Thursday, July 27, 2017

Volume 4 - Night of the Living Dead and the Legacy of George A. Romero

It's been just under two weeks since horror fans around the world lost one of our heroes, George A. Romero. Like many I know, I was hit incredibly hard by this news. The creator of the modern zombie, Romero seemed truly larger than life, and that creature's pop culture stamina made it seem like George would just always be there for us.

The other reason losing George Romero hit me so hard is that, despite his place as one of the pioneers of the genre, he seemed like he was one of us. A true independent filmmaker, Romero made raw, unique, and personal films that felt like they were specifically formed for horror fans. It's like that line Dan Aykroyd repeats in Tommy Boy - "I make car parts for the American working man, because that's what I am, and that's who I care about." - only Romero made horror films and I truly believed that he'd mean it if he said that about his films.

It took me a while to get over the news that Romero had passed. I cried that afternoon, but I also couldn't help but feeling grateful that I had the chance to learn about the horror genre from this man, grateful to be a little blip in the horror loving world at the same time he was out there representing all of us and making us proud. And, for me, everything I loved and will always love about George Romero begins with his debut feature, which changed the genre forever.

HOW THIS WORKS
Step 1) I pick a movie.
Step 2) I tell you about the movie.
Step 3) I tell you what we're looking for in a double feature movie.
Step 4) Another movie!
Step 5) Victory!

Night of the Living Dead
1968, Directed by George A. Romero

Night of the Living Dead and I have a history that makes me laugh when I think about it today. I was into "scary" stories and movies from the time I was a toddler, and my parents were very receptive to me seeing films from the horror genre at a young age. But there was one movie on our VHS shelf that I was told was absolutely off limits: Night of the Living Dead. 

I was a surprisingly compliant child, so I settled for The Blob and The Phantom of the Opera and The Creature from the Black Lagoon and enjoyed myself. As I got in to my early teens I was allowed to watch things like Fright Night or A Nightmare on Elm Street sequels. But I still didn't watch Night of the Living Dead until I was probably 15 or 16 years old. You might think it ridiculous, but on the bright afternoon when I plugged the tape into our basement's VCR I understood why my parents didn't let me see this movie. 

I grew up in a farmhouse in a secluded area outside a blue-collar town, not unlike the one where most of the events of Night of the Living Dead take place. When I saw Night of the Living Dead it did something that most of those other horror films I had already seen couldn't do: it felt like something that could happen in my world. The people were real, the setting was real, even the graveyard was real. I didn't know to think about it at the time, but later I realized that this was the first true independent horror film I'd ever seen. Even though it wasn't trying to make me jump and it wasn't as violent or in-your-face as many of the newer horror films I'd seen, it got under my skin and made me feel a true sense of dread. 

I left my first viewing of the film knowing two things: 

1) I wasn't safe anywhere.
2) I needed to see more movies by this director. 

Fast forward 20 or so years, and I'm watching it again. It's been one week since I found out George Romero died, and I've got a DVD commentary featuring Romero - along with actors/crewmates Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, and Russell Streiner - playing over the movie. And even though I've seen the film dozens of times and read countless tales of the production and even listened to this same commentary before, I'm floored. 

Listening to Romero and his friends talk about the work they did on this film 30 plus years ago is a reminder of everything I love about the film, but also a wake up call about just how much went right and wrong during production. This team had to be amazing to put it all together. Romero tells stories about accidents on set and talks about the mistakes they made and the apologies they had to give. He shares so many stories about the people who helped make the film happen and the process of writing the film, down to talking about how the personalities of the people on set influenced the film's message. I'm hearing all this, and I'm wishing I was as committed to anything as this man was to getting this film made. The conversation pulls back the curtain on just how difficult it is to make even the smallest movie, and yet Romero just has this quiet confidence as he relays stories of how he and his crew - Romero never takes sole credit for anything in the discussion, which is adorable - never backed down and put it all together. He never mentions the fact that he ended up making a no-budget horror film that basically defines the genre, and he doesn't need to because his hard work and the hard work of his crew bleeds off the screen. 

As I listened to that conversation, I felt the same kind of awe that I felt the first time I saw Night of the Living Dead. Then I started to think about how Romero came back and did the same thing over and over again, for more than 40 years, and along that road managed to create so many other films that horror fans like me can look at with the same sense of wonder. It makes me want to live my life with the same drive and passion that George Romero had, because I know if I do that I will die a happy man.
This hasn't been much of a commentary on the film itself, partially because ever since that afternoon in the '90s it has been impossible for me to imagine the world without Night of the Living Dead. If you haven't seen it, my best advice is to open your mind, let it wash over you, and think about how much love the people who were making it had to have for their little film. If you can do that and it doesn't end up infecting your heart and mind, you might be a zombie already.
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Normally this is the point where I talk about what I'm looking for in a double feature, but another great thing about Romero and Night of the Living Dead is that they mean something special and unique to so many people in the horror community. So when I decided I was going to pay tribute to the man by featuring it in a double feature, I wanted to know what other people were thinking. I asked my Twitter followers what kind of double feature they would pick, and the responses did not let me down.














First off, you all are wonderful. I love everything about that list, from The Blob to Caddyshack 2. We've got independent horror films from the same era, modern studio hits, concert films, more of Romero's classics, and more. You could teach a course on film based around people's double feature picks to go with Night of the Living Dead if you wanted to, and these are the people you need to have help with the lesson plans if you do.

This leaves me with a lot to live up to. I'm not gonna promise you'll love my choice - it's one of the more divisive horror films in recent memory - but if you don't the good news is that these fine folks have your back too.
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Here are the things I was looking for when I made my pick.

  • The thing that struck me first about Night of the Living Dead was how the secluded setting. It's a movie that takes place in a very small area, but you can feel that this is not a secluded incident, and that this event is a lot bigger than what we see. It takes a lot of work to make one set seem like the center of the end of humanity, but Romero did it so well that he laid the foundation for other filmmakers to bring the same tone to their films.
  • Night of the Living Dead is a movie with few real characters, and it does a lot of its best work by building tension between them. But it also has a couple of characters - namely the melodramatic young couple, Tom and Judy - who just seem to be trapped in the middle of everything and who are trying to go on with their life. There's something about their relationship, as cheesy as it is, that has always been a neat romantic centerpiece to the zombie apocalypse for me. I wanted to find a movie that amplifies that feeling
  • I keep saying that Night of the Living Dead influenced other films, but also it provided a structure that other filmmakers can use as a jumping off point. I wanted to pair Night with another film in the same vein, but I wanted to pick something with a different mindset. There are plenty of films that imitated Night of the Living Dead, I'm looking for something that brings its own mystery to the framework Romero provided. 
  • I wanted a zombie film. It's an easy condition, but Romero is responsible for all the zombies we've seen since. It only seems right to bring a version of them back for this one.
After considering all of that, I settled down with one of my favorite horror films of the past decade...

Pontypool
2008, Directed by Bruce McDonald

Among the many thrills of Night of the Living Dead are the scenes where we see news reporters on TV trying to explain what the heck is going on and why the dead seem to be coming back to life. We never get a real answer from them, and perhaps the most relevant piece of information that comes from the TV set in the besieged house is when Sherrif Kosana utters an exasperated and now famous response to a reporter's question. 

"Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up."

Romero knew this was one of the great mysteries of his film, and that's probably why he chose to start Dawn of the Dead, his first sequel to Night, inside a news room that had been trying to make sense out of the living dead. We never get an answer from those reporters either, but I always wonder what it would have looked like if the people sharing the news had a direct line to the outbreak. What would the zombie apocalypse have sounded like if it was broadcast live?

That's the question that Pontypool aims to answer.

Pontypool follows a morning in the life of Grant Mazzy, a displaced shock radio DJ doing the morning radio show in a small Canadian town that shares its name with the movie. He's played by veteran character actor Stephen McHattie, who gives one of the best lead performances in horror here. Mazzy gets a report of mob brutality from a correspondent and he's forced to try to decipher what's going on while staying on-air as the reports of brutality become more and more bizarre. McHattie, working with a chip on his shoulder and a wild-eyed energy, seems to be having the time of his life bringing this character to the screen, and the enthusiasm he shows reminds me a little bit of the confident tone Romero had while making his film. There are a lot of questions about the film as a whole, but the man at the center of it is certainly doing everything he can to outwork all of them.
Pontypool does not leave the explanation of the outbreak to our imagination, and that is either one of its strengths or weaknesses depending on your interpretation of the film. I'm not sure I'm smart enough to get it - and I've seen the film 3 or 4 times - but I really appreciate how these filmmakers created their own take on how a zombie outbreak could occur. It's unique as hell, and I've been told by wiser people that it makes sense. I'm comfortable taking their word for it, because even without understanding everything about it I find myself grinning and bracing for surprises every time I see it.

This film has its mind in a much different place than that of Night of the Living Dead did, but the bones of the film are the same. It's a flipped perspective - one film has people at the center of the outbreak looking outward for answers, the other has the person who's supposed to have the answers getting information directly from the outbreak - but the sense of dread is still there, and it still feels like the world is ending everywhere around this small town.
And that's what's so amazing about George Romero and Night of the Living Dead. This is a film with an entirely different idea than Night of the Living Dead, but there's no way it exists if Romero hadn't pushed through all the challenges to get that little film into theaters back in 1968. There's no way many of the films the fine people of Twitter picked happen without it, either. Night of the Living Dead changed our perception of what horror could be, and opened up the door for films like Pontypool to come into existence. The work he did on Night of the Living Dead made the work director Bruce McDonald, McHattie, and everyone else who made Pontypool easier, because the kind of film they wanted to make didn't exist before Night of the Living Dead.

George Romero just wanted to make one movie when he made Night of the Living Dead happen. But people like Romero, who do what they love and fight through any of the challenges that try to stop them, are the kind of people that end up changing the world. That's one more reason it hurts so much to write these words and think about what the horror universe lost last week. Romero's passion was so great that it became larger than any film he made. He had an impact on every horror fan out there. 

There's no right or wrong way to pay tribute to someone, but this is the way I wanted to look back this week. Try it out if you're a fan of Night of the Living Dead, or find your own way to pay tribute if you miss him too. I never met George, but I know the two words he wrote next to most of the autographs he gave are what he would want us to do to honor him.

"Stay scared."


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