![]() ![]() And in a way, that view of it wasn’t entirely wrong. ![]() “Night of the Living Dead,” by contrast, seemed to be trashing the very essence of what a motion picture was. “Rosemary’s Baby,” released earlier the same year, was also a work of shivery disturbance, yet it was also, quite obviously, a movie of high cinematic elegance (it established Roman Polanski as the successor to Hitchcock). Variety, for one, wrote that the movie raised “doubts about the future of the regional cinema movement and about the moral health of film goers who cheerfully opt for this unrelieved orgy of sadism.” The movie was dismissed, by and large, as a grotesquely amoral stunt - something beneath an actual motion picture. When “Night of the Living Dead” was first released, in October 1968, the press was scarcely ready for it. The cemetery scene was, of course, the ghoulish appetizer for a movie that would take the possibilities of flesh-ripping, intestine-eating gore to frenzied new heights of mayhem - or depths of depravity, depending on your vantage. Romero seemed to be crushing the entire world around it. As I sat there, spellbound with fear, the artistry of George A. The effect wasn’t just scary - it was insane. It had been built up to.) The movie had barely started, yet this monster was already at the climax of his rampage. (Even the first attack by Norman Bates, in the motel shower, had been prepared for. He arrived so quickly and relentlessly - out of where? out of nowhere - that his presence burned through the hidden niceties of every horror film I’d ever seen. He was scarcely a “character” at all he was all id and violence and drive, all rampaging hunger. He kept coming, hard and fast, banging his open hand on the car window like he wanted to smash through it. The film’s first zombie, wordless and relentless, reminded me of Frankenstein’s monster, only it was like seeing Boris Karloff on homicidal overdrive. Who, exactly, was coming to get us? In a minute or so, we found out. The bespectacled creepy geek who said “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!” seemed to be teasing not just his poor sister but anyone who was watching the movie. The images had a high-intensity lurid starkness that looked like something out of a silent film crossed with something out of a documentary. ![]() It was almost as if the regular programming - the banality of the usual mainstream diversion - had been suspended, all for this news bulletin from a zone beyond the Twilight Zone. As I sat there in the darkened living room, the film’s end-of-the-world atmosphere of rapacious anxiety seemed, at that moment, as if it had been fashioned for the small screen, and made just for me. Yet here was “Night of the Living Dead” on TV. They weren’t all that easy to find (especially if you were 15). At that point, low-budget horror films - even those that became notorious and sold a lot of tickets on the drive-in and grindhouse circuit, as “Night of the Living Dead” had - possessed an up-from-the-underground, not-quite-on-the-radar quality. an oddball black-and-white movie that opened in a cemetery just kind of…appeared. I was at home on a lonely high-school Saturday night watching TV, and at 11:30 p.m. Romero, who died on Sunday, it was in 1974. The first time I ever saw “ Night of the Living Dead,” the low-budget masterpiece of flesh-eating midnight terror directed by George A.
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