George A. Romero receives the SITGES-International Film Festival of Catalonia's Grand Honorary Award

The director took the Auditori's stage to collect the award before the presentation of his latest film, Diary of the Dead.

Sitges crowned Romero as the father of modern horror. At this point no one doubts the profound impression left by his first work, Night of the Living Dead (1968), on earlier genre production and, probably, to speak of Romero and contemporary film is to speak of the concept of authorship in the horror genre, a label debated over and over again and that has always brought dogma and praxis, counterculture and canon face to face.

New Yorker George A. Romero's films have fundamentally revolved around the subejct of zombiesr, so much so that today we can't conceive of watching movies on the living dead without receiving echoes from his work. One of the big themes in horror films, the dead person that comes back to life and devours the living, the figures of cannibalism and their figurative leap from pictorial arts to the big screen, contribute to generating a series of meanings about our convulsive society, used a throwing weapon for criticisms of capitalism, the consumer society and, and shown in his last zombie foray, the perverse manipulation of the mass media.