Zombies, as any cultural critic who’s ever written about zombie movies will tell you, are metaphors. They represent our societal and generational fears, or something. Take George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, that seminal zombie masterpiece from 1968. The zombies aren’t just reanimated corpses who can’t resist bum-rushing a Pennsylvania farmhouse. They symbolize Cold War paranoia and homosexual repression and mainstream tensions about the counterculture and Vietnam War anxiety and a bunch of other stuff too, depending on who you ask. But whatever you think inspired them, Romero’s hippie-era zombies are undeniably the stuff of nightmares. Sure, they’re lurchy at best, and relatively easy to outrun if you just walk at a slow pace in the other direction, but something about their unrelenting “can do” determination and flash mob–style team efforts makes them legitimately terrifying. There’s a palpable tension among the non-zombified heroes, a growing realization that doom is inevitable and the zombies will likely prevail in the end. And any brains they don’t eat will probably be on the receiving end of a bullet, thanks to a redneck posse with orders to shoot first and ask if they were black… er, a zombie later.

So what can we make of the zombie metaphors in Survival of the Dead, Romero’s fifth sequel to his original horror classic? All these years after the zombie apocalypse, the walking undead haven’t really changed that much. They still stagger like a drunk guy looking for a cab, and they’re as single-mindedly carnivorous as ever. But the living aren’t nearly as petrified as they were back in the wacky tobacky 60s. At worst, they’re mildly inconvenienced by zombies. Their reaction is similar to what most of us feel when we’re taking off our shoes at airport security. You know you have to do it, but Jesus Christ, still? At one point in the movie, a National Guard soldier realizes that a zombie has snuck up behind him, and after rolling his eyes with exaggerated annoyance, he mutters “Shiiiiit” before setting its head on fire. Zombies are no longer a real threat. They’re a nuisance at worst, an irritating fact of life, and a stupid one at that. Zombies are about as crafty and devious as the Times Square bomber. If you want to stop a zombie, you just have to pay attention. So the real battle is no longer with the zombies, but between the people who can’t decide on the best way to deal with them. Should we just shoot ‘em all in the head, or try to rehabilitate them with horse meat? The arguments among the living, although ostensibly about saving humanity, are really about proving that the other side isn’t as concerned with national security as you are. As one clan leader confesses, “That’s all I ever wanted, is for you to admit that I’m right and you’re wrong.” Glenn Beck couldn’t have said it better.

I called Romero to talk about Survival of the Dead, which opens in theaters nation-wide tonight. His personality is exactly what you’d expect from a 70-year old horror director who wears enormous old-guy glasses and has old-school ideas about zombies. He was charmingly cantankerous. He also had a roaring, swampy cough, which he blamed on a chest cold he caught in Toronto.

Eric Spitznagel: To paraphrase Freud, sometimes things have symbolism and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Are the zombies in your movies always a metaphor, or are they sometimes just bloodthirsty walking corpses?

George Romero: To me, the zombies have always just been zombies. They’ve always been a cigar. When I first made Night of the Living Dead, it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion. The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon’s Silent Majority or whatever. But I never thought about it that way. My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly. I’m pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies. I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible. (Laughs.)