31 Days of Horror: Night of the Living Dead

They're coming to get you, Barbara, and they are coming to get all of us in Night of the Living Dead.

In addition to our regular programming, every day this month, Last Cinema Standing will be bringing readers recommendations from the best of the horror genre as we make our way to Halloween. This should not be treated as a “best of” list but more as a primer. You can read the full introduction to Last Cinema Standing’s 31 Days of Horror here, and be sure to check back each day for a new suggestion.

Day 30: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Barbara and Johnny drive to the countryside to visit their father’s grave. It is a pleasant day, and the cemetery is mostly empty, except for one older man in the distance. Barbara’s discomfort with their surroundings is apparent, and like any good older brother might, Johnny begins to tease her.

“Barbara. They’re coming to get you, Barbara,” he says. About this much he is correct, and for the next 90 or so minutes of screen time, they come to get Barbara and anyone else unlucky enough to be in their path. They are the dead, brought back to a grim simulacrum of life by unknown causes, and their mass re-animation means no one is safe.

Some might say The Exorcist or Dracula or maybe The Shining, and there are legitimate cases to be made for all of them and many more, but for me, there is no other choice. Night of the Living Dead is the greatest horror film ever made. Until Pulp Fiction came along in 1994 and opened the floodgates on a thousand hyper-literate, highly stylized crime films, it would be hard to name another movie that influenced the future of its genre and film in general more than George A. Romero’s fright night masterpiece.

The zombie as known by the popular culture was invented in that Pittsburgh cemetery, and movies have not been the same since. Like how your parents said you can be anything when you grow up, zombies can be anything now – Nazis, strippers, heartbroken teenagers, classic literary characters – but with rare exceptions, they are all Romero zombies.

In whatever form they come, they are implacable, uncaring, and devoid of the thing that once made them human. You can stand and fight or you can run and hide, but most likely, you will be frozen with fear, and in the next heartbeat, you are one of them. You are a convert to their cause, and what anyone you love might recognize as you is gone, replaced by the coldness of your stare, the pallor of your skin, and the insatiable nature of your appetite.

But, influence is one thing. Films become influential because they are great, sterling examples of the best of their form. Night of the Living Dead is an unimpeachably brilliant thriller from start to finish with any number of social messages buried like gold pieces among the ghouls. It rewards repeat viewings by showcasing the kind of subtlety and nuance often missing from even the most austere dramas, let alone scary drive-in flicks.

Virtually none of the political commentary or cultural critiquing was intended by the filmmakers, but simply by doing what came naturally, a subversive work of art was born. As a general rule, only the best films are deemed dangerous enough to be banned – A Clockwork Orange, The Last Temptation of Christ, etc. – and in a country torn apart by Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, and endless social upheaval, you better believe Night of the Living Dead was considered dangerous.

Our hero is Ben, a smart, resourceful black man played by Duane Jones, who had never acted before and would act only rarely after. Just casting a black man as a hero would have been considered shocking at the time, but Romero and his team just saw the right man for the job. Thank god they did because Jones’ performance is a vital breath of fresh air in a film culture that to this day is desperately lacking in strong black heroes.

He battles hordes of mindless drones, a ready-made metaphor for almost anything. Just take your pick – consumerism, television, political party loyalty, mobs of any kind, and basically all situations in which a large group of people comes together in thoughtless destruction. Joining Ben in the fight, to the limited extent they are able to help him, are Barbara, a young couple, and a family of three.

Of these side characters, the family and particularly the father is the most intriguing. Played by Karl Hardman, who performed multiple behind-the-scenes tasks on this film, Harry is a panicking, petty man interested in his own survival, the survival of his family, and everything else, in that order. In storytelling terms, he is a perfect foil for the calmly logical and eminently capable Ben, but if we dig deeper, we find a pointed jab at the patriarchal structure of American families and the myth of the “You can count on me” dad.

Some of this is there, and some of it is not, but all of it depends on your context for viewing. Because the zombies can be anything, anywhere, and anyone, the audience can plug itself into the terror, which means that no one will have the same experience as anyone else watching Night of the Living Dead. Whatever your deepest fears are, they are manifest in the form of zombies. You can run until you drop and hide until you cannot breathe, but they are coming to get you, me, Barbara, and everyone else. That is the gift of this movie, and the power of horror.

Tomorrow: (yells out the window) “Boy, what day is it?” “Why, today, it’s Halloween day.” And thus had Scrooge found his inner goodness. We wrap up the 31 Days of Horror with a swan song you will perhaps agree is appropriate.

31 Days of Horror: Return of the Living Dead III

Melinda Clarke plays Julie, who hates herself and what she has become in Return of the Living Dead III.

In addition to our regular programming, every day this month, Last Cinema Standing will be bringing readers recommendations from the best of the horror genre as we make our way to Halloween. This should not be treated as a “best of” list but more as a primer. You can read the full introduction to Last Cinema Standing’s 31 Days of Horror here, and be sure to check back each day for a new suggestion.

Day 26: Return of the Living Dead III (1993)

The Return of the Living Dead series starts out as essentially fun horror-comedy in its first two installments, but the third entry almost demands that you sit up and take notice. I will say right off the bat: Things are going to get pretty dark in this post. We are going to talk about depression, self-harm, and the Holocaust. If you want no part of it, I understand. No hard feelings.

Zombie movies are at their best when they reflect something back about our culture, be it consumerism, racism, proclivities toward war, or anything in that realm of social consciousness. We have strayed from that ideal lately, thanks in large part to straight-to-video cheapies trying to turn a quick buck on an easy premise – coming to mind immediately are Zombie Strippers!, Zombies vs. Strippers, and virtually any title that comingles the promise of nudity with the promise of flesh eating.

The Return of the Living Dead movies, parts one and two anyway, were fun horror parodies of George A. Romero’s classic Dead films. They never forgot the horror aspects and featured a ready-made punk attitude that fit the early 1980s like a glove. I liken the evolution of Return of the Living Dead III from its predecessors to the way one might compare grunge to its heavy metal and hair metal forefathers: The fun is replaced by full-bodied nihilism, and the attacks on who we were and who we are now come fast and furiously.

Director Brian Yuzna and writer John Penney did not leave a big footprint on the film world, and stars Melinda Clarke and J. Trevor Edmond are probably more recognizable from their television work. But, for one film, they proved masters of macabre social commentary in ways the genre has been sorely lacking since.

Clarke and Edmond play lovers Julie and Curt. Curt’s dad, Col. Reynolds, is part of a U.S. military project testing a serum that will reanimate the dead with the goal of providing cheap, disposable meat for the American war machine. Already, we are into some pretty heady stuff, and the plot has not yet begun. As Col. Reynolds and his group continue their experiments on the undead, Julie dies in a motorcycle accident with Curt at the helm. Using his father’s serum, Curt brings Julie back to life, whereupon she becomes a self-hating flesh eater.

That is a lot to chew on, and this movie is often wrongly dismissed as the big-budget, needlessly weird cousin to the first two films in the series. So let us break this down slowly and try to see where its greatness lies and from where its critics are coming.

We will start with Clarke’s Julie, who has become something of a cult icon, and it is not hard to see why. While the first two installments have the punk walk and talk down, they lack the feelings of self-loathing, self-doubt, and nihilism behind the familiar pop culture tropes. This film brings all of that back in spades within Julie.

Julie does not want to hurt anybody, but as a zombie, it is in her nature. In an effort to avoid acting out and harming those around her, she resorts to self-harm. Raise your hand if this sounds familiar and not in a fantasy, sci-fi way. She hurts herself to fight the urge to hurt others. She hates who she has become but cannot fight it.

If this reminds you of a teenager you know – or, hell, even an adult – this is not by accident. The pain is a release, as it is for so many people like this. I know because I have walked up to that edge and stared into that abyss. There is nothing there but darkness, and no matter what beauty lay behind or in front, it is impossible to stop staring down into the pit, so you dive in.

This film is commendable for having the courage to go there, and when it does, it just keeps going. Yuzna and Penney venture all the way to the darkest period of our shared history, which you may recognize in the abstract but will be struck by if you choose to see it.

The zombies are in this place because the military has brought them here. The army performs experiments on them that force you to question what humanity is capable of when it classifies another group as less than human. It is nothing less than torture for the sake of seeing how far torture can go. The unsuccessful experiments, along with incalculable others, go to the furnace – the crematorium if you will.

Maybe it will seem like a stretch to compare the third film in a zombie horror series to the Holocaust, but if you can watch the army experiments, the prisons, and the abuse of a misunderstood and vilified minority without thinking of Josef Mengele, Adolf Hitler, and the one of the greatest atrocities of our time, you are not watching closely enough.

Perhaps you do see it, and it offends you. You may think films have no right to trade on the murder of millions of innocents. Well, wake up. We live in a culture in which violent crimes and serial murders are no longer shocking. They are primetime television, fictional and not. We filter everything through sound bites, pop psychology, and end-of-the-world drum beating. Return of the Living Dead III is a violent, angry critique of humanity’s past crimes and a warning for what the future could become. Unfortunately, it is a future we were unable to avoid.

Tomorrow, we try to recover with one of my favorite films of all time from any genre.

31 Days of Horror: Black Sabbath

Boris Karloff returns home in the middle segment of horror anthology Black Sabbath.

In addition to our regular programming, every day this month, Last Cinema Standing will be bringing readers recommendations from the best of the horror genre as we make our way to Halloween. This should not be treated as a “best of” list but more as a primer. You can read the full introduction to Last Cinema Standing’s 31 Days of Horror here, and be sure to check back each day for a new suggestion.

Day 8: Black Sabbath (1963)

This is what fear looks like. Black Sabbath, originally titled The Three Faces of Fear, is a horror anthology from Italian cult filmmaker Mario Bava. It is comprised of three tales of terror, each focusing on people who have allowed fear to consume them. As fear becomes the primary motivation, logic and reason go out the window – and with them, the hope for salvation.

With that emotional core as the only connecting thread, Bava tells the stories of a modern woman being terrorized by her telephone as she lounges alone in her apartment; a man in the early 1800s who arrives at a family’s home after one tragedy but whose very presence portends an even greater tragedy; and a pre-World War I nurse whose nagging conscience manifests itself in an all-too-real way.

Though it lacks the overt religious implications of his previous and intentionally similar-sounding Black Sunday, overtones of moral turpitude and divine punishment ring throughout each segment. This is most evident in the middle portion, in which the head of the household, played by an unmistakable and irreplaceable Boris Karloff, may or may not have been turned into a vampire. Religion has always had its place in horror films, often in a direct battle between good and evil, and Bava employs this to add gravity and weight to the proceedings.

Anthologies have been around since the beginning of storytelling – think “One Thousand and One Nights” or “The Canterbury Tales” – but are particularly well suited to horror. With each segment in Black Sabbath the length of a short film, the tension ramps up to an almost intolerable degree right from the start, and Bava sustains it the whole way, providing catharsis only in the mayhem that results when the tension finally breaks.

With recent horror films like the V/H/S series and The ABC’s of Death, anthology movies have been thrust back into the spotlight. Efforts like these find their DNA in the George Romero-produced Creepshow and in EC Comics such as “Tales from the Crypt” and “The Vault of Horror.” They have a reputation for being hit or miss, mostly as a result of the creative teams behind each story working on different wavelengths. While the conceit may tie things together, there is rarely a thematic underpinning to the effort.

This is not the case with Black Sabbath, for which Bava directed each of the three segments, and while the stories traverse time and space, they resonate in their shared preoccupations with guilt and punishment. There is nothing but this to connect these gruesome tales, but Bava ensures they feel of a piece, and the whole enterprise benefits from the guiding hand of a horror maestro.

Tomorrow, we pick our side in the fight between good and evil.