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Turning Tables on Color, Horror, and Hollywood

Night of the Living Dead (1968)Black hero for a bunch white dweebs…This is a great, creaky horror film, with shades of 1920s expressionism
and 1960s hip/underground counterculture. It is really nutty and crude
and grotesque, but brilliant and scary, too. There's no question that
it's rawness makes it seem like our own home movie, and so our own
reality. It's not just a Hollywood trick to have zombies breaking down
your door.The fact that the main character and most sane person is
African-American is no small thing. Not only does this logically pull
from the Haitian roots of zombi-ism, but it breaks barriers of basic
interpersonal racial hierarchies. That is, the movies, lagging behind
much of real life, had rarely played the black male in a lead role with
such honest lack of self-consciousness before–maybe ever. I'd have to
wrack my brain to see what other films are contenders, and I don't mean
to dis the great contribution of Paul Robeson, Sidney Poitier, and
others (which includes a number from the 1960s), but Night of the
Living Dead is at least a contender in adding to a normalcy for the
next generation, a seemingly more liberal and "enlightened" society of
young people who are now, thankfully, the norm. Look who's president.What makes the movie important beyond this, in terms of movie-making,
is that it fits in with a broader trend to a naturalism in the details,
that now-famous shift in the late 1960s to filming with less polish and
more everyday believability. I just watched MASH (1970) and was
surprised to see it there–you forget how movies from the early/mid
1960s, even great ones about middle class people like The Apartment
(1960) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) or even The Odd Couple (1968)
are stylized and "perfect" in some controlled (and brilliant) way. I
like those kinds of movies, sometimes prefer them very much, but I see
the penetration of this other kind of home-movie no-nonsense truth. And
so do other people. Night of the Living Dead is the highest grossing
film of 1968.You do wonder why our hero doesn't just call for help at the end. He is
too smart to just get shot, but once that happens, the film does
something conspicuous–it turns to still frames in a newspaper kind of
texture, as if we are seeing documentary photojournalism in print. This
adds to a kind of realism and finality, but it also reminds us of
African-American victims of violence in the 1960s, seen this same way
in the news. The fact that the white authorities are typical rural guys
of the time, rednecks in some stereotyped way, and that they casually
kill this black man, takes on significance.Not that the zombies are real, or that the acting is consistent (it
sometimes is stellar). But as a style, you enter the film with
different eyes, and different–not lower–expectations. Like watching a
silent film, or Star Wars, or any variety of movie, you learn how to
watch it right away, and adapt to its rules. The world within this film
is bizarre and gripping and fabulous, in every sense of the words.
Director Romero puts it together with such intuitive artfulness, you
accept all its foibles as necessary to the end. Don't expect The
Shining or Frankenstein or any alternative horror flick, and take its
odd genius for what it is.

secondtake from United States - 21 June 2009

Horror forever

Night of the Living Dead is about as cheaply made as movies get, and as
revolutionary. The fact that it is a cleaver metaphor for 1960's
America, has been heavily emphasized as part of the brilliance of
George Romero's film debut, but the real reason to love this movie, is
the revolution it started in the genre. Many horror film's have since
followed in Romero's footsteps, but none have ever, and will ever match
the uniqueness of Night of The Living Dead.The plot is simple and practical. A handful of people who escape death
take refuge in an abandoned house, where they make a stand against a
army of zombies, corpses brought back to life because of a recent
radiation catastrophe in the country. One of the many brilliant traits
of the the film is the way it is shown, in grainy black and white for a
more haunting and almost ancient cinematic effect, like the classic
horror films with Lugosi and Karloff.Night of the Living Dead is a sensation. Unfortunaly due to all the
action and gore laden zombie films which have come out ever since,
contemporary viewers might find this one a little boring, but any true
fan will love this and should see it regardless of the controversy.

samkay1 from Canada - 5 June 2009

The father of all zombie films

In 1968, George A. Romero created a horror classic on a shoestring
budget that would capture the attention of movie audiences all over the
country. The film still captivates audiences today and has inspired a
whole host of zombie films like "Zombie," and "Return of the Living
Dead." But, this movie was never duplicated in it's greatness. The film
follows a small group of people who barricade themselves in a farmhouse
to try to keep safe from a zombie invasion. Filled with social
commentary, George A. Romero created a revolution for the horror genre
and secured his named as a horror movie legend. This film has
phenomenal acting from Judith O' Dea, Duane Eastman, Kyra Schon, and
Karl Hardman. The work that everyone involved with this movie really
shows because "Night of the Living Dead" is still talked about and
enjoyed by many audiences more than 40 years later. This movie inspired
4 sequels, and 2 remakes. The movie redefined the horror genre and no
movie like it will ever be made again.

Garet Payne from United States - 13 May 2009

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Like everyone else reviewing this film, I'm a horror fan. Hopefully,
they're all horror fans too. I think I have good taste and know a good
horror movie when I see it. Night of the Living Dead is considered one
of the greatest and most important horror films of all time. It's
impossible to ignore that and the fact that the film's director, George
A. Romero, gets a lot of attention because of it. With the current
state of the genre, tastes and styles continuing to change so much and
so fast, a lot of the attention on Romero is negative. Many young
horror fans are going back to see his earlier films and wondering why
they are, and he is, so famous. I consider Romero to be a horror
director with a very inconsistent record of hits and misses. He's
mostly known for his "Dead" series of zombie films, but it's also worth
mentioning that he has a lot of military plots in his films. In Night,
you don't really see the military, rather you see an army on TV,
comprised of gun-carrying U.S. citizens.The 1960's were a decade where a great deal of Hollywood films went
into color. While Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 hit Psycho was in black and
white, 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's was in color. And the trend went
back and forth again, until into the 1970's, where almost no films at
all were released in black and white (except for David Lynch's
Eraserhead). For the purpose of mood, most 60's horror films remained
in black and white (The Haunting, Repulsion, Village of the Damned,
Black Sunday, Spider Baby, The Innocents, Carnival of Souls). About
black and white itself, it's often a very boring way to watch films.
But it's also quite gritty. And used by certain filmmakers to achieve a
realistic tone to their films' subject matter. Especially in the 60's.
Most of Night of the Living Dead certainly feels realistic. For its'
time, at least. It seems to be a movie about a group of people trapped
inside a fairly enclosed space, with tensions mounting, then things
reach a boiling point and their shelter starts to feel like a tomb.Night of the Living Dead features zombies and raises the question of
where they come from without doing much to answer it. That's because we
follow the characters as they enter the farmhouse and they wait for
news or for others to come to their rescue. So, realistically, were we
in the same position as any one of the characters, we would know only
what the TV and radio were telling us. There were zombie films made
before Night- White Zombie and Plague of the Zombies, as well as
potentially, any film featuring The Mummy. And Frankenstein, as well,
is a re-animated corpse. But while those were relegated to being cult
films and failed to break through into the American mainstream, Night
did in fact make a big impact on American filmgoers. I believe it may
have first cracked the drive-ins. And, if there were grindhouse
theaters at that time, this probably played quite a few of those. With
a film like this, you really have to consider and know its' history
before passing judgment on it. Also, when you do pass judgment, you
have to make it personally relevant.Night has - and I know I'm not alone in seeing it this way - not aged
well. It remains what it was in the 60's and styles in the genre
changed so fast, the film's approach as horror was near completely
obsolete by the arrival of Wes Craven's shocking and much less
restrained debut, The Last House on the Left, a mere 4 years later.
Though 1974's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was something of a return to
Night's much less overt and in-your-face violence, Hollywood's approach
to horror was also becoming more explicit, as early as 1973's The
Exorcist, one of the bloodiest and most graphic horror films of its
day. But even in the case of Chainsaw, the message was clear- black and
white was being permanently retired by cutting edge, amateur film
directors getting their start in the horror genre. Which is both a good
thing and a bad thing for Night. The film became an instant classic.
But it also, I think, failed to keep its' impact into the mid-1970's
and the rapidly changing styles.My personal feeling on the film is that it is mostly boring. As its'
focus is more on human-created tensions, I admire Romero and the fact
that Night's been mostly successful (as the IMDb's rating can attest
to) with film fans. But, this film is too realistic to be scary. I find
films scarier when they are more like a nightmare, even surreal, but
with elements of reality. Depending on the concept, horror films that
concentrate more on characterization often lack a true sense of the
chaotic and irrational quality of a person's worst nightmare. In a
situation like this, where people are upsetting you and challenging
everything you say and do, I feel more apt to be angry than scared.
However, the film does have a few standout sequences that are an
important signature to any good horror movie. One is a death scene
involving a gardening spade. Another is a montage of zombies eating the
internal organs of their victims. And the last is a scene of one of the
main characters, Barbra, having a dissociative fugue while walking
through the empty farmhouse (a moment that feels torn right out of
Carnival of Souls, which Romero admits was an influence on Night).

Was it All a Dream? from God Only Knows, Planet Earth - 30 April 2009

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