NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) was a low-budget (US$100,000) horror flick, made in grainy black-and-white with unknown actors that has since become a cult classic. Like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), it has had lasting effect on later horror films.Like Psycho, it turned horror conventions upside down. Where most horror films used Expressionistic lighting, this film has a documentary look, mainly through its cost-saving grainy photography and frequent use of a handheld camera. Lighting is natural and there's sparing use of closeups, which distances us from the characters.
Canted (tilted) angles are frequent (study the first zombie attack, for example). But unlike in traditional horror films, these scenes seem less picturesque than realistic, due to the use of a handheld camera and natural lighting.
The zombies (walking dead) differ from past monsters. Classic monsters had a goal (usually sexual or with a sexual subtext). These monsters are mindless; their only goal is to eat, regardless of gender.
Though mindless, the zombies unite in their appetite for human flesh. On the other hand, the humans fight each other.
Romero's film has been recognized for subverting generic expectations, as did Psycho. Like the leading lady was killed midway through Psycho, the leading couple in Romero's film is quickly eliminated, through death or shock.
Two other couples are killed, though they suggest the "normal" nuclear family in one case (Harry, Helen and their child) or a new generation of hope in the case of the younger couple. Escape itself (as in the truck) is a trap, while the nuclear parents are devoured by the child they nurse.
The film can be viewed as an attack on the American nuclear family: a place of death (as in the cemetery) rather than life. Dead family members punish the living, who themselves embody the dead (Barbara and Johnny; the zombies) . In the wake of Columbine and similar events, Romero's film seems prophetic.
The film begins with a sibling couple obliged to tend their father's grave, though hundreds of miles from home (the geographical distance suggests an emotional distance). The couple are not only annoyed by their dead parent, but by each other. Johnny's play at being a monster reveals his inner monstrous feelings, which come to life at the end of the film: the brother returns as a zombie to devour his own sister.
Related social issues are the contemporary Viet Nam war and the race issue in the American South. In fact, at the end of the film the Black hero (never identified as Black in the film) is mistaken for a zombie by a white posse and killed, in scenes (complete with German Shepherd dogs) that evoke the Civil Rights marches in the South.
Finally, the entire cast of characters is killed off. The men in the posse (the "heroes") seem as bad as the zombies. Like zombies, they kill anything that moves, including the hero.
Romero subverts conventions in other ways: the setting is what looks like typical American farmland (Pennsylvania); the "haunted house" is an ordinary house, with corpses inside instead of living people. The house itself is dismantled to defend against the zombies.
Where the time of horror in the classic horror film is night, much of this movie takes place in daylight. Horror, the movie suggests, is now pervasive and can no longer be contained in haunted houses or at night.
Yet the movie's timeline moves from day to night and back to day again: the symbolic Dawn of new hope. But the dawn here, unlike in other horror films, offers no hope: by then the main characters have been killed but one, and he (the hero) is soon dispatched with a single bullet. Day comes, as the soundtrack makes audible, but without hope, belying the biblical Psalm: "weeping may remain for a night, but joy comes in the morning (PSALMS 30:5).
To view this movie, click on the title at the beginning of this essay.
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