jets.” Romero grew up in the age of Gothic studio horror films. “Traditional scoring, traditional spooky settings, haunted houses—something just jumps out of the dark at you. It’s that primal idea that something’s in there—don’t open the door, don’t go in the attic—those tried-and-true values that still really work.”

As a teenager Romero was transfixed by the lavish 1951 cinematic opera, The Tales of Hoffmann, and soon he made a habit of renting a projector to take out a print from the Janus movie house. “There were only a few places that you could do that,” he recalls. “And if Tales of Hoffmann was ever out—and this was a movie no one took out—it was always this one kid who had it. This kid Marty Scorsese.”

Like his beetle-browed Manhattan counterpart, Romero picked up directing early. For his 14th birthday, he received an 8 mm camera that soon led to his arrest for throwing a burning dummy off a roof—part of an early directorial effort called Man From Meteor. (“It wasn’t worth it,” Romero says. “The shot wasn’t very good.”) Romero doesn’t remember any unconscious hobgoblins from the time other than the era’s standard nightmare. “What scared me was the bomb,” he says. “I lived in New York and was in the zone that Ed Sullivan would show in concentric circles—‘This part is certain death,’ ‘This part is probable death…’ We were sort of in the third ring, so it was a tossup.”