Night of the Living Dead

Directed by George A. Romero (1968)

Starring: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Keith Wayne, Judith Ridley, Kyra Schon

Ah,  horror movie love.  It’s not something I’m terribly familiar with, to be honest.  I don’t really get the fans of Red Box Horror or the ladies who line up for midnight screenings of the Saw franchise.  But what I do get is a love of the Zombie Movie Genre, and the modern incarnation all begins with the grainy 35mm Pittsburgh epic.  My immediate reaction to Night of the Living Dead was movie-love, pure and simple.

Barbara (O’Dea) and her brother Johnny visit their father’s grave on the night when radiation from a satellite effects the recent dead, causing them to reanimate and crave human flesh.  When Johnny is killed, Barbara is able to escape to a farmhouse nearby, where she is joined by other survivors, including Ben (Jones).  Ben takes care of Barbara as he fends off the approaching corpses.  She has gone catatonic, only speaking occasionally as she follows Ben’s orders.

Ben is by far my favorite character.  Not only does he have a take-charge attitude, but he recognizes how the situation has messed up Barbara and approaches everything with a clear head.  In contrast, the five others in the house with them, especially Harry (Hardman) who is too stubborn and prejudiced to agree to Ben’s plans.

Meanwhile, our heroine is the opposite of these focused zombies and Ben.  She’s helpless, which riled up my feminist side, but as I understand it, they had altered the script to O’Dea’s performance.  In fact, it seems like Night of the Living Dead never had a set script, but instead moving along with a general plot and changing elements when necessary.  When put in that context, it seems like a different creative work.  Rather than some magnum opus, it can breathe and adjust itself as necessary, without losing much in terms of terror, and probably gaining more in subtext.  Honestly, it just seems so appropriate for the American Independent Horror to have such a thrown-together production.

As much as the characters are trapped in the farm house while the dead stumble outside, they’re not cut off from the world.  There’s a radio that Ben sets up, and eventually they get the television working.  The news gives some explanation towards why the dead are reanimated, related to radiation from a satellite, but the explanation is largely unnecessary.  It just gets thrown in as an easy explanation.  The news broadcast then shifts to the local situation, showing that it’s quite easy to kill the risen dead. Just aim for the head.

Not like that advice helps, when there are so many outside the farmhouse.  The attempt to escape ends horrifically, though it was caused by human error rather than the undead.  It was surprising to see how crafty the undead act and how determined they are to get to the humans.  For zombies, they’re pretty damn intelligent.

And it is damn scary, forty-three years later, in a gritty way that many have tried to replicate, but never quite match.

 

 

Fido

Directed by: Andrew Currie (2006) Starring: Kesun Loder, Billy Connelly, Carrie-Anne Moss, Dylan Baker

As a spin off of the zombie tradition, Fido depicts a world post-zombie apocalypse.  Here, everyone becomes a zombie when they die, unless they were given an expensive burial (including a coffin for the head).  Zombies are used for help around the house, controlled with collars designed by ZomCon, a company that seemingly controls everything.  Timmy (Loder) has started questioning whether zombies are dead or alive when his mother purchases one.  She wants to maintain a good image for the new neighbors across the street, but her husband’s been afraid of zombies, as a veteran of the war.

Bill (Baker) does not get close to his son.  He had to kill his father and seems to avoid developing attachments to anyone, instead going golfing with someone he hates.  When Timmy tries to reach out to him, he bonds with the family’s zombie instead, naming him Fido and treating him like the new puppy.  They play in the park one afternoon, but an unfortunate encounter with one of Timmy’s neighbors damages Fido’s collar, causing him to kill her and spread the zombie virus in the safe community.

The crux of the film centers on Bill’s resistance to human relationships, even though the key relationship is around Timmy and Fido.  Bill is obsessed with the expensive funerals ZomCon produces and has taken out Funeral Insurance polices for everyone in the family.  He is oblivious to the fact that his wife, Helen (Moss), is pregnant claiming economics as the problem, where it’s obvious that he’s afraid of forming a bond with his children.  That frightened disinclination leads Fido to become Timmy’s main friend and defender against bullies as well as the sympathetic man in Helen’s life.

Fido doesn’t play around with crossing boundaries in its plot. Mr. Theopolis, Timmy’s neighbor and former employee of ZomCon, is obviously romantically involved with his zombie Tammy.  The zombies are clearly brought into households as a kind of easy slavery, but it becomes clear that the zombies can think and express emotions.  Just not in a verbose or clear way, and not even for all of them.  Fido doesn’t attack Timmy, even when his collar isn’t working, but it’s only after becoming Timmy’s friend.

Fido takes the end of Shaun of the Dead, spins it in a 50s American suburb and expands it into the scenario for what happens to life with zombies.  So many other zombie movies present them as an apocalypse story that it’s really fun to see a functioning society develop around the horror-plague.