Few films can be said to
be truly influential, never mind influencing the creation of a whole new film
subgenre. George Romero’s 1968 classic stands up even to this day as a gritty
and wildly inventive horror movie. Even now others still hold a debt of
gratitude to this work including such acclaimed works as Edgar Wright’s Shaun
Of The Dead (2004), or even the Robert Kirkman comic series The Walking Dead
(2003 – present) and it’s subsequent television adaption (2010- present) of the
same name.
Overall, Night of the
Living Dead has quite a simplistic plot really. The story follows a young woman
visiting the grave of her father with her brother. However when they are
mysteriously attacked in the cemetery, Barbra is forced to flee on her own.
Eventually she stops at an old farmhouse, which seems abandoned. There she
meets a group of survivors who are eventually trapped by a group of creatures
outside and they attempt to think of ways to escape.
With the zombies aside,
the film in its execution of exposition and character development is in fact
rather subtle. The acting is held back and realistic with characters carefully
assessing their situation. There is no over the top screaming or shouting that
seems out of place. Yet even though there is one point where the character of
Barbra is in a state of shock because her brother is missing that borders on
being hammy, in reflection, considering what is going on she would be perfectly
entitled to be in such a state of hysteria.
Another important thing
to mention is how such small developments really help the film. The news
reports that the characters watch on television are serious and have an
unexpected feeling of realism to them. The images of the rednecks walking
across the country in vast groups speak well to the reality of American gun
culture. The point being that it makes you believe and invest in what it’s trying
to show you through it’s references to the real world and how such a horror may
be dealt with in reality.
With this it is also
important to mention that the creatures themselves have a certain nightmarish
quality to them. Zombies are the animated bodies of the dead that feed on the
living. They walk and stumble in a manner that taken out of context could seem
quite humorous, yet this is never the case. The reason being that no matter how
slow they are, no matter how clumsy or irregular their movements may seem, they are always
a threat to the protagonists. It isn’t
the way they look that is so frightening about the creatures in this horror
film. There's no Frankenstein’s monster and at a distance they could be mistaken
for humans (as they are in fact by Barbra and her brother early on in the
movie). They are simply led by instinct, they have no thoughts or abilities to
reason – they simply consume.
And above all that is
what makes them so scary. Perhaps that is what makes the entire film so scary.
There are no recognizable film stars here, no one to root for simply because of
their name or face. This film is only characters and more to the point, people;
regular people with families, a young couple and two other young adults alone in the
group, and they have to come up solutions. Yet in the end it’s their petty squabbling that gets most of them killed. Selfish decisions combined with
their unreasonable attitudes lead each of these characters to their fates.
The only figure here
that could be described in any way as heroic is the African American character of
Ben, but even a search and rescue party of rednecks shoots him in the end. Much
has been made of this and it’s reference to American racisms at the time of the
civil rights movement. As the same similarities were pointed out between the
grotesque and gruesome images of the film and the news footage of the war in
Vietnam – with both also being filmed in a similar rugged and granny black and
white style. Whether these things were intentional conscious decisions or
subconscious, or even coincidental is up for debate, but it is hard to deny
these similarities.
Every time you go back
to a work of art there is something that usually comes to mind and hits you in
the same way that reminds you of your first viewing. That unique feeling that it
gave and continues to give you that brings you back again and again. For me,
that moment is the end of this film. When Ben is killed there is a powerful
feeling of injustice. You really feel sickened by what has happened
to a character that we have grown to care about. But it doesn’t stop there. We
are then shown after his death the hideous treatment of his body as he is
tossed around like a piece of furniture. All of this is done strangely enough
through a series of stills, which really forces you as a viewer to pay
attention to what is happening in front of you. Again, the stills in your mind
give you another layer of realism where in which, if we can see these actions
happening before us, then maybe it really did happen. Of course it didn’t, but
in the same way a nightmare is horrifying whilst you are experiencing it, Night
of the Living Dead brings about a similar emotional intensity in it’s viewer.
No comments:
Post a Comment