I just love the fact that the father of the modern zombie movie was inspired at the age 11 or 12 by Jacques Offenbach’s “The Tales of Hoffmann!”

George A. Romero, the animating force behind “Night of the Living Dead,” pays tribute to Powell-Pressburger’s bizarre masterpiece at the link. This is the same team that refined nightmare fuel with “The Red Shoes.”

Offenbach was a cello virtuoso who made his fortune as a hugely-successful composer of operetta. He wrote something like 100 of them, including “Orpheus in the Underworld,” which gave us this leggy earworm:

His only opera, “The Tales of Hoffmann,” is his magnum opus. Unfortunately, by the time it was accepted for performance at Paris’ Opéra-Comique, the composer was already in his grave. In fact, he died with the manuscript in his hand, only four months before the work’s premiere.

Debussy noted that the musical establishment of the day had difficulty coping with Offenbach’s sense of irony. Offenbach would no doubt have appreciated the fact that, like one of Romero’s zombies, he was, in a sense, reanimated after death. “The Tales of Hoffmann” has not been out of the repertoire since its premiere in 1881.

Happy birthday, Jacques Offenbach!