Short Essay 1:
Night of the Living Dead came out at the end of the civil rights era and many people went down to the local theater to watch movies that adhered to social conventions. With Night of the Living Dead, George A Romero came out with one of the first horror movies that critiqued the human personality “operating within a ruthless capitalist society” (Williams, 26). Night of the Living Dead broke many film conventions such as the lead protagonist dying in a death “absurd in nature”(Williams, 27), the young “lovey-dovey”(Williams, 27) couple that do not survive through to the end, and children being innocent and without a shred of violence.
The convention of the protagonist living until the end of the film is one of the most common in film. In Night of the Living Dead Ben the protagonist does not live to the end. In the film we are not given any history or anecdotes about Ben’s personal life before the events of Night of the Living Dead. His entrance is as sudden as his departure in the film. We first see him barging into the house that Barbara has found herself in and immediately taking responsibility of the situation. He has lots of obstacles, such as having conflict with the other males in the house and having to fight off the living dead outside, and almost fails many times but he survives. He is on his way out of the house when he is shot dead by the countrymen who are there to exterminate the living dead. We, the audience, do not know whether the countrymen knew if Ben was a zombie or not. Then we witness a newsreel-like montage of Ben’s body being thrown into a body with the rest of the zombies that mirrors World War 2 imagery of concentration in which people were regarded as less of human. This imagery shows that Ben is regarded as less than human by the living just as Jews were treated in the concentration camps.
Another convention that many films of horror had was the “two young lovers who… ordinarily survive when all others are destroyed” (Williams, 34) and offers the audience a hint of hope for the future after the events of the film. Such films like 2010’s The Crazies, which is based off of Romero’s own The Crazies, had this convention. In The Crazies the couple David and Judy stick together through terrible events such as being tied up and almost being impaled by a pitchfork at the high school that the government is using for quarantine, and almost being killed by a family of Crazies but escaping with nothing but a stabbed hand. Despite all that horror and danger that they experience they still survive and are able to walk away from the camera towards their destination of Cedar Rapids. In Night of the Living Dead, the couple Tom and, coincidentally, Judy are in the same predicament as the couple in The Crazies. They’re caught up in this life threatening situation and they are staying together no matter the price. Except that through their very real mistakes that will almost definitely happen if a zombie break out occurred, they are punished and killed by the very thing that they want to escape. Judy shows her love by running out and “breach[ing] the strategy originally agreed upon”(Williams, 34) to join her partner Tom. All seems well until the gas that Tom is pumping sets alight and instead of keeping the pump aimed away from the gas tank, he accidentally swipes the pump towards the truck and accidentally lighting that on fire. He and Judy try to drive away but ends up blowing up the car and giving the zombies “an unexpected barbecue” (Williams, 34).
The final film convention that Romero defies is the tarnishment of “Hollywood’s idealistic images of childhood” (Williams, 27) through the young girl Karen. Throughout the movie we are given innocent images like when Karen is laying on the table sick and another image of her father and mother coming together to try and nurture her despite the marital problems they are having. After all these innocent images that make us sympathize with the child and makes us want her to survive the hell that she is in, she ends up being the monster that the other humans are currently fighting upstairs. The young girl Karen eats her father and kills her mother by repeatedly stabbing her mother. Not many films had this imagery and after Night of the Living Dead many films started to use this imagery such as 1984’s Children of the Corn, 2009’s The Orphan, and, to a lesser extent, 2002’s The Ring.
Night of the Living Dead was quite the defyer of the conventions that filled past and current films. Having the main protagonist die, having the young couple who are setup to succeed but ending up failing, and having the sweet innocent child turn bloody killer surprised many viewers at its launch and continues to do so in the contemporary world. As Williams states in his book Knight of the Living Dead, Night of the Living Dead used the “thematic traditions of 1950s EC Comics”(Williams 26) to deliver a “devastating critique upon the deformations of human personality operating within a ruthless capitalist society” (Williams, 26).
Short Essay 2:
Martin is the “most realized” of George Romero’s works according to the direct himself (Williams, 80). The 1978 film follows a young man by the name of Martin who believes that he is a vampire. Throughout the film we are given vague hints as to whether he is a vampire or not. It is up to the audience to determine whether Martin is truly a vampire or just a sick individual who uses his pseudo-vampyric nature as a justification for his actions. Personally, I find that he is more of a sick individual who uses the title of vampire as something to excuse his murdering and sexual molestations of women and men.
Martin, according to Williams, lives in a “world of illusions” and there are lots of examples of this throughout the film (Williams, 81). These illusions are are shown visually by transferring from a colored film to black and white film. The transfer from color to black and white, to me, is a callback to the classic vampire films from the early 1900’s like Hammer Productions’ Dracula, Nosferatu, and Vampyr. The first illusion that we are subjected to is when Martin is on his way to his cousin’s city. As night falls we see Martin preparing his tools of a hypodermic needle and a razor blade just before he successfully picks the lock to a woman’s cabin. When he walks in the transfer of color to black and white occurs. He sees a lovely woman in a nightgown “welcoming his advances like a lover” and before he can caress her he hears the “mundane sound of a flushing toilet” (Williams, 83). This brings us back out of his illusion and into the colored reality that he is in. He quickly hides himself behind the bathroom door as it opens and the woman is not this lovely sexy woman with clear and smooth skin but rather a woman who has a face mask on. He springs into action and she, again, goes against his illusions of a sexy moment where she instead is cursing at him and calling him a “bastard” and other well-deserved insults. He slashes her wrists and drinks the blood seeping out of the wounds. His face is of total bliss as he drinks her blood which adds onto the fact that he could be a vampire but to me it seems like he’s just reveling a bit too much in his psychotic ways. This scene gives us our first look into the psycho nature of Martin.
Once Martin finishes his bloody ritual with his first victim, his cousin Cuda picks him up at the train station and they go to his home. Cuda is a religious elderly man who believes Martin to be a vampire and tells him throughout the movie that Martin is in his eighties and needs to be dealt with. Cuda adds onto the illusions that Martin already experiences by making Martin dream about a trial by a priest and some other churchgoers in his home while he cowers behind a couch. George Romero does not make it obvious whether this is a memory or just an illusion. Martin experiences this illusion various times throughout the film such as after doing his ritual with a woman having an affair, anytime he fights with Cuda about his identity, and when he stalks his next prey. Martin depends on Cuda to continue his delusions about being a vampire and Cuda continuously tells Martin that he is a vampire. Martin’s first time in his room at Cuda’s he finds garlic hanging by the ceiling but he is not affected by them. This gives the audience a small hint on whether Martin is a vampire or not.
Martin towards the middle of the film decides to very clearly show Cuda that him being a vampire is all just illusion. He dresses up like a cliche vampire and has fake vampire teeth on so when he encounters Cuda, Cuda is falling for the illusion and becomes afraid. That is until Martin tears off the teeth and cape and angrily shouts that Cuda’s beliefs are not true. This is ironic because his belief of being a vampire are not true. Although Martin does what vampires are known to do such as drinking blood, he himself is falling for the illusion that Cuda also believes in. And that is not the only way that Martin falls for the illusion either. When he speaks to the radio broadcaster to talk about his vampirism, he is falling deeper into the illusion that he believes in. The radio broadcaster seems to not believe it himself because he encourages Martin’s behavior in order to get more listeners onto the show. He makes up this whole figure for Martin named “The Count” and is always hyping him up before Martin calls in to talk about his vampyrism. He never outright says if he believes in Martin’s illusion but I’m leaning towards the fact that he is just using Martin for his own gain.
Martin is living in a world full of illusions. He himself is perpetuating the illusions by acting like a vampire and drinking the blood of his victims but he is also being influenced from outside sources such as his cousin Cuda, and the radio broadcaster. Lastly his death is the culmination of all his vampire-like illusions in which he is killed by Cuda by a wooden stake hammered through his heart.
Short Essay 3
Day of the Dead is George Romero’s final film in the “Dead” trilogy with it being released in 1985. The film’s characters have a lot of struggles and do not cooperate throughout this film. The main character Sarah is the only living female character amongst a cast of hyper aggressive males. The males who are not that hyper aggressive have a problem of their own such as a drinking problem, a sick curiosity on how the zombies function, and a zombie bite. The previous qualities do not fully explain the breakdown of the group but the groups’ loss of communication, claustrophobia, and the slow rate of Dr. Logan’s work do.
At the beginning of the film when the group arrives at the army base where the bunker is at, the two groups, of scientists and military, are getting along pretty well. The army is actually going out towards the uninhabited part of the tunnels and getting the zombies for Dr. Logan. But once Major Cooper dies, the cooperation ends. The audience assumes that the scientists and the military have been getting along enough when there was a central figure that kept the two groups somewhat in agreement because Major Cooper is talked about by both groups as someone who knew what they were doing and listened to both parties. Major Cooper is a good leader because he was able to bring together two totally different groups of people and make them cooperate for their own best interests. But once Major Cooper dies, the two groups become “dominated by the macho megalomaniac figure of Captain Rhodes” (Williams, 140). Captain Rhodes is the most hyper aggressive male in the film and is even wearing two pistols and a large ammo belt across his chest which is reminiscent of the war movies where there’s a soldier who has to have these symbols of masculinity to make themselves feel more powerful. Captain Rhodes assumes authority and starts to demand Dr. Logan AKA “Dr. Logan” to start showing progress in his experiments or he will kill the zombies right outside their safe environment. Dr. Logan shows him later on what he is doing and Rhodes does not listen. He reaches for his gun, seemingly the only way he can control others, but is stopped. Rhodes is no longer listening to the scientists and is resorting to aggressive methods in order to get things done. Dr. Logan mentions that Bub the zombie must have rewards for his behavior. He does not communicate what those rewards are except that it is meat. So when Captain Rhodes finds that Dr. Logan is using the meat of his fellow dead soldiers, all bets are off. Captain Rhodes shoots Dr. Logan, dooming all the experiments that could have had some success at a cure or at least domestication, and is now seeing “red”. Communication breakdown has occurred.
The setting of this film is in a bunker. The bunker has thin hallways, one large central room that the soldiers are always in, small cell-like rooms that the characters sleep in, and the tunnels that house the undead. There are few chances for them to go outside and get away because they have limited gas for the helicopter and there is a growing mass of zombies that are threatening to bring down the little fence that separate humans from zombies. There are very few scenes in this film that occur outside in the open. Only the beginning and end have exterior scenes in which the characters get to attempt to find other humans subconsciously for something that will ease the tension of being stuck with the same people day in and out. This film is very focused and not in a good way for the characters. They see each other, and the zombies, every single day and there is not much to do except for waiting around and rounding up a zombie whenever Dr. Logan needs it. At first the group is cooperating moderately but as time goes on they slowly become impatient having to see each other all day every day. Sometimes the inhabitants get to go outside the bunker but that’s really to see how the outside world is doing by getting in the helicopter and flying to a nearby city such as in the beginning of the film when we have an overhead shot showing this large sprawling Florida city. This shot is to really emphasize the contrast between the open world and the cramped world that the characters are hunkered down in.
In the first chapter of the Knight of the Living Dead book by Tony Williams, he explains that most of Romero’s films contains characters who are affected by their environment that they are in and that’s what shapes the characters. Comparing this film to Dawn of the Dead, Dawn was set in a mall and had large spaces in which people could run around and get to where they needed. They distracted themselves from the impending threat of the zombies by indulging their materialistic urges. In this film there is nothing for them to distract themselves with. Instead of large open spaces to walk around in, they are instead in small, cramped spaces. During the final showdown when the zombies get in and all the characters are now running for their lives, Rhodes is going up and down these hallways trying to get away from an armed Bub. Bub is always at the other end of the hallway and is, alone, blocking the hallway behind him. Bub blocking the hallway just on his own is a good indicator of how cramped the hallways were. Rhodes is herded to his death like a shepherd herding his livestock. He no longer is in control but rather Bub which is a reversal of roles from the beginning of the film.
Dr. Logan seems to be far in his research into whether zombies can be domesticated or not when we first meet him early on in the film. He has already set up some of the zombies up with hospital equipment like the electrodes that doctors use to observe brain activity and he has even been observing a zombie show human like traits that show that the zombie, Bub, has a faint glimmer of memory from his past life. When Captain Cooper dies, Rhodes becomes more involved in the experiments that Dr. Logan is doing. He is unsatisfied with the work and even says that what Bub is doing are just “tricks” as if Bub is being taught to do the behavior that he is showing like he’s a dog which parallels the real life mood of teaching gorillas sign language. Although there is a lot of potential in the research that Dr. Logan is doing, it is not enough for Rhodes as he is more concerned with keeping his men safe. Which goes back to the fact that they’ve been cooped up there for months and maybe even years while this research has been going.
Day of the Dead is all about everything going to shit because no one can cooperate with each other in a cramped space while waiting for Dr. Logan’s research to yield something satisfactory. Sarah is trapped between a conflict raging from the military community and the science community. In the end they are undone by themselves with the zombies just following instinct. Only three of the many people survive and Rhodes is destroyed by the very thing he was trying to protect his men from.