Horror Movie-A-Day-A-Thon-Apalooza-Fest: 9/30

Feature Presentation: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Director: George A. Romero

Rating: 9 out of 10





I feel the need to post a warning here, despite my love of this film. Modern audiences have a very skewed view of zombie movies, because we live in an era where zombies became so parodied and boring that filmmakers decided to reinvent the zombie genre a bit. I fear the young viewers probably either watched 28 Days Later or the Dawn of the Dead remake first, which isn't a bad thing except their first experience with zombies was as a more agile and ferocious creature than the zombie's of Romero's films. It would be like vampires walking in the daylight or being immune to garlic, holy water, and wooden stakes.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with updating the rules. I enjoyed Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, but to me that's not what zombie's are about. In Romero's original you didn't have to fear one zombie by itself. They looked kinda stupid, walked like barely alive mannequins, and moaned like an old man with a bad hip. That's all they did. On the surface they don't appear to be too threatening because they're easily avoided in small numbers. The real threat of these flesh-eating creatures is when they begin to gather in larger numbers. You see, at first, there's only a couple of them to deal with, and, in this film, our hero Duane Jones handles them with relative ease. But as the movie goes along more and more of them begin to show up outside the secluded farmhouse serving as a refuge for the 7 survivors holding on for dear life. And that's where the danger in these old zombie films come into play, when there's just so many of them you become overwhelmed and the next thing you know, you're dinner. Because of that, I thoroughly enjoy the slow-boil of these older zombie flicks where the terror builds higher and higher as the film goes along. Great stuff.

So much is made of Romero's foresight in having an African-American as the smartest and strongest hero in the film but, moreso for me, because he's great in the film. He's charismatic, calm, collected, and intelligent. I really don't think the film works without him in the lead role. All of this makes the ending all the more......well, I'll let you watch it before I say anything about the ending. Rest assured, it's not what you're expecting.

More of Romero's contributions to the genre will be coming up soon.

Next: The Nightmare Before Christmas