(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)
The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 3
11. Night of the Living Dead, dir. George Romero
The hero is cool under pressure. He is able to assess the situation and take action. He is a motivator, a communicator, a leader. He is caring, intelligent, handsome, strong, and brave.
He is also wrong.
Night of the Living Dead is a great horror film for a variety of reasons. The tremendously atmospheric black-and-white photography is one of them: All expressionist shadows one minute and verite-style documentaryisms the next, it imbues the title characters with a simultaneously obscure and vivid nightmare quality that their counterparts in the film's sequels (even in the excellent Dawn of the Dead for all its satirical brilliance and undeniable terror) sorely lacked due to their depiction in living color. The eerie opening scene is another: a long drive through an empty road into a cemetery, where our erstwhile protagonist mocks his dead father and utters one of the most memorable unwitting prophecies in horror-film history. And the gruesomely simple premise is still another: With minimal explanation the dead have come back to life, and they've come to eat you. The film itself lurches forward with a similar basic-instinct urgency, throttling us after mere minutes and never letting go until that unforgettable ending.
But perhaps the most important reason for this horror film's greatness is also the one you're least likely to notice at first, or even after a second viewing. The film is such a white-knuckle onslaught of suspsense and disgust that we may focus on the zombies and the conflict they engender. But that's a focus almost as single-minded as that of the zombies themselves. What's really frightening here is that in the end, all our logic, all our admiration, all our sympathy is revealed to have been directed at the wrong person. The right person, of course, did not look or act right--angry, loud, belligerent, defensive, vindictive, self-righteous, cowardly, even craven, he was essentially right in spite of himself. But right he was, and that upends our worldview as much as any zombie.
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