We weren’t a horror movie family. Sure, my parents let me watch Watership Down at a young age and we got the occasional Vincent Price flick late at night on TNT, but in general my siblings and I didn’t get exposed to the more gruesome films out there. When I began to expand my knowledge of film on my own, I usually gravitated horror-wise to more “psychological” movies like The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby. Perhaps it was my snobbery or my innate, deep-seated cowardice, but somehow one of the most famous and influential horror films of them all slipped by me: the movie that launched a thousand zombies, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
Going in, I had a worrisome apprehension that what scared the beejezus out of folks in 1968 would simply leave me chuckling (or worse, yawning). After all, I’m of the Saw generation; if we can sit through a reverse bear-trap, then some black and white zombies shouldn’t be a problem, right? Right?
Well, right. The gore of Night was not as terrifying as it must have seemed 40-odd years ago, either of the entrails-being-tugged-between-hungry-ghouls variety or the walking dead themselves. In fact, it was actually more interesting to contemplate how Romero and company managed to make these pieces seem as realistic as they were (roast ham and donated entrails, it seems). But not being as scary as it was to the seven-year olds at the original premiere doesn’t make Night an outdated movie or a useless one. Viewing it through a modern lens, it seems more like a grand bridge between cinematic horror traditions, between the Universal Pictures creepshows that the filmmakers grew up on and the onslaught of gore-obsessed flicks that would follow in its wake. Night actually surprised me; for being filmed in 1968, the frugality of production lends the film a grainy, cheap air that makes it seem out of time even for its own time. Even the costumes and radio announcements seem more suited to the 1950s, although that perception might owe more to the popular image of the ’60s as a weird and groovy time, maaan. It was a strange kind of throwback, even then, the kind of film that can only be made in a time of changing social mores.
Famed and imitated as it is, the plot seems hardly worth recounting: the recently dead start moving again and devouring people. A young woman gets assaulted by a shambling, gray-skinned man in a cemetery and takes refuge in a nearby house, where a motley assortment of survivors take shelter. They argue, try to work together and get killed off one by one, as is the grand tradition of horror films. It’s the small details that make Night unique, beyond its status as a connection between classic and modern horror. The eventual protagonist is a young, decisive African-American man; the zombies are never called such, instead referred to as “ghouls;” the authorities are portrayed as incompetent and/or myopic before this was a popular cinematic stance.
When mentioning to friends and enemies that I intended to watch Night under the auspices of never having experienced it before, mentions of its intense social commentary were nearly universal. Depending on who was lecturing, the zombies represent capitalists, the survivors are homosexuals, the whole thing is a metaphor for the ’60s, it’s a critique of U.S. military policy in Vietnam and much more. And I think that’s mostly a bunch of bullshit. While Romero’s personal views may have bled into the film, the film supports nearly any kind of social critique simply because it’s devoid of any. There’s no truly explained rationale for the appearance of the zombies, there are (42 year-old spoiler warning!) no survivors, there’s no morality or redeeming message. There’s simply horrible, unstoppable things happening to unprepared people, and that’s difficult to swallow. We always want a reason for things to happen, for there to be a theme under it all to make it palatable. But sometimes there’s just the horror. This movie is one of those times.
But a funny thing happened as I watched Night. From the opening of the film, with its overbearing score (one of its persistent and most irritating flaws) and slowly moving flesh-eaters to the time the windows get boarded up and Molotov cocktails get made, I had been watching with a purely critical eye. I made mental notes to comment on Romero’s use of slanted angles when filming the survivors and rock-steady shots for the zombies, for the chiaroscuro lighting and distorted climactic screens. But when the protagonist finds himself alone in a field full of zombies and they begin to smash windows, I forgot all that and just watched to see what was going to happen next. Even after all this time, Night still has the ability to rivet a viewer.
by Nathan Kamal
