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.

In a late tribute, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD will headline this week's double feature at the blog. What would you pair with it?

— The Mike (@TheMike31) July 23, 2017

The Blob!!!

— Danielle Sinay (@daniellesinay) July 23, 2017

Return of the Living Dead?

— Ted Flint (@TedFlintKansas) July 23, 2017

Either RETURN or THE DEAD NEXT DOOR.

— Derek Smith (@Darathus) July 23, 2017

THE CRAMPS LIVE AT NAPA STATE for the b&w cinematography, claustrophobic setting, and the way the audience slowly takes over the stage.

— Mitch Lovell (@TheVideoVacuum) July 23, 2017

CREEPSHOW.

— Brad Henderson (@BradFHenderson) July 23, 2017

MARTIN. It's another great Romero movie but looks & feels nothing like NOTLD.

— Barnabas Collins (@CousinBarnabas) July 23, 2017

Assault on Precinct 13 seems an obvious 1. Secluded, aligned with people you don't like much and battling a force trying to get in.

— H.E.A.D. C.H.U.D. (@Unrealized_Tomb) July 23, 2017

Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead.

— Nathan Smith (@madmanmarz85) July 24, 2017

Body Snatchers '56, The Innocents, Children of the Damned

— Elbee (@ghoulieschool) July 24, 2017

I'd also go with AOP13.
JC really took the lessons Romero laid down & employed them almost surgically to create a terribly effective flick.

— Albert Muller (@aj_macready) July 24, 2017

GET OUT would be a pretty good companion piece, considering the ending.

— Brett Gallman (@brettgallman) July 24, 2017

Panic Room

— David Hart (@pccasestudy) July 24, 2017

🎡 of Souls

— St. Ephanie Crawford (@scrawfish) July 25, 2017

The Battery. or Shaun of the Dead.

or Caddyshack 2 if I'm feeling randy.

— Mike Snoonian (@mike_snoonian) July 25, 2017

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."

Volume 2 - Get Out and the Conversations We Need To Have

Last week we had some fun with some horror movies, this week we're starting with horror again. (If you haven't met me, you'll learn to expect that they'll come up a few times.) Gotta admit though - I'm really nervous about writing this piece. Based on who I am and what I've experienced in life, I can't possibly know what I'm talking about here. I thought about that a lot when I was considering this double feature, and I almost didn't do it. But sometimes the conversations we need to have are not the most comfortable ones, and sometimes the things we mean to say are more important than the mistakes we might make trying to say them.

That said, I'll leave one last warning up front. The things I am about to say will be said in the best way I can based on my experiences and the knowledge I have from my life. If the terms I use are insensitive or poorly chosen, please let me know. I am trying to do the right thing, I'm just not sure I'm the person to do it.

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!

I don't need to spend a lot of time talking about the movie we're starting with this week; everyone else in the film world and lots of audiences have already done that for me. It's one of the most well-reviewed movies of the year, and it's a flick I think will stick around for a long, long time.

Get Out

2017, Directed by Jordan Peele

I've already put my cards on the table, so I'll say this in a real simple way: I love Get Out a lot. I think it's one of the best horror movies ever made, and I'm not the kind of person who says something new is one of the best somethings ever made often. I buy new jeans more often than I find new favorites, and y'all should see some of the ratty jeans I wear. This is not what I do. And yet, here I am, doing it.

If you're one of the people out there that hasn't seen it or doesn't know about it yet, here's the quick summary of what you need to know about the film. A young African-American man, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), goes to the home of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) to meet her family. Things there...are not what they seem.

That's it. That's all I want to say. You may be picturing something like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner - a film Peele lists as an influence on his film (more on that in a bit) - but there's a whole lot more "not what they seem" in this film than a difficult Spencer Tracy and a racist maid. The biggest joy in watching Get Out is seeing how it tackles this racial divide and finding out what the twist Peele has waiting for us is. 

The central theme of Get Out is best summed up by Peele's own words. In an interview to promote the film for Crave Online, Peele was asked what scares him the most. His answer, posted below, has a lot to do with the movie I picked for this double feature.

People. I think, and it goes to this whole horror thesis I hope I get to explore, but there's nothing that's scarier than what people are capable of when we get together. The way we can use fear, the way we can scapegoat, the way we can value those closer to ourselves more than we value people further from ourselves, or the other. I think human beings together are capable of the greatest things on Earth but also capable of the biggest atrocities.

Get Out hammers home that point. It manages to do so in an entertaining manner, balancing the injustices people are capable of with impressive comic and dramatic moments and a neat little horror/sci-fi twist. So, where can we go from there? Here's what I was thinking when I started looking for a double feature partner for this one.

• Peele has coined Get Out, and the next several films he plans to make, as "social thrillers." One of the coolest things I've seen in a long time is that, ahead of the release of Get Out, the Brooklyn Academy of Music allowed him to program a series of films entitled The Art of the Social Thriller. Through this 12 film series, he paired his film up with greats like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Rear Window (my personal favorite movie ever!), The 'Burbs, and more. Go ahead and click on that link and look at that list of films. It's beautiful, man. So...I couldn't use any of those films here. Dude stole my thunder. Thanks a lot, Jordan.
• As the quote above states, the scariest thing about Get Out is the human element of it all. At the center of the film are people. People who don't think Chris' life is valuable. People who get together and have their own way. Unfortunately, we need another movie that features people like that - even if it makes the double feature a little less pleasant.
• Before Get Out, Peele was most known for his time in comedy. As the co-star of Comedy Central's groundbreaking Key & Peele, Peele spent five years making people laugh and pushing the limits of comedy, while also dealing with plenty of issues like racism and homophobia. He wasn't the person you'd expect to make a movie that challenges what we think and what we believe about each other - and yet his willingness to challenge viewers helped him become the perfect person for that film. We need another director like that.
• Above all else, the thing that excites me about Get Out is how much it got people who had seen it talking. I can't sum that all up in one bullet point, so let's have a quick personal talk before we get to our other movie.

Hi. My name's Mike, and I am a white man. More than that, I'm a white man who grew up in a place where there were only white people. It was the '80s and the '90s, and that was just how things were there. For the most part, it still is.

The only black - that's the word we used then, because that's the word we were taught - people I knew were on TV or in sports. I never really thought about them as different than me, and I was never really told they were different than me, but the older I got I just started to notice that people around me - and thus, me - talked about them a little differently. And yeah, people used the n-word. It was thrown around in jokes sometimes, just because it could be. 

Perhaps the weirdest encounter of my life happened when I was a young adult. I had gone to college and stayed in my college town after graduation; I was now a "city boy." One day, I was home for a gathering with my extended family. I had a pair of black tennis shoes - cheap ones, I'm not the kind of guy who's rocking any Jordans - and for no reason, other than the fact I thought it didn't matter, I had replaced the worn out black shoelaces with some white ones. If this sounds like one of the smallest decisions I've ever made in my life, that's because that's what it was to me. Yet, as I wandered through a totally normal setting with people I've known my entire life, someone I was walking by said, our of nowhere, "Did you get those white shoelaces from one of the blacks over there?"

I still have no idea why the color of my shoelaces mattered, or how it represented the African-American community, and - I'll be honest - I was far too dumbfounded by the question to even reply to it.  I realize that this is one of the smallest incidents of racism in the history of racism - I've seen much worse, believe me - but it just struck me as the most bizarre comment I'd ever heard in my life. And it made me fully realize...that's how some people think when they've only learned from their own community. Sometimes they are taught things and they teach their children things and the cycle just goes on. And most of the time they don't even talk about it.

Nowadays, I work directly with people of many races and colors, but I still live a mere 25 miles from my hometown in a "city" of about 60,000 people on a school day. It's not a huge shift - this is still a 90%+ white community - but it's something. And when I talked to some of those people about Get Out, I got the biggest smile on my face. I was never in a place where we had actual conversations about race issues with someone, outside of the basic lessons about slavery and The Civil War we had in school. I don't blame my parents or close friends and family for that - I know all of them to be people who would stand up with the same opinions I have if they were confronted this issue - but it's so weird to look back and think about the unspoken beliefs people had back then. I wish we had more movies like this, movies that made us think about our belief systems and made us ask questions and start conversations about life.

Like I said, I know this is a totally white story about racism. But it's mine, and it makes me want to help people who might want to have these conversations get to that point. So let's get to that double feature....

The Intruder

1962, Directed by Roger Corman

I'm really excited that today's audiences have a film like Get Out that can get them talking about race issues. The film I wish I had seen when I was younger, that would have helped me to be more understanding of the dangers of groupthink and stereotypes, is Roger Corman's The Intruder.

Like Peele, Corman - a master of pulpy schlock that covered everything from Edgar Allan Poe to Crab Monsters - doesn't seem like the guy you'd expect to make a statement about how we live with each other and how minorities face challenges being accepted as who they are. Yet here he was in 1962, teaming up with author Charles Beaumont and a pre-Star Trek William Shatner, to create a film that tackled the white reaction to the integration of schools in the South without compromising one bit.

The Intruder is the story of Adam Cramer (Shatner), a young white man who rolls into a fictional town telling those he meets that he's a "social worker" and that he's "come to do what I can for the town." In fact, what he's come to do is stop the town from accepting a small group of African-American teenagers into its all white high school. And it really doesn't take him much work for him to get most of the white people in town on his side.

Bragging about his membership in the Patrick Henry Society (I googled it, it's real) and repeating "Whose law?" whenever someone reminds him that United States law has already decided that the schools will accept these students is enough to get Cramer in the door with most of the townspeople. We quickly see that they are generally opposed to integration, especially when it takes less than four minutes of the film before a little old lady drops a casual "nigger" in conversation. Much like my personal experience, she uses the term toward a white man who just happens to not be meeting her standards. This town is living that same belief that there's something different about white and black people - but unlike my childhood, this was a time when these comments were rarely held back.

While Cramer is busy giving speeches on the courthouse steps and reminding the town's richest man that "democracy is the collective will of the people," there seems to be only a couple of men in town who are willing to stand up against him. The guy I really like is Tom, the head of the town newspaper, who at one point admits to his wife that he is, in fact, in favor of the integration of schools. She responds with shock, because that's just not the way people in that town think, and when she asks him why he's never told her this he gives the perfect response to sum up his realization.

"Because I didn't know. I don't think I really knew til now. One thing Adam Cramer's done for us...he's made us face ourselves."

If this sounds a little like The Twilight Zone, that's because Beaumont - who adapted his own novel for Corman after the studios that bought the rights chickened out on making the film - wrote 22 episodes of that show and knew exactly how to point out the dark side of human nature. But there's no disclaimer from Rod Serling here; this is our world and our reality. As the film builds to a finale that's full of lies, threats, and all kinds of mob mentality, The Intruder becomes a gut-wrenching film to watch. 

Random note, because this post hasn't been long enough, I freakin' love this kid that co-starred in The Intruder. His name is Charles Barnes, and Corman picked him for a central role because he was a student and football player at a school that was integrated the previous year. He didn't bother finding an actor in Hollywood for the role, he just told Barnes to go with what he experienced and work from that. And the kid nails it. So good.

I don't think this would be an easy double feature to watch - you're definitely going to want to watch The Intruder first and end with Get Out, both for tone and timeline reasons - but I think it's an incredibly important one. Both Beaumont and Peele knew how dangerous people can be when they start thinking the wrong way, and both films can be necessary conversation starters.

I've never told that story about my shoelaces before. Partially because it's such a small incident, but also because it's just not comfortable to talk about these issues. Yet, the only way we can get stronger and smarter and braver in our world is to challenge ourselves to do it. Maybe watching The Intruder will help people see how things used to be, and maybe watching Get Out can help them see how things still are today. Maybe if we look at these things, and talk about these things, we can help change the lives of people who don't understand the racism that lives in their community. 

Maybe there are better ways to do it, but for me it's the movies that speak loudest. And if these movies can make me think more, it's my duty to recommend them to others too. That's a chance worth taking.