OK, kids, come sit down here with your
Uncle Kevin and I’ll tell you a story.
Once upon a time there were two kids blowing their Sunday going to visit
their grandfather’s grave. They were
good kids. But even good kids can get
themselves into trouble. Good kids can get themselves into whole great big
worlds of hurt. You know how you’re going along; minding your own business, and
then your brother pulls a shitty prank on you. Whoops, sorry, shouldn’t say
“shitty.”
See, here’s the tricky part about pranks. When pranks are funny they’re better than a
cat in a room full of rocking chairs, when they’re not funny they can really
suck. It’s always fun and games until
somebody gets an eye poked out.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, well, see, these two kids were
in the cemetery, and the brother starts teasing his sister when they see an
ookie (it’s a word! It’s in the Adam’s Family theme song) old dude shambling
around the tombstones. Probably just the
town drunk (back in those days we used to talk about town drunks), now we have
tragic alcoholics.
“They’re coming to get you, Barbara,” he growls
in his best Boris Karloff voice. “They’re coming for you. Look, here comes one of them now.”
Turns out that the old dude isn’t drunk
at all; spoiler alert, the bastard ain’t even alive.
With that begins the 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead. A film that has resulted in a lot of people
getting their eye’s poked out.
There has been a lot written about this
movie. There have been books and
articles, and articles about the books about the articles about the
movies. There have been posters,
T-Shirts, cigarette lighters (don’t start smoking kids, it’s bad for you), a
soundtrack album, plushie toys…you name it they got it.
And there have been remakes and
variations and sequels.
The sequel to Night is a real game changer.
Called Dawn of the Dead, it is
the film that brings us full on into the zombie apocalypse. The world we currently know has fallen to the
shambling armies of our hungry neighbors.
In this setting we are treated to a dark humored trip through the
American psyche.
Since then, the zombie film has become a thing.
Much like slasher films, zombies are easy to create and the films are
cheap to make. Also, the ability of the
ghoul to act like putty in the hands of a good film maker leaves the door open
for all sorts of social commentary.
A close viewing of Night of the Living Dead seems to intimate that the dead eating the
living situation is under control. Yes,
there is probably still a problem with grandma rising from her death bed and
munching on the cat, but the type of world that (say) The Walking Dead portrays wasn’t part of the scenario. Night
is made great by a creeping terror (not a dude in a carpet). It isn’t about Armageddon. It’s about a Night spent in a Nightmare. You kill one
ghoul in the darkness and just off in the spotlight another one emerges. They’re slow, but you never seem to be fast
enough. A bit like credit card debt, or the increasing aches and pain that get
you as you grow older.
On a basic level, this is a personal Nightmare experienced communally.
It is into this world of the infrequent
ghoul that John Russo’s novel, Return of the Living Dead, hit the scene. This isn’t the later version with punk
rockers hitting a cemetery and becoming a midnight snack. This is a
direct follow up to the events of Night.
I first came across the book at a book
sale being held at a community center in Fremont, CA. I am uncertain of the exact date, but I am
pretty sure it would be sometime in the late 1970’s. Now, since I was still pretty young my grasp
of exact chronology may not be all that it ought to be. What I do know is that
zombies were a big deal to me.
They were the closest thing I was going to
get to a grown-up monster and I was going to devour them up.
But, had I seen Night of the Living Dead yet?
You know what friends and neighbors? I’m
not sure that I had seen it yet. I do
remember when I did finally see Night of
the Living Dead…it required a little bit of subterfuge, but I did see it.
Back in the day, Night of the Living Dead was the scariest movie that could be
imagined. Even the trailer was enough to
send me into fits of fright,
There I was, at a tender young age
watching Creature Features with Bob Wilkins when, seemingly out of nowhere, he
would spring this trailer on us.
This shit was hardcore. In a world of Godzilla movies and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter
this was taking shit to a whole new level.
The fact that this shit was on TV made it all the more horrible. At least The
Exorcist was carefully locked up behind the doors of the local movie
theater. And, tell me if I am wrong, but
in the early Seventies Linda Blair’s lacerated and wicked demon smile was a
well kept secret.
There was a rather strange painting of her
on the cover of Famous Monsters of Filmland, but; sure as God made little green
apples, I had never seen the cover. Actually, I don’t think I saw the cover
until just a year ago, and (no disrespect to the artist) I didn’t recognize
it. But that cover art aside, in my
grade school world The Exorcist, Last House on the Left, Texas Chainsaw Massacre all occupied a
world that I never even heard of. These
were films that weren’t just for grown-up, they were so grown up that they flew
right over my radar.
Night
was the gateway drug into a world of adult horrors. The first film I saw that couldn’t end up as
the butt of a joke on the Munsters or the Adams Family. This was no Saturday Afternoon monster flick.
I had been told, and told more than once,
that there was no way on earth I was watching this movie. This undoubtedly was good parenting because
(as I mentioned) the trailer alone was able to propel me into fits of horror.
It was the embodiment of Cosmopolitan's over the top review of the novel The Shining, “It will frighten you into
fits.” I have images of thousands of 70’s housewives thrashing around on the
floor with a shiny silver paperback novel in their hand.
So, there I was: in the 1970’s watching Bob
Wilkins on Creature Features when he announced that the world famous “Night of the Living Dead” would be
coming on in just a week. I mean, damn; and not for the last time in my life,
here was a movie that I just had to watch and my mom was completely and utterly
opposed to me watching it. This was not
a fun movie. This was seriously scary and there was no way on Earth that she
was going to let me watch it. This film
would give me Nightmares for a week. If there is one way to get a kid to want to watch
a movie you don’t want them to see offer up some serious psychological damage
as a consequence.
There was only one way to get out of this
predicament. I invited my two aunts over
to watch Creature Features with us. This was back when they both lived in an
apartment right next door to ours. So
coming over late on a Saturday Night
wasn’t completely out of the question.
Hell, we could make popcorn and order a pizza. This was the equivalent of child me’s Studio
54.
Long story short (too late), I got to see Night of the Living Dead. And as predicted it scared the fuck out of
me. It scared me bad. At the same time, having seen this movie was
a truly satisfying experience. It was the horror equivalent of losing my virginity.
It is the imagery and the brutality of
Night that stuck so closely in my head.
There have been more realistic ghouls in later films, but the white
faced shambling monsters that destroyed a farm house full of people in 1968
have a resonance that has never been duplicated for me.
Night, I think, can be argued as
recreating the gothic. Instead of the
frantic girl running away from the castle, we have the terrified woman running
to the farm house. The film is rich with
the feeling of the region it was filmed in: the dialog, the scenery, the
ending. All of it is purely evocative of
a time and place that feels at once real and trapped in a Nightmare.
The Nightmare that was Night of the Living Dead didn’t take
place in some wasted out apocalypse. It was a Nightmare that could be lived in
my very own hometown. It was a present
and real as the farmhouse I walked past every day on my way to school. It was as eminent as the next Newsflash, or
“test of the emergency broadcast system.”
It was as inevitable as death.
Most monsters are the creatures of
fantasy. Vampires, werewolves, the
Frankenstein Monster, all had a quality of the fantastic and the romantic about
them. The ghouls in Night were no such
thing. There was nothing romantic (or even
fun) in being a white faced ghoul that barely moved and ate intestines out in a
field. The ghouls were like a
disease. They weren’t a fun scary, but
the ultimate imagine of what death was: complete and utter loss of who you are.
Later, with Dawn of the Dead and the later spate of Zombie films, books,
comics, video games, and TV series the ghoul did become something to
imitate. By placing them in an
apocalyptic setting the meaning of the ghoul changed, from something terribly
read to just another monster. The apocalyptic ghoul lives in its own world and
is no real threat to you walking down the street.
But, for a brief moment in time I had fears
of ghouls that were unpredictable and as real as the mailman.
