Night was produced on a shoestring budget ($114,000) and was met with wildly divergent reactions. Some critics panned it as immoral, sadistic exploitation—Variety famously called the film an “unrelieved orgy of sadism”—while others found aesthetic and cultural value in the film (Phillips 2005, 82). Whether critics and audiences liked what they saw, they continue to respond powerfully to the film, which has now grossed $30 million worldwide (The Numbers 2015). According to the critical consensus, Night achieved its power by effectively tapping into extant social anxieties. Kendall Phillips, for instance, identifies a number of “points of resonance between Night and the social upheaval occurring in the final years of the 1960s” (2005, 85). The Sixties had seen the rise, consolidation, and disintegration of the counterculture; the decade began with optimism and ended in strife and internal division. Some critics claim that Romero’s bleak film reflects this development (Becker 2006): The main characters—a “democratic” blend of ordinary American citizens (Dillard 1987, 19)—seem to have every opportunity to effectively defend themselves against the forces of evil if only they work together, but they fail spectacularly and perhaps inevitably. In Phillips’s phrase, the film “acted as a kind of eulogy to the revolutionary spirit” of the counterculture (2005, 93), a spirit that by 1968 seemed to many to be either frustratingly impotent (flower power did not seem to be conquering war, greed, and hate) or disturbingly sinister (with the rise of militaristic counterculture factions, for example). The preyed-upon characters in Night fail to cooperate and end up killing each other; authorities prove to be dangerously inefficient (even as they do their best to contain the threat); and the enemy—whether live or undead—is us. As in other horror films of the era (Platts 2014a), the monsters in Night are ultimately internal; not exotic monsters from the Carpathian mountains, lost worlds, or outer space, but the darkest, most destructive impulses in human nature. Conflict and defeat are inevitable. Conflict and defeat are not unique to the 1960s—they are basic terms of existence. They may have been more salient to American citizens in the 1960s than they were in, say, the 1950s, and Night did come out of, and reflect, particularly troubled times. But the horror of Romero’s film is not that it reflects the defeat of the counterculture; it’s that the film reflects the defeat of life.
The visual style of Night sustains the film’s thematic function as a disturbing reflection of social anxieties. The film is shot in black and white; not because of financial or technological constraints, but as a conscious stylistic choice, one that imparts to the film a cinéma vérité tonality (Becker 2006, Phillips 2005, 98). As Joseph Maddrey writes: “Because Night of the Living Dead was filmed guerilla-style . . . with the unflinching authority of a wartime newsreel, it seems as much like a documentary on the loss of social stability as an exploitation film” (2004, 51). Moreover, the hand-held camera, the use of natural lighting, and the grainy still images at the end of the film all work to uphold the film’s documentary quality (see Figure 8.1). Night lacks the artifice of, say, Hitchcock’s horror films (Dillard 1987); its style functions to remove aesthetic distance and give the film a tone of visual authenticity. To contemporary audiences, Romero’s zombie film evoked a news broadcast. Is that why the film became a resounding success, an indisputable classic of modern horror cinema which moved and shocked audiences? Partially, yes. The film does function as an accomplished artistic diagnosis of a Zeitgeist. But its power goes deeper. It continues to fascinate, engage, even disturb audiences. The film may have lost its capacity to leave audiences “stunned with terror,” as the film critic Roger Ebert reported of his experience of watching the film in 1969—he himself “felt real terror in that neighborhood theater last Saturday afternoon”—but the power of the film transcends its cultural context. Romero’s zombies are not just apt metaphors for brainless humanity, or capitalism (Wood 1985), or the Vietnam War (Higashi 1990), and the film is not just a dramatization of sociopolitical tendencies peculiar to the apocalyptic tail end of the American Age of Aquarius. The zombies have a horrible, visceral, literal presence, and the central conflicts in the film are universal. Indeed, the film has a resonance that connects with basic dispositions in human nature.
Figure 8.1: George A. Romero’s seminal zombie film Night of the Living Dead (1968) capitalized on an authenticity aesthetic to more effectively disturb audiences. It looked like a documentary film about the undead walking the earth. The film was shot in black and white, evoking newsreel footage, and ended with grainy still images that suggest news photos.
Central to Night are, of course, the eponymous monsters, the “ghouls” or zombies. Not that the film’s characters realize what they are up against, at least not initially; the film uses restricted narration to withhold background information from characters as well as audience, and it is only forty minutes or so into the film that we are told—via a diegetic newscast—that the ghouls eat their victims. Moreover, we never learn exactly what causes the uprising of the ravenous dead. Some scientists think it has to do with “high-level radiation” from space, but other scientists are shown contesting this hypothesis. Night’s zombies would have been disturbingly mysterious to contemporary audiences. They are pale, dumb, animalistic, and aggressively predatory; some have facial disfigurations that appear to be the result of violence, maybe early decay (see Figure 8.2). The zombies of Night are less visually disgusting, less decayed, than are most contemporary zombies, such as the rotting, walking cadavers of The Walking Dead (Darabont 2010–) (or even the Technicolor zombies of Tom Savini’s 1990 remake of Night). Like non-human animals, they are afraid of fire. And because the radiation has somehow “activated” their brains, the walking corpses can be killed with a shot or a blow to the head.
Figure 8.2: A decomposing zombie, or “ghoul,” from Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). A reanimated corpse with a taste for human flesh is a powerful, if implausible, concept because it taps into evolved fears of predation and contagion.
An evolutionary perspective helps explain why the modern horror zombie of the type championed by Romero so quickly became such a mainstay of popular culture. Something about zombies makes them peculiarly fascinating to us, even though they do not exist in the real world. The zombie of modern horror is highly dangerous: It is predatory—it has one motivation, and that is to eat people—and infectious. Once bitten by a zombie, a person becomes one sooner or later. This idea, a loan from vampire fiction, is introduced, but not highly developed, in Night. One character, the girl Karen, has sustained a bite on her arm. The characters in the film express some concern over infection, but none of them realizes that she is liable to become a zombie. A present-day zombie-savvy audience, in contrast, immediately realizes the danger; in The Walking Dead, if somebody is bitten on a limb by a zombie, that limb is promptly amputated—but this convention of zombie fiction had yet to become widespread when Night was released.
Both of the modern horror zombie’s defining characteristics, the predation and the contagion, allow it to connect squarely with evolved defense mechanisms in human psychological architecture. We fear agents that have the will and the capacity to eat us, and we have strongly aversive reactions to cues of contagion, such as the odor and sight of decomposing flesh. What’s more, the counterintuitive nature of the zombie makes it particularly salient. We intuitively understand that death is the irreversible cessation of self-propelled motion (Barrett and Behne 2005), and zombies, like vampires, violate that understanding (Clasen 2010a). They look like dead people, dead meat, but they move around and act in a goal-directed manner. Dead people are disturbing in their own right. A corpse in an advanced state of decomposition is disgusting and troubling—mainly because it is decomposing, pathogen-riddled meat, but also because a corpse may imply an act of predation (Boyer 2001). The undead are even worse. The very concept of an undead agent is fascinating, and the fascination becomes tinged with dread and disgust when the undead agent is predatory and contagious. Yet an undead human is more disturbing than, say, an undea
d raccoon. The zombie gives us a troubling vision of a human stripped of humanity, of life reduced to meaningless hunger. The zombie, moreover, is a personification of death, a collapse of life and death into one concept, an embodiment of the truism that we are all slowly dying and decaying. The zombie is us—not just a symbol of the braindead masses, but a symbol of that most terrifying fact of life, its transience. The power of the zombie is really all in our minds, in the way that human mental machinery is constructed. We fear predators, loathe rotting meat, are captivated by counterintuitive agents, and are terrified of death and the “conqueror worm” that awaits us all, in Poe’s phrase. These horrors crowd together in the figure of the modern horror zombie.
Night makes death thematically salient from the outset. In the very first scene, we see a single car traveling a cracked road through a dead landscape. Inside the car are Johnny and Barbra, two youths who are visiting the grave of their father. Johnny teases Barbra about her fear of the cemetery and the dead, even attempting to spook her with a Boris Karloff impression: “They’re coming to get you, Barbra,” he says as a man is shambling toward them in the distance. The man turns out to be a zombie, and the zombie attacks and kills Johnny. This all happens within a few minutes of screen time. Death, and the dead, saturates the film from the very opening scene, and the audience is drawn into the film partly via the inherent fascination that an evolutionarily relevant theme such as death holds, partly via formal techniques. While the film does not tie the audience to one specific point of view, it does use many reaction shots to show us, and let us mirror, the characters’ emotional reactions to the zombie outbreak. For example, in the beginning of the film, Barbra’s frantic flight from the zombie that killed her brother is filmed alternating between point-of-view shots from her perspective (to put us in the action) and reaction shots (to let us mirror her emotional state). Moreover, much of the filming is done using a hand-held camera, often held at canted angles or traveling quickly and chaotically, to convey to the audience the urgency of her flight and thus to let us feel an echo of her terror. The use of reaction shots in the film vastly outnumbers shots of the zombies, who only get a few minutes of screen time in all. This is in keeping with the film’s thematic focus on what the zombie apocalypse does to people, rather than on the zombies or the apocalypse themselves.
As the film progresses, the literal fear of the dead gives way to fear of the dangerous living. The very cosmos of the film comes to teem with danger, with the zombies being just one source. The film, like so many subsequent zombie stories, is centrally about the social and psychological consequences of the zombie outbreak. As Romero himself has said, his zombies “don’t represent anything in particular. They are a global disaster that people don’t know how to deal with,” and his zombie films are “about how people respond or fail to respond to this” (McConnell 2008). Romero’s interpretation dovetails with Dillard’s analytical observation that “the living dead themselves are the active and catalytic agency for the release of all of the film’s horrors” (1987, 20). James Twitchell goes further and claims that “to pinpoint the horror [of Night] one must ignore the monster and watch the transformations wrought on the victims” (1985, 268), but that is an overstatement. The zombies are not mere window dressing or gratuitous eye-catchers; without the zombies, Night would be a very different film. The film may foreground such realistic processes as breakdowns of communication and cooperation, but the quasi-supernatural zombies are crucial to the film’s tone and its meaning and, ultimately, its artistic and commercial success.
Conflict plays a major thematic role in Night—the conflict between the zombies and the living, who are engaged in a deadly zero-sum game, and the equally deadly conflicts among the living themselves. As Dillard observes, the “film is primarily one of ceaseless and unremitting struggle” (1987, 22). From the outset, the film shows characters quarreling. Barbra and Johnny quarrel over the cemetery visit. Ben and Barbra quarrel over whether to leave the relative safety of the farmhouse and look for Johnny (that quarrel ends with Ben literally knocking Barbra out). Harry and Helen have an unhappy marriage and fight. Their child, Karen, eats part of her father’s corpse and kills her mom. Ben and Harry fight, with words and fists (and eventually, a gun). Only Tom and Judy don’t quarrel much; they are young and very much in love, but this unconditional love becomes pathological in the film when Judy throws caution to the wind and pursues Tom on his fuel run, which gets her killed. There is in the film a sense that effective cooperation could have saved the defenders of the farmhouse, who all die, but that human nature keeps getting in the way. Conflict is inevitable in this film, as it is in real life. Not only do people have nonoverlapping interests and motives, but everybody struggles with an internal conflict between altruistic and selfish motives. The conflict between prosocial impulses and a desire for dominance is an active theme in most fiction (Carroll 2012b) and looms large in much zombie fiction, where characters are frequently torn between looking out for number one and helping their peers. This has been a central evolutionary problem for the human lineage for millions of years (Boehm 2012). In Night, Ben discovers that the Coopers and Tom and Judy have been hiding in the basement while he was busy boarding up the house and fighting off zombies. Ben asks Harry why he didn’t come up to help when he heard Barbra’s screams. Harry answers: “I’m not gonna take that kind of a chance when we’ve got a safe place. We luck into a safe place, and now you’re telling us we’ve gotta risk our lives just because somebody might need help, huh?” Replies Ben: “Yeah, something like that.” Here Ben—the closest we come to an actual protagonist in this film—is portrayed as the prototypical good guy, the altruistic fighter, but that does not save him. In Night, there is no transcendent good, no ultimate bad. Some characters are better than others (Ben, fighting for survival while trying to protect the weak, is better than whiny, selfish Harry), but in the end, the film shows us flawed people struggling and failing to survive in an indifferent, dangerous world.
Night offers no neat resolution, no happy ending, no reassuring vision to take away from the film—just a lingering sense of profound disturbance and unsettlement. Audiences that register the film’s somber tone—the bleak position it takes on the inevitability of social, psychological, even organic breakdown—are left with a feeling that they have witnessed something unpleasantly true. Some audiences, of course, are unable to see past the film’s ridiculous premise (radiation from outer space raising the dead). The hostile critic from Variety is one such literalist. But the film is more than a ridiculous premise played out to fill an hour and a half of sadistic entertainment. It lets us look into dark pockets of psychology, examine human reactions to disaster, particularly social interaction gone awry in the face of such disaster, and project ourselves into such a world, asking ourselves what we would do and how we would fare. That is why Night dwells on the characters’ attempts at coping with disaster, for example in the extended sequences depicting Ben and Harry’s arguments over whether to stay on the ground floor or in the basement, and Tom and Judy’s argument over whether to stay in the relative safety of the house or attempt to run for fuel. The film’s truths, then, are psychological and sociological. Night engages us by foregrounding themes that are inherently engaging, by pitting human characters against a highly dangerous and salient foe, and by creating suspense and immersion via restricted narration and subjective cinematography. The film makes salient in particular the conflicts endemic to human life. That theme would have had particular relevance for contemporary audiences, who were witnessing ideological as well as armed conflict all around them, and it continues to fascinate audiences because of its roots deep within human nature. Night conveys the profound demoralization borne of the political and cultural conflicts of the 1960s, conflicts that are given vivid embodiment in the trope of the zombie apocalypse. The film offers an opportunity for emotional engagement and for reflection on the human condition under extreme conditions. Audiences are invited to participate vicariousl
y in the struggles depicted, and such vicarious participation can help us reflect on, and maybe modify, our own reactions under similarly extreme conditions. Romero’s imaginative universe is a nasty one; the appeal of Night is the appeal of temporary, imaginative absorption in such a fascinating, ambivalently compelling, extremely bleak universe.
The immensely successful television series The Walking Dead—the “most watched show in cable television history” (Platts 2014b, 294)—appropriated and developed all the central themes and elements of Night. The series also uses an outbreak of a zombie virus as a catalyst for a story about human interactions and human psychology, and it also dwells on conflict between and within characters. The popularity of The Walking Dead suggests that the themes it shares with Night transcend the period of Night’s production. Humans are interested in vicarious insight into social and psychological conflicts, and as a prey species, we are captivated by stories that pit human characters against horrible, predatory monsters. Stories that center on the zombie apocalypse may be laughably unrealistic in their narrative premise, but they engage our attention and can tell us something real and true about our constitution.
Why Horror Seduces Page 13
