The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead, Second Edition [second edition] 9780231850759

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the cinema of G E O R G E A . R O M E R O

DIRECTORS’ CUTS

Other titles in the Directors’ Cuts series: the cinema of E M I R K U S T U R I C A : notes from the underground GORAN GOCIC

the cinema of K E N L O A C H : art in the service of the people JACOB LEIGH

the cinema of W I M W E N D E R S : the celluloid highway ALEXANDER GRAF

the cinema of K AT H R Y N B I G E L OW: hollywood transgressor edited by D E B O R A H J E R M Y N & S E A N R E D M O N D

the cinema of R O B E R T L E P A G E : the poetics of memory ALEKSANDAR DUNDJEROVIC

the cinema of A N G L E E : the other side of the screen WHITNEY CROTHERS DILLEY Second Edition

the cinema of T E R R E N C E M A L I C K : poetic visions of america edited by H A N N A H P A T T E R S O N

the cinema of A N D R Z E J WA J D A : the art of irony and defiance edited by J O H N O R R & E L Z B I E T A O S T R O W S K A

the cinema of K R Z Y S Z T O F K I E S L OW S K I : variations on destiny and chance M A R E K H A LT O F

the cinema of D AV I D LY N C H : american dreams, nightmare visions edited by E R I C A S H E E N & A N N E T T E D A V I S O N

the cinema of N A N N I M O R E T T I : dreams and diaries edited by E W A M A Z I E R S K A & L A U R A R A S C A R O L I

the cinema of M I K E L E I G H : a sense of the real G A R RY WAT S O N

the cinema of J O H N C A R P E N T E R : the technique of terror edited by I A N C O N R I C H A N D D A V I D W O O D S

the cinema of R O M A N P O L A N S K I : dark spaces of the world edited by J O H N O R R & E L Z B I E T A O S T R O W S K A

the cinema of T O D D H AY N E S : all that heaven allows edited by J A M E S M O R R I S O N

the cinema of S T E V E N S P I E L B E R G : empire of light NIGEL MORRIS

the cinema of W E R N E R H E R Z O G : aesthetic ecstasy and truth BRAD RAGER

the cinema of

GEORGE A. ROMERO knight of the living dead s e cond e d it ion

tony williams WALLFLOWER PRESS london & new york

A Wallf lower Press Book Wallf lower Press is an imprint of Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York

Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2015 Tony Williams All rights reserved Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williams, Tony, 1946 January 11– The cinema of George A. Romero : knight of the living dead / Tony Williams.—Second edition. pages cm.—(Directors’ cuts) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-17354-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-17355-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-85075-9 (ebook) 1. Romero, George A.—Criticism and interpretation.

I. Title.

PN1998. 3.R644W55 2015 791.4302'33092—dc23 2014029738 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Book design by Rob Bowden Design Cover image: © Getty References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction to the First Edition Introduction to the Second Edition

1 5

1.

A Director and His Traditions

9

2.

Night of the Living Dead

26

3.

There’s Always Vanilla

38

4.

Jack’s Wife

52

5.

The Crazies

65

6.

Martin

80

7.

Dawn of the Dead

90

8.

Knightriders

105

9.

Creepshow

120

10.

Day of the Dead

134

11.

Monkey Shines

147

12.

One Evil Eye and The Dark Half

162

13.

From Bruiser to Land of the Dead

177

14.

Diary of the Dead

195

15.

Survival of the Dead

215

Epilogue

234

Appendix One: The Romero Screenplays and Teleplays Appendix Two: Chronology Notes Filmography Bibliography Index

239 249 253 271 279 285

AC K N OW L E D G M E N TS

i wish to thank Southern Illinois University for providing me with a sabbatical to undertake this work; graduate student Chris Costello for his valuable preliminary research in investigating certain leads into naturalism, the grotesque, Stephen King and the comic strip; Chris Hauserman for alerting me towards Romero’s use of new technology; Robert Singer for insights into the complex and diverse operations of twentieth-century cinematic naturalism; Steve Bissette for research material; the Humanities and Inter-Library loan staff of the Morris Library of Southern Illinois University for their valuable efforts in obtaining key material; Steven Schneider for encouragment; Anna Gural-Migdal, Monique Fol, Vincent Lacey, Director of CAIRL Laboratory for his generous help with technical problems; The Latent Image for their kind hospitality granted me during my 1979 visit to Pittsburgh, especially George A. Romero, Christine Forrest, Michael Gornick, Tony Buba and Vince Survinski; and Dean Shirley Clay Scott of the College of Liberal Arts for providing me with travel funding for further interviews in Chicago with George A. Romero and Christine Forrest. Finally, I wish to acknowledge Del Cullen of Wallflower Press for his copy-editing work. For this second edition I wish to include the following names. I’m indebted to the stimulating work, e-mails, and phone conversations of Reynold Humphries, whose lucid arguments and scholarly work in the horror genre contain great value for me; Frank Lafond and Jean-Baptiste Thoret have honoured my work in this area by translating two of my essays into French for their edited anthologies on Romero’s work; former graduate student Brian Wilson has begun a very promising career as a film critic by writing profoundly on Romero’s films; Rusty Nails allowed me to see an early cut of his documentary on George Romero, Dead On, that will certainly become a definitive statement on this director’s concerns; and finally I’d like to thank Tye Wilson for giving me a DVD of his Broken Shadow Entertainment student undergraduate film I Heard the Darkness (2008). It was not only a very accomplished work of professional filmmaking but also one that continued the spirit of George Romero films in a creative rather than derivative manner of so many better budgeted Hollywood films and ephemeral direct-to-DVD productions.

George Romero links the worlds of past and present, cinematic, cultural, and literary in many key ways. When recently reading the works of Henrik Ibsen I also encountered this very striking speech of Mrs. Alving in act 2 of Ghosts that foreshadows Romero’s own recognition of human beings enslaved both by outmoded ideas but also destructive ideologies, features that occur in all of his films, and not just those having to do with zombies. Here parallels between ghosts and zombies need no further emphasis. I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.

Henrik Ibsen, “Ghosts,” Eleven Plays of Henrik Ibsen. New York: The Modern Library, 1935, 134.

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the cinema of G E O R G E A . R O M E R O

Introduction to the First Edition

this book aims to introduce the reader to the films of George A. Romero along the lines of the Wallflower Press Directors’ Cuts series. By concentrating upon the features Romero has directed it will analyse them in the light of the social and historical circumstances affecting cinema from the late 1960s to the present day. However, this book differs from many of its predecessors in attempting to outline some relevant, but neglected, cultural and literary factors influencing the work of this director. As my previous studies concerning the American family horror film and the work of Larry Cohen have revealed, no cinematic work can really be understood apart from significant aspects of a highly influential national cultural tradition. Such features often operate as salient unconscious factors influencing the work of any innovative director. Until recently, Romero had not directed a film since The Dark Half (1993); his relative inactivity resulted from a deliberate policy of withdrawal from the dehumanising conservatism infecting the film industry since the Reagan era. However, I wish to argue that the specific nature of his work is not entirely comprehensible because of what Robin Wood has elsewhere described as those powerful radical elements rooted in the Vietnam/Watergate syndrome of disillusionment, protest and subversion (1986: 133, 189–91) which evaporated during the 1980s. Romero’s films have always been characterised by a lack of false optimism, a willingness to look objectively at the hard facts of reality, and a recognition that any victories may be tentative (or even unlikely) in grim situations. Rather than seeing his work as entirely symptomatic of a specific era, I would argue that its particular vision is more appropriately related to certain neglected factors in the American cultural tradition such as the apparently outdated tradition of literary naturalism. Although naturalism is one of those ‘master narratives’ supposedly rendered obsolescent by fashionable latecapitalistic discourses such as postmodernism, it is relevant to an era hysterically attempting to forget important historical lessons. Although naturalism has suffered from its associations with Emile Zola’s dogmatic theories expressed in his essay ‘The Experimental Novel’, the author’s fiction often operates in a creatively different and dynamic manner, which refutes any attempts to classify it into conveniently rigid theoretical parameters. Zola’s work was not just influential in Europe but also America.

It stimulated not only diverse American literary explorations by writers such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London and Frank Norris, but also achievements in early silent and sound cinema. The movement includes such diverse works as Greed (1924), The Salvation Hunters (1925) and Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989). The American cultural tradition developed its own version of naturalism. It also recognised the diversity of a movement where aspects of the grotesque and fantasy appeared within its terrain. Gothic features also characterised certain works of European and American naturalism. They developed in specific literary and cinematic incarnations during the later years of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century. Literary features characteristic of ‘New American Gothic’ also appear in films as diverse as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Wise Blood (1979), the fiction of Stephen King, as well as another neglected cultural phenomenon relevant to both past and present American cinema—the comic strip. During the 1950s, Romero was influenced by the visual style of EC Comics. Although castigated by conservative forces, McCarthy-era hysteria and academic experts such as psychiatrist Dr Frederic Wertham, who claimed to find a link between comic books and juvenile delinquency in The Seduction of the Innocents (1954), these examples of ‘trash culture’ were often more visually and thematically subversive of institutional values than the politically motivated work of those unfortunate victims of the witch hunt. Such visual features have always influenced Romero’s work; they appear explicitly in Creepshow (1982). Although the film is not one of the director’s major achievements, it by no means deserves the comparison made by Robin Wood with British Amicus horror films of the 1970s involving ‘the same pointlessness, the same moral squalor: nasty people doing nasty things to other nasty people’ (1986: 191). Despite its appropriations by an artistically bankrupt and decadently redundant Hollywood system, the role of the comic strip as a purveyor of serious messages, particularly in historically repressive eras such as the 1950s, still needs serious reevaluation as an alternative mode of expression. The sub-title of this book, ‘Knight of the Living Dead’, accidentally occurred before my realisation of its use in Tom Allen’s article on the director. But it is not entirely coincidental or gimmicky. Romero’s best work has always operated as a wakeup call to those dominated by a materialistic culture that promises life but actually delivers a living-dead philosophy. As Wood notes, Romero’s zombies differ little from their living counterparts who are programmed into consumerist products of a decadent, late-capitalist civilisation and need desperate re-awakening before they supplement the former’s ranks. The title of Ibsen’s play When We Dead Awaken also operates as an unconscious, but relevant, parallel to the situations encountered by Romero’s characters. Like all key artists, Romero never makes the message overtly didactic; but it exists within the text for those willing to discover it. His vision directly opposes those debased Hollywood values of the last twenty years. Rather than capitulate to market forces, Romero has decided to maintain his independence as an outsider by articulating an eloquent silence which is also oppositional in nature. This study thus attempts to trace the source of the director’s oppositional directions. Previous studies of his work by R. H. W. Dillard and Gregory Waller relate Romero to the traditions of the classical horror film. Steven Shaviro sees the zombie films as a critique of the 2

the cinema of george a. romero

capitalist logic of production as well as noticing Romero’s debt to the EC Comics tradition of the 1950s. Steve Beard regards the zombies as an allegorical representation of ‘the disenfranchised underclass of the material world’ and ‘a projection of post-modern capitalism’s worst anxieties about itself ’ (1993: 30). However, the films of George Romero deal with other issues also and should not be limited to zombies. As we shall see, they owe much to the tradition of literary naturalism derived from the work of Zola which entered the American mainstream and developed accordingly. Romero’s films represent an intuitive appropriation of a discourse which has often been denied and rejected by the status quo. Although the director has never read Zola, his films intuitively reflect themes which originally appeared in the French writer’s work and which infiltrated the American appropriation of naturalism in both literature and film. Artists are often influenced by relevant discourses, whether consciously or not. This book thus attempts to place George Romero within a particular cultural context and argues for seeing his work against a much broader background, rather than limiting him to the creator of the modern cinematic zombie. Chapter one, ‘A Director and his Traditions’, is an extensive account of Romero in relation to relevant cultural, historical and industrial influences affecting his films. Chapter two examines his creative breakthrough as a director in Night of the Living Dead (1968). Chapter three reveals connections his recently released ‘lost’ film, There’s Always Vanilla (1972), has to the concerns of his so-called ‘horror’ movies. Chapters four and five relate Romero’s two neglected 1973 independent commercial films, Jack’s Wife and The Crazies, to the developing conservative climate of Nixon’s America. Chapter six investigates the relationship of Martin (1977) to both traditional Gothic fantasy and the New American Gothic explorations of writers such as Stephen King. Chapter seven examines the second part of his zombie trilogy, Dawn of the Dead, while chapter eight interrogates Knightriders (1981) as a dark allegory of compromise and contamination affecting both Romero and his fellow Americans confronting developing Reaganite cultural hegemony. Chapter nine examines Creepshow in terms of its relationship to naturalism and EC Comics influences. Chapter ten investigates the final part of his zombie trilogy, Day of the Dead (1985) and the cultural and industrial reasons for its neglect. Chapters eleven and twelve examine the unjustly neglected Monkey Shines (1988), his contribution to the Dario Argento production Two Evil Eyes, and The Dark Half (both 1990). The book concludes with an examination of his most recent film, Bruiser (2000), in terms of Romero’s overall career.

knight of the living dead

3

Introduction to the Second Edition

much has occurred since the first appearance of this book. Over the past seven years, the career of George A. Romero has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of a mostly moribund American cinema. Far from remaining in further inactivity and subjected to misguided descriptions of a talent who had long ago reached his peak as a result of different industrial production circumstances contrasting with those that existed at the beginning of his directing career, Romero has separated himself from a corporate dominated Hollywood studio system no longer sympathetic to the type of film he makes. He has relocated north towards Canada, the very destination Riley and his group move towards in the climax of Land of the Dead (2006). Six years after the poorly distributed Bruiser (2000), a film that went directly to the limbo of non-theatrical DVD distribution, Romero again obtained the support of a major studio to film the fourth part of his zombie series, one ironically stimulated by the remake of one of his major successes, Dawn of the Dead (2004) in which he played no role whatsoever. Beneath contempt, let alone serious criticism, Zack Snyder’s remake belongs to the current tendency of a creatively bankrupt Hollywood studio system ignominiously engaged in an endless series of remakes rather than stimulating new talents and commenting radically on disturbing political events. By contrast, although The Crazies (2010) resembled a bad TV movie of very little aesthetic value, features implicit in Romero’s original version managed to appear, ominously suggesting that the bland suggestion made in the Oval Office in Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) of using nuclear weapons against an American population is now official government policy, as the ending revealed. Parallels to the Iraq War, a meat hook hanging ominously outside a deserted diner, the discovery of incinerated bodies and the heroine’s recognition, ‘They exterminated everyone, not just the sick’, revealed the growing awareness that there was not little difference between the Nazi regime and twenty-first-century American military policy. However, such elements were rare since most films used zombies for their ‘scary movie’ affinities and not in the way Romero did. The economic law of diminishing returns aptly applies to such a situation. Zombies returned to products designed for DVD distribution. Hollywood’s decaying reproduction of more successful modes of previous achievements

contained ironic parallels to Romero’s living dead hordes mindlessly reproducing instinctual vague memories of old behavioural patterns but never attaining any type of progressive development. The one notable exception that emerged in a Hollywood system now hostile to any form of progressive creative expression occurred not in film but television. Joe Dante’s contribution to the Masters of Horror cable television series, Homecoming (2005) represented the one notable exception to this depressing trend. Significantly aware of the work of George Romero, Homecoming combined the zombie genre with a politically aware critique of the corrupt excesses of the George W. Bush era. Containing characters modelled on right-wing virago Ann Coulter, talk-show host Larry King, and the odious Karl Rove, Dante’s contribution delivered a crushing attack on the war on terror, the restriction of freedom, the press blackout on photos of American veteran coffins returned from Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and America’s use and abuse of veterans from the Vietnam War to the invasion of Iraq, revealing a political system rotten at the core. At the same time, Homecoming contained touching scenes such as the black family at a diner inviting a white freezing zombie soldier out of the rain and caring for him as if he were their own son. Several scenes not only contained ironic references to the false achievements of the Bush administration such as a ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign and the manipulated Florida election result in 2000, but also references to the cinematic achievements of predecessors within the realm of progressive horror such as Jacques Tourneur and George Romero in two graveyard scenes similar to Sergio Leone’s homage to Sam Peckinpah in My Name Is Nobody (1973). Dante’s tribute to Romero’s zombie trilogy and other important films such as The Crazies needed little emphasis for the knowledgeable viewer as Dante discovered when he received a standing ovation following one screening at a European film festival. He was one of the few directors who understood that the system really needed positive change and did not capitulate to the anti-political Hollywood mindset. A year later, Romero delivered his next instalment to this archetypal American political saga. Big Daddy in Land of the Dead emerged as the logical successor to both Peter of Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Bub in Day of the Dead (1985). All three revealed a potential of opposing the system, something they shared with George A. Romero, and Big Daddy took the lead in rising to this challenge. Supported by Universal Studios, the company associated with 1930s horror films, as seen in Romero’s tribute to that era in reproducing the old period studio logo, Land of the Dead had a reasonable budget of $6 million. But despite Romero’s description of the film as his version of Beyond Thunderdome (a reference to the more elaborate and better budgeted final part of the Mad Max trilogy), his film was not in the Hollywood multi-million dollar blockbuster company and was soon routed at the box office by Steven Spielberg’s ultra-spectacular War of the Worlds (2006) starring Tom Cruise. Furthermore, despite gaining the support of a major studio, Romero expressed reservations about the nature of his recent return from the grave, reservations which have less to do with the quality of the film and perhaps more with the type of corporate control he was again dealing with. Following the Pittsburgh premiere of Land of the Dead, he left his home environment and moved north to Canada, the very area where he had filmed Bruiser. Finding a more sympathetic 6

the cinema of george a. romero

production environment, he directed another chapter of his zombie series, Diary of the Dead (2008). Living in Toronto, Romero became a Canadian citizen and completed Survival of the Dead, which was released in 2010. Another film is also planned and many more may appear from a director who will pass his 70th year by the time this second edition is published. George Romero is very much someone indelibly influenced by the changes of the 1960s. Although he understands what later went wrong in his America, he has never sold out and still retains that independent spirit as well as a commitment to that arena of non-commercial independent filmmaking that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. As Rusty Nails reveals in Dead On, his excellent forthcoming documentary on the life and work of this unique director, both these elements are indispensable towards understanding the very nature of Romero’s cinema. This second edition affirms what has been stated in its predecessor. Romero is not just a director of zombie films. He is a keen observer of the social flaws in North American society, an incisive satirist of its failings, and someone still hoping for that decisive change for the better that never happened in the 1960s. With the exception of some recent articles by Stephen Harper, John A. Loudermilk, Timothy Roberts, Brian Wilson, and Robin Wood, little of interest has emerged in critical studies of Romero in English. By contrast, Europe represents a stimulating exception. Two important anthologies in French have appeared featuring contributions by Australian, British, and French scholars revealing the high esteem and respect Romero’s work has in the non-Anglo-American world. In 2007, Jean-Baptiste Thoret edited Politique des Zombies: L’Amérique selon George A. Romero. Frank Lafond’s George A. Romero: Un cinéma crépusculaire followed. Both these collections contain in-depth, perceptive explorations of the director’s work and often compare the very different nature of American and European reception. Earlier other studies in German and Italian had appeared such as Dario Buzzolani, George A. Romero: La notte dei morti viventi (1998), Giacomo Caruso’s edited collection George A. Romero (1992), Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan’s edited collection George A. Romero (2001), Lorenzo Esposito, Carpenter, Romero, Cronenberg: Discorso sulla cosa (2004), and Frank Koenig, Dawn of the Dead: Anatomie einer Apokalypse (2004). Romero’s inclusion in the University of Mississippi’s Interviews series appeared in 2011. Romero has also delivered many interviews both in film journals such as Positif as well as Internet publications, to say nothing of the February 2009 video discussion conducted by Erik Button. Despite Romero’s suspicion of the supposed benefits of democratic access to the media voiced in Diary of the Dead, he is a director fully aware of developments in new technologies such as his early involvement on the abortive Resident Evil project. Highly suspicious of the dubious progressive claims made on their behalf, he also uses new media for creative purposes rather than for sheer manipulation and control as seen in the supposed libertarianism of blogs. As Raymond Williams noted several decades ago in Television, Technology and Cultural Form (1974), nothing is wrong with technology itself but only certain ways in which it may be used. Diary of the Dead reveals that Internet users and abusers may become little better than different types of zombies succumbing to new types of infection in a nightmare version of the utopian vision of Marshall McLuhan. If anything, the knight of the living dead

7

recent return of George A. Romero to productive filmmaking reveals a talent still in process of development, experimenting with new technology but at the same time remaining true to those ideals that motivated him in the 1960s still remaining integral parts of his vision. The first edition of this book suggested that the naturalist discourse intuitively motivated much of the director’s work. By contrast, this second edition has little to say on this subject since arguments made in the first remain valid in the author’s opinion while recent material receives comment in added footnotes. Yet modifications are necessary for any new edition. The original conclusion has satisfactorily become redundant in the light of recent developments, the most important being that Romero is now consistently working again without any of the creative frustrations and delays he encountered within the Hollywood studio system. Material on Bruiser now forms a new chapter combined with analysis of Land of the Dead, while The Amusement Park has been removed to an epilogue. The succeeding chapters contain new material on Diary of the Dead, a film which has been misunderstood by most reviewers and fans but one representing Romero’s greatest achievement to date and needing urgent re-evaluation as well as Survival of the Dead. At this point, a conclusion is now unnecessary since Romero has moved in a direction happily unforeseen when the first edition appeared. He will continue his creative trajectory.

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chapter on e

A Director and His Traditions

although hailed as the director of Night of the Living Dead (1968), a film popularly associated with initiating the gore and special effects syndrome affecting contemporary horror films such as Scream (1997) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), the name of George A. Romero really owes much to that relatively brief moment of independent commercial cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Stimulated by the success of Easy Rider (1969), many major studios invested and distributed early works of newcomers such as Dennis Hopper, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The era also saw the emergence of a renaissance in the American horror film characterised by significant works by directors Larry Cohen, Wes Craven, Brian De Palma and Tobe Hooper, which promised revitalisation of the Hollywood film industry. However, despite the appearance of early 1970s works including the Godfather films (1972, 1974), Chinatown (1974) and the films of Robert Altman, Hollywood cinema soon deteriorated into a complicit alliance of corporate conglomerates. Studios became dominated by multinational firms eager to include cinema as one item in a profit-sheet agenda.1 Although making money had always been part of the pre- and classical Hollywood cinema, the profit motive had not exclusively interfered with the production of quality films, several of which involved some degree of thought and even challenge to contemporary patterns of life. The mid-to-late 1970s saw the appearance of two blockbusters, adolescently regressive films which would sadly herald the decline of a formerly great Hollywood industry—Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977). Among several other critics, Andrew Britton and Robin Wood have analysed the ideology determining these artistically impoverished works whose box-office success and dumbing down tendencies have contaminated the Hollywood film industry to the present day.2 Although elements of visual excess, horror and special effects characterised earlier horror films, the success of Jaws and the creatively bankrupt cycles of films in the Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series led to the horror genre’s change into a reductive series of roller-coaster experiences submerging the sporadic expression of intermittently interesting ideas within the narratives

(see Williams 1996). This industrial late-capitalist movement led to the decline and debasement of talents who showed great promise in the 1970s. While Larry Cohen, Tobe Hooper, and George Romero became marginalised in the following decade, others like Brian De Palma and Wes Craven continued to work within the system but their later films never displayed the radical potentials and dynamic creativity that characterised the achievements of their 1970s work. Apart from Monkey Shines and The Dark Half, Romero experienced inactivity during the late 1980s and early 1990s. These last two films differ visually from his previous work. On the surface, the formal nature of their respective styles appears to resemble an average Hollywood production as opposed to the independent film-making styles he employed in his earlier films. However, despite these differences, Romero was following a different type of style which moved away from his earlier visually ‘excessive’ type of direction. Yet his concerns in these later films remained the same as those contained in his earlier work. Most critics associate Romero with major achievements within the horror genre of the late 1960s and 1970s such as Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. But they often neglect his other diverse films such as There’s Always Vanilla, Jack’s Wife and The Crazies, made during the same period. Internet web pages and journalistic discourses usually connect Romero’s Night of the Living Dead to the gore and special effects operating within the contemporary horror genre. Most Hollywood mainstream horror films now indulge in sensationalism and special effects to the detriment of character portrayal and stimulating thought. They are actually debased heirs of an early film form commonly known as the ‘cinema of attractions’.3 Romero is often linked with the horror genre’s emphasis on sensationalism and violence, but such associations are far from the truth and are less important in understanding the specific nature of his films. Although Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead are associated with the horror genre, their links and implications are far broader. Romero’s role as director is far more complex than it initially appears. Despite convenient application of generic labels such as ‘horror’ to his diverse output, Romero’s works resemble Larry Cohen’s. Like Cohen, Romero often engages in satirical attack on American society and employs comic strip imagery within certain films (see Williams 1997). But, unlike Cohen, Romero also unconsciously uses distinctive cinematic techniques derived from American literary naturalism, New American Gothic, grotesque realism, and cartoon imagery borrowed from EC Comics of the 1950s. Romero has also expressed his debt to the work of the British team, the Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), and has specifically mentioned their cinematic opera Tales of Hoffman (1951) in several interviews. As with other major artists, Romero often operates intuitively. He tends to be surprised at critical comments exploring his work, but significant cultural and historical structures of meaning are by no means absent from his films. While Romero may consciously employ the visual style of EC Comics in certain films, others exhibit patterns which belong to the American literary naturalist tradition and represent its cinematic development.

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Zola’s Influence The naturalist connection appears an arbitrary connection. Does Romero not operate within the excessive generic realms of horror cinema, a world apart from literary naturalism’s associations with factors of heredity and environment? However, naturalism is a complex cultural phenomenon. It is associated with Zola’s literary and theoretical explorations contained in the Rougon-Macquart series of novels as well as his essay ‘The Experimental Novel’. The Rougon-Macquart series emphasised genetic factors such as heredity and the wider realm of environment as key influences affecting the historical roles of individual characters. Many critics and readers believed that these factors operated in a rigid manner trapping many of Zola’s fictional characters into behavioural patterns they had no control over. But such influences often appeared deterministic. Zola’s nineteenth-century interpretations of certain hereditary and environmental factors affecting his characters involved potential, rather than rigidly deterministic, features. Such hereditary and environmental factors within Zola’s fiction are capable of other, more flexible, interpretations. Modern reformulations would place these factors in a wider context, such as how genetic-family-induced features in the human personality interact with outside, environmental forces, themselves influenced by historical and ideological factors. In Zola’s novels characters such as Gervaise Macquart, Jacques Lantier, Claude Lantier, and others appear to suffer from factors stemming from biological and environmental predestination when faced with overwhelming circumstances. However, although certain characters such as Jean Macquart and Etienne Lantier often encounter overwhelming odds and temporarily succumb to forces beyond their individual control, the novels in which they appear such as Le Débâcle and Germinal frequently conclude with hopes for a better future. Circumstances may change at any time. Zola never predicted any false optimistic solutions for future struggles facing his characters. Several of his works suggest possible alternatives, such as Dr. Pascal, but others, such as L’Assommoir, Nana and La Bête Humaine, end pessimistically. In these works, the main characters find that any alternatives are impossible due to the presence of overwhelming personal and social factors which cannot be overcome in specific circumstances. Zola, however, was never entirely pessimistic. His utopian philosophy appears explicitly in his city trilogy, Lourdes, Rome and Paris. They involve Pierre Fremont’s struggle to articulate a new religious and social order for those unhappy individuals caught within negative historical forces. Although these features characterise his less significant novels, they do reveal optimistic currents which often struggle for expression throughout most of his work. Like naturalism itself, Zola’s work is a complex entity. At its best, naturalism is never static but creative and dynamic. In his exploration of the contemporary urban film, Robert Singer notes that Zola’s ‘The Experimental Novel’ makes a metaphorical comparison between the biological circulus, an organic solidarity, with its ‘perpetual movement, until . . . dérangement . . . has broken the solidarity or brought about some trouble or stoppage’, and a social circulus. For Zola, ‘in society, as in human beings, a solidarity exists which unites . . . members . . . in such

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a way that if one becomes rotten many others are tainted’.4 Singer sees the concept of the social circulus often involving such ‘dérangements’ when heredity and environmental factors interact in specific and complicated ways. Such interactions appear in literary and cinematic naturalist texts. These texts often analyse and document individually damaging movements within the social circulus resulting from either hereditary or environmental factors or a specific combination of both. Despite the reductive nature of Zola’s theoretical definition in ‘The Experimental Novel’, his fiction supplies empirical testing grounds for the operation of such formulas. Fortunately, his novels reveal more creative and dynamic modes of interaction than the more static philosophy contained in his theoretical formulations. Certain objections may arise at this point, especially concerning the biological nature of Zola’s ideas. They appear anachronistic and irrelevant within the concerns of a more modern historical era. But, as Richard Lehan has pointed out, despite the emphasis of recent studies upon naturalist associations with linguistic and institutional features, biological factors have always been common within the realm of literary naturalism (1995: 50).5 However, we need not think of these factors within now anachronistic concepts of nineteenth-century genetic determinism. They are better understood in terms of Michel Schneider and Robin Wood’s socially relevant reinterpretations of Freud’s dubious metaphysical definition of an eternal ‘repetition compulsion’ affecting human nature. Quoting Schneider, Wood comments, ‘like decadent bourgeois philosophers, he (Freud) mistook the “death instinct” of a murderous and suicidal class, the imperialist bourgeoisie, for the instinctive nature of man as such’ (1998: 16). By understanding Zola’s original genetic formula in this manner, greater insights into the author’s fiction become possible. Already trapped by biological and environmental factors, Zola’s fictional characters symbiotically exist within a dehumanising and materialistic Second Empire, moving towards its final apocalyptic descent in Le Débâcle. This situation also foreshadows Romero’s deadly cinematic symbiotic relationships that feature contaminating social structures and negative behavioural patterns leading everyone towards the path of mass destruction. Robin Wood and Sumiko Higashi are two critics aware of the relationship of Romero’s films to their social and historical conditions of production. Such relationships also parallel June Howard’s understanding of the naturalistic discourse as a ‘form that struggles to accommodate that sense of discomfort and danger, a form that unremittingly attends to the large social questions of its period’ (1985: ix). Howard further notes that any investigation of naturalism ‘thus doubly entails an investigation of its historical moment—as the condition of its production and as the source of discourses embedded within the works . . . It is a way of imagining the world and the relation of the self to the world, a way of making sense—and making narrative— out of the comforts and discomforts of the historical moment’ (xi). Whether literary or cinematic, naturalism is no museum exhibit. In Howard’s words, it is ‘a dynamic solution to the problem of generating narrative out of the particular historical and cultural materials’ (xi) available to any artist at any particular time. Although many Zola novels end pessimistically, naturalism also has utopian possibilities. It informs the reader, as Howard states, of the ‘discovery that our own history is contingent, that our world was not a foregone conclusion. That discovery 12

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may perhaps produce not only a renewed sense of historical difference but a renewed sense of historical possibility’ (xi). For example, both Germinal and Le Débâcle end on a note of total defeat for the vast majority of characters. But they conclude with their main characters leaving the respective scenes of their personal failures and deciding to build a new future. In Germinal, the new season inspires Etienne Lantier with a renewed and reinvigorating sense of new possibilities. Le Débâcle does conclude pessimistically in one sense when Jean Macquart accepts the fact that his chance of a romantic relationship with Maurice’s sister is now impossible since he has accidentally killed him during the military assault on the Paris Commune. But it also ends on an optimistic note with Jean’s desire to rebuild his country after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. However, Zola’s optimism always faces challenge by any changing factors which may occur in the future. Despite his relative freedom from contamination by the deterministic nature of hereditary and environmental factors affecting the rest of his family, Jean is not an entirely convincing hero whom the reader may expect to overcome satisfactorily any later obstacles. Any progress is provisional and liable to reversal at any time. Similarly, the concluding novel of the Rougon-Macquart series also reveals that little has changed since the Fall of the Second Empire in Zola’s rural community of Plassans. As in the opening novel of the series, La Fortune des Rougon (1871), Dr. Pascal sees Félicité Rougon still exercising control over her extended family. Although she succeeds in destroying her deceased son’s incriminating family history, fragments still remain for his surviving lover to begin his work anew. The obstacles will be great. But success is not entirely impossible. Similar thematic constraints also affect characters in the films of George Romero. These literary references suggest that naturalism is not entirely deterministic or pessimistic as the endings of other Rougon-Macquart novels such as L’Assommoir, La Bête Humaine and Nana also appear to suggest. Howard notes that naturalist determinism may be neither pessimistic nor rigid in nature. It may operate according to a desire to place characters in situations of temptation from which they may or may not emerge successfully.6 Furthermore Zola’s ‘scandalous’ observations on the sordid aspects of certain facts of everyday existence do not result from either ‘bad taste’ or a perverse desire to provide sensationalism as his detractors argue. They result from drawing attention to unpalatable facts of human existence which readers ignore at their peril. This certainly occurs in the opening chapters of Paris. Affluent urban inhabitants ignore the plight of the dying, aged worker Laveuve. But their ignorance leads to apocalyptic consequences in this fin-de-siècle novel written near the beginning of a new century. The naturalist movement soon crossed the Atlantic. American literary naturalism developed along chosen cultural and historical paths in the New World. But it also owed much to its British and French predecessors. As Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin notes, ‘Interest in contemporary French literature was a striking feature of cultural life in the United States during the last decade of the nineteenth century, and Zola’s popularity is evidenced by the numerous translations of his works and by the fact that even novels he had not written were published under his name’.7 Pre-World War One cinema produced many films influenced by both European and American knight of the living dead

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literary naturalism. These included not only literary adaptations by Jack London, often filmed in a distinctively naturalist cinematic style but even some works of Zola himself!8 Even the different consumerist Jazz Age of the 1920s saw the appearance of naturalist films such as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) and Josef von Sternberg’s The Salvation Hunters (1925). But the very idea of a naturalist horror film appears to contradict what most people generally understand by the term ‘naturalism’ if we understand it reductively as a slice of life representation. However, elements of horror and excess typical of this cinematic genre are not entirely foreign to literary naturalism. In Thérèse Raquin (1868), the work he designated as his first naturalistic novel, Zola depicts his guilty lovers tormented by images of a dead husband returning from the grave to haunt them. His descriptions operate on a realistic level so that the hallucinations depicted take on material form very similar to the appearances of Freddy Krueger in the everyday world of his victims in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Thérèse and Laurent are also under surveillance by the castrating gaze of a mother-in-law. Despite suffering from a stroke she still condemns them with her eyes. The imagery anticipates the castrating gaze of the dead Mrs Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), whose gaze encompasses guilty son Norman, intruder Lila Crane, and the cinema audience itself. La Fortune des Rougon opens with tragic young lovers Silvère and Miette meeting near a now disused, old Plassans cemetery where bone fragments are often scattered in the damp turf. Zola introduces significant grotesque and metaphorical imagery into the opening paragraphs framing the meeting of his doomed Romeo and Juliet figures. They become the first youthful sacrificial victims of a political strategy which leads both to the restoration of the Monarchy and the imposition of the dead hand of the past. These factors dominate the lives of future victims of the Second Empire during the entire Rougon-Macquart series. Both young lovers die separately in the novel. But their deaths leave a void throughout the remainder of the series. The dead past destroys any possibility of youthful potential and development. It is almost as if the dead rise from the graveyard to consume their youthful descendants in much the same manner as those living-dead elders of the Rougons and Macquarts destroy the lives of their children. Romero’s zombies attack the living in the same manner. Although the final novel, Dr. Pascal (1893), concludes after the fall of the monarchy, the repressive patriarchal forces which initially led to its victory are still in control as symbolised by the dominating figure of Félicité Rougon who attempts to control past history. The book ends with the deceased Dr. Pascal’s lover facing the huge task of opposing a life-denying authoritarian order. This climax resembles those tentative endings of Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead with the surviving heroines facing an uncertain future. It is not surprising that Zola opens his first Rougon-Macquart novel with images of death and putrefaction closely linked with the future victory of a repressive order associated with patriarchal control (La Conquête du Plassans, Son Excellence Euguene Rougon), sexual repression (La Faute du l’Abbé Mouret, La Joie du Vivre, Un Page d’Amour), social decadence (La Curée, Nana, Pot-Bouille), consumer capitalism (Au Bonheur des Dames), economic excess (L’Argent), working-class misery (L’Assommoir, Germinal, Paris), rural oppression (La Terre), marital infidelity (L’Assommoir, La Bête Humaine) and, finally, the collapse of French civilisation (Le Débâcle). Although no 14

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Marxist, Zola is critical of impossible utopian solutions (as witnessed by his satire of the dying, young Marxist in L’Argent), and sceptical about human development, and his work contains strong, moralistic messages criticising a familial, political and societal system that causes great injury to its unfortunate victims. Despite Zola’s philosophical attachment to certain outmoded nineteenth-century theories concerning heredity and environment, his Rougon-Macquart series anticipates the American family horror film by revealing key relationships between the microcosmic and macrocosmic forms of social life. Zola’s creative works belong to a particularly turbulent period of French history; similarly Romero’s major achievements belong to another significantly influential historical period a century after Zola. As many of Zola’s readers know, qualities of literary excess often characterise his fiction, as novels such as Le Ventre du Paris and La Faute du l’Abbé Mouret reveal. Passages in certain novels often collapse traditional divisions between reality and fantasy. Father Mouret’s hyper-realistic vision of nature’s restoration of its former power (the taking over a country church in an apocalyptic manner in La Faute du l’Abbé Mouret) is one of many instances. Grotesque and supernatural imagery erupt within the text in a manner akin to the return of the repressed in a horror film. Despite its rejection by the literary establishment for most of the twentieth century, naturalism is not the simplistic dogma parodied by its opponents. Like all innovative ideas, naturalism’s complexity suffered from distortion. But, as Raymond Williams commented in his re-evaluation of the term, ‘actual positions and practices are very much more diverse than their subsequent ideological presentations and . . . we shall misunderstand and betray a century of remarkable experiments if we go on trying to flatten them to contemporary theoretical and quasi-theoretical positions’ (1989: 66). Williams also noted that very little historical support exists for divisions generally made between supposedly formally different artistic movements such as naturalism and modernism. Naturalism and modernism share a common aim of criticising society. Although naturalism ironically later came to be popularly understood in terms of the very things it attempted to challenge, such as the static reproduction of everyday life via theatre and television set design or mere grotesque spectacle, it was never reductive. It also contained several unexplored potentials for future development. Williams notices neglected opportunities inherent within naturalism which horror films might generically develop culturally and historically: In the same sense there is a crisis at that point in Naturalist theatre where someone stares from the window at a world he or she is shut off from. Dissident bourgeois art, including much of great interest and value, often stops at that point, in a moment of exquisite nostalgia or longing. But the more significant development is the growing conviction that all that can really be seen in that window is a reflection: a screen, one might say for indefinite projections; all the crucial actions of the world in a play of psyche or of mind. The powerful images which result will of course not be Naturalist, naturalistic, or classically realist either. When Strindberg, at just that point of crisis, changed his mind about what made people unhappy, he began writing plays of great power which there, in the 1890s, were contemporary with the first films and in fact, as we read them now, are effectively film scripts involving the fission and fusion of identities and characters; the alteration of objects and

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landscapes by the psychological pressures of the observer; symbolic projections of obsessive states of mind: all, as material processes beyond the reach of even his experimental theatre, but all, as processes of art, eventually to be realised in film: at first, as in expressionism, in an exploratory cinema; later as available techniques in routine horror and murder films and in the kind of anti-science fiction commercially presented as SF. (1989: 115)9

Williams notes how naturalism extends in different directions and uses various forms to realise its goals. It is a tradition Romero intuitively appropriates. Although popular audience response to his zombie trilogy often remains at gratuitously spectacular levels, the films actually contain deeper levels of meaning. One such meaning linking both Zola and Romero involves the concept of the crowd. Although more mobile than their zombie counterparts, Zola’s fictional crowds often occupy terrifying roles. They can be also as mindless and violent as Romero’s zombies. La Fortune des Rougon depicts both national guard and insurgent forces acting in an uncontrolled manner. In Germinal, female rioters castrate a butcher who has been sexually exploiting them for years and proudly display their trophy! Etienne Lantier gets carried away by the crowds in his self-appointed role as political leader. Everyone descends into irrational mass hysteria that harms their respective causes. Etienne’s actions foreshadow Scottie’s male bravado in Dawn of the Dead, which leads to his downfall. David’s ‘debacle’ in the same film occurs after he, too, succumbs to the consumer greed linking both the marauding bikers and shuffling zombies returning to reclaim their commodified mall kingdom. Crowds in naturalist fiction embody both literal and symbolic consuming qualities.10 In Au Bonheur des Dames, Zola’s female consumers in search of commodities in the new Parisian grandstore resemble those frenzied activities characterising both the living and the dead in Romero’s Dawn. Mob imagery also occurs in American naturalist novels such as Frank Norris’ The Octopus where events finally move out of control and disaster affects everyone. Norris’ novel also contains a penultimate chapter anticipating the type of cinematic montage used by D. W. Griffith in A Corner in Wheat (1909). It contrasts the death by starvation of a helpless foreign immigrant with the cannibalistic feasting undertaken by members of the upper classes. Norris does not need to emphasise the metaphorical associations linking these two events. Very little difference exists between humans and zombies in Romero’s films. The human vigilantes in Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead act in as mindless a manner as their zombie counterparts. Tom Savini’s remake of Night of the Living Dead concludes with Barbara watching the human posse apprehensively and fully aware of the relationship they have with their zombie quarry. The living and dead also belong to a particular culture of consumption which Richard Fox and T. Jackson Lears regard as indicative of twentieth-century America, a connection which explicitly appears in Dawn of the Dead. Ironically, Romero’s zombie trilogy views consumerist behaviour as literally, rather than metaphorically, devouring everyone in its path.11 Most of Romero’s films emerge from a particular geographical location— Pittsburgh. Once a thriving industrial centre, it has now become an example of post-capitalist decline in American society. Naturalist literature and cinema often deal with issues of human deprivation resulting from the decay of a once-thriving 16

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inner-city environment. Romero’s Martin and Tony Buba’s documentary films Sweet Sal (1979) and Lightning over Braddock (1988) depict an environment whose decline not only expresses the collapse of American heavy industry but also that of human development and potential. Romero displays this important social message by using cinematic forms of narration. He deliberately selects the horror genre for his purposes, but concentrating particularly on its zombie aspect. The choice is not accidental.

Zombie Cinema Zombies existed in cinema long before Night of the Living Dead. They are a generic feature of horror in the sound era but are surprisingly absent from silent cinema. Romero’s films not only revitalised their cinematic treatment but also developed significant links with previous elements within the horror genre. Night of the Living Dead introduced cannibalistic features into ‘living dead’ representation, which later films such as I Eat Your Skin (), The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (), Zombie Flesh Eaters (), Zombie Holocaust () and countless (forgettable) imitators all reinforced. Before Night of the Living Dead, zombies bore little relationship to their more visceral screen descendants. Originally zombies were creatures based on Haitian folklore who were supposedly corpses brought back to life as a result of supernatural voodoo practices.12 The revived zombie was usually black and existed in a somnambulistic fashion resembling Conrad Veidt’s Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (). Usually, the zombie supposedly provided cheap labour for sugar-cane plantations. However, screen zombies differed from their mythical counterparts in several respects. Although the first sound zombie film White Zombie (1932), directed by Victor Halperin, depicts black Haitian zombies grinding wheat in Legendre’s mill, the film is notoriously vague about what they actually did. The film opens with a scene of Haitian blacks performing a funeral rite over the grave of one of their number at a roadside to prevent its appropriation into the realm of the living dead. Audiences assume that the black workers seen later are actually dead. But Legendre’s methods appear to have little to do with actually reviving corpses in the instances we see him functioning. In two cases he uses a poisoned flower and doctored drink to overpower his white victims as well as long-distance hypnosis. Once Legendre loses control, the victim recovers unless it is too late. In White Zombie, Legendre’s zombie entourage includes key representatives of Haiti’s governing classes.13 In Halperin’s Revolt of the Zombies (1936), the villain (Dean Jagger) also uses intoxicating fumes, as well as hypnosis, to dominate his victims. He never resorts to reviving the dead. Other films draw clear distinctions between white and black zombies and usually reserve traditional Haitian methods of resuscitation for the latter. The Ghost Breakers (1940), King of the Zombies (1941) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) follow this pattern. Although the black community in the last film clearly regard the white Christine as one of their own, the nature of her ailment is ambiguous and left open to suggested causes such as fever and a mother-in-law’s wish-fulfilment desire for an obedient, dutiful zombie daughter rather than a live adulterous one. The film ends with Christine’s lover knight of the living dead

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killing her and both drowning. Bob Hope’s zombie assailant in The Ghost Breakers is clearly black and decomposing but his counterpart in Scared Stiff (1953), a remake starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, is played by caucasian heavy Jack Lambert. Both these films have zombies functioning as scary subordinate players, as in Zombies on Broadway (1945) where Bela Lugosi helps press agents find new acts for jaded Manhattan theatregoers. However, prior to 1968, zombies were generally black rather than white in American cinema. Apart from Halperin’s films, the rare appearances of white zombies differed from their Haitian counterparts. Boris Karloff’s character in The Walking Dead (1936) is an unjustly executed convict brought back to life by medical means and who exercises limited powers of rationality and thought. Both King of the Zombies (1941) and Revenge of the Zombies (1943) depicted mad scientists unsuccessfully attempting to enlist zombies for world conquest by Axis powers. In Voodoo Man (1944), Lugosi turned pretty white females into zombies to keep his dead wife alive. However, during the 1940s the zombie soon became reduced to the type of Universal caricature depicted in Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1946). Romero’s zombies are much more threatening. He reworks the figure similarly to naturalism’s reinvention of the human being as a wild man and savage brute. Howard comments that in literary naturalism ‘the creature who defines humanity by negation and represents a problematical area of existence is imagined as living not outside the bounds of human society, not in the wilderness (where images of the American Indian as savage placed it) but within the very walls of the civilized city’ (1985: 80). Romero belongs to a 1970s horror tradition where the threat becomes internal rather than external. He thus depicts his zombies as progressively encroaching on the boundaries of civilised society in a similar manner to the savage crowds in naturalist fiction. British horror cinema differed little from its American counterpart. The zombie in an episode of Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1964) is clearly black and dead while the humans controlled by alien invaders in Quatermass II (1957) are white. Although termed ‘zombies’ by the local population they are actually alive since the aliens use methods similar to those of Lugosi and Jagger in controlling their human servants. Once the threat dissipates, they recover like Madge Bellamy in White Zombie and the white colonials and Cambodians in Revolt of the Zombies. In John Gilling’s Plague of the Zombies (1965), the victims are all white and almost exclusively working-class male inhabitants of a Cornwall community used by the local squire (John Carson) as unpaid slave labour in his tin mine. This racial difference results from an English class system which regards the proletariat as little better than savages. Carson’s villain in Plague of the Zombies puts into practice the suggestion Legendre made to Beaumont in White Zombie about using the living dead as unpaid labour on his Haitian plantation. Although Gilling’s zombies resemble Romero’s white prowling living dead crowds they are not cannibals. Post-1968 representations generally discard class and racial distinctions between white and black zombies in classical films. In Romero’s zombie trilogy, his living dead include male and female, diverse ethnic groups and members of different classes. His zombies also became explicitly cannibalistic, desiring both living and dead flesh. Day of the Dead (1985) shows attempts by the scientific establishment to control zombies 18

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in ways similar to methods used in earlier films like Plague of the Zombies. Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty) actually follows up a suggestion made by Richard France’s scientist in Dawn of the Dead concerning the control of this new population. Various methods employed seek to render dangerous threats harmless to the body politic similar to Roland Barthes’ concept of ideological inoculation described in Mythologies. Class factors condition attempts at controlling this new multitude who threaten the very precarious status quo existing in Romero’s trilogy. Minority humans and the majority zombie population co-exist in an uneasy situation.

Naturalist Associations The methods used by human survivors in Romero’s films differ little from those within naturalistic novels where the upper classes attempt to control a growing agrarian and industrial proletariat. Such ideas also apply to Romero’s zombies. According to the director, ‘Zombies are the real lower-class citizens of the monster world and that’s why I like them’ (quoted in Beard : ). Both Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead see zombies as dangerous others while Day of the Dead features Dr. Logan training his pliable zombie Bub by using traditional child rearing methods. Whatever method employed, zombies become a new proletariat who threaten a hierarchically ordained ‘order of things’ as much as their living working-class counterparts in Germinal and George Gissing’s Demos who are also characterised by cannibalistic imagery.14 By dying from a zombie bite, humans fall into a deterministic mode of being whereby they fall into a ‘living dead’ existence, becoming zombies often little different from their everyday lives. They have no control over this process in much the same manner as Beauty Smith and Jim Hall have no control over the respective forces of heredity and environment which have molded them into human beasts in Jack London’s White Fang. But other human beings have a choice. They may succumb like Roger and Dave or decide to live on and fight another day like Fran and Peter in Dawn of the Dead and the small multi-ethnic community in Day of the Dead. Although odds against survival appear limited, the fate of human survivors is never totally deterministic. Some form of survival is also possible. Although Peter and Fran and the small community of Day of the Dead eventually leave the specific confines of cinematic narration and face overwhelming odds which threaten their survival, they still live at the climax of each film and may even continue to do so after the final credits. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead trilogy features imagery owing much to the naturalist tradition of class insecurity as well as the horror genre’s special effects, the latter now having little social relevance in contemporary examples operating on purely sensational and exploitative levels. Like his other films, Jack’s Wife and Martin, Romero’s zombie films are usually classified as horror films devoid of social meaning. But, as Robin Wood demonstrates, all cinema genres are never rigidly discrete but fluidly interact with one another. Many naturalist novels also use features from many other genres.15 In both Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, as well as Jack’s Wife and The Crazies, domestic and family knight of the living dead

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issues occupy key narrative segments within the films which resemble scenes from naturalist novels. The naturalist scenario is never absent from a Romero zombie film. June Howard’s observations are pertinent in this regard: In the degraded world of McTeague and Maggie the family is no safe enclave in which humanity, affection, and virtue can assert themselves; instead brutality, passion, and indifferent causality predominate. The family itself becomes a nightmare; the bonds between family members are not only ambivalent, as in Seth’s Brother’s Wife, but manifestly burdened with sexual and aggressive impulses. Both McTeague and Maggie comment ironically on the courtship plot and the image of the family as represented in sentimental formulas and the domestic novel, revealing life as it ‘really’ is—at least in another part of the city . . . In the slums the family is not a haven but only the most intimate arena for the forces of destruction. (1985: 180)

This imagery evokes the bland romantic interlude between Tom and Judy in Night of the Living Dead before their destruction. It also parallels images of the Coopers whose mutual domestic antagonism parallels the devouring activities of the zombies outside the farmhouse. Like the American family horror film of the s, naturalist novels and Romero’s films both contain different versions of what Howard aptly describes as ‘a potentially disruptive fissure in the text’ (: ). An unusual element which initially appears contradictory may actually embody a different means of expressing the core features of the discourse. Similarly, naturalism may also employ zombie imagery in horror films associated with contemporary twentieth-century cinema. As one of a group of critics who convincingly argues that naturalism also extends into twentieth-century literature, Donald Pizer frequently argues against any rigid understanding of the entire naturalist discourse. He also relates it to other forms such as realism, the extraordinary and the excessive. Pizer points out that a ‘naturalistic novel is thus an extension of realism only in the sense that both modes often deal with the local and contemporary. The naturalist, however, discovers in this material the extraordinary and the excessive in nature.’16 If naturalism is really fluid in nature and capable of modification and development during different historical eras, certain horror films may also contain features associated with this movement. As Howard notes, naturalism may also contain melodramatic action and ‘unrealistic’ animal imagery as seen in its fascination with the ‘brute’ side of human nature. She cites Frank Norris’ first completed novel Vandover and the Brute (1894–95) for its representation of the dark side of human nature. The imagery occurring within this early work has many associations with Robin Wood’s definition of the horror film as representing ‘the return of the repressed’. The brute of the novel is actually Vandover’s ‘secret self ’, which eventually grows and devours him: ‘As the brute grows, it devours Vandover—it is a carnivore, indeed a cannibal within him.’17 Romero’s characters are often dominated by repressed desires that they cannot acknowledge. Eventually, they either free themselves from the carnivore within themselves or literally become carnivorous living dead creatures preying on others. Vandover and the Beast ends with its title character becoming an animal in all but name. 20

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Howard’s reference to brute imagery in naturalistic novels parallels excessive motifs occurring within horror films. These elements represent part of a text’s productive meaning within which messages are inscribed. As Howard notes, the moral and formal aspects of a certain type of production often co-exist in the text. She does not see Vandover as expliclty becoming a werewolf since the causes invoked to explain his transformation are natural and never supernatural. Furthermore, not only do the moral and medical systems of explanation coexist in Vandover and the Brute. But ‘the moral is inscribed as the medical, the energies and events of melodrama are rewritten though the conventions of causality’ (1985: 67). The same is also true of Romero’s use of horror effects, which are never employed merely for their own sake. They are intrinsically related to logical and scientific explanations often supplied in each part of the trilogy. Romero’s various screen characters also embody certain particular features peculiar to the naturalist tradition. Howard quotes Warren French’s observations concerning differences between characters in the novels of Dreiser and Henry James. French comments that: the former are not represented as being conscious of what they are doing or capable of any self-analysis of their motivations; whereas the latter are almost obsessively preoccupied with self-conscious analysis . . . A useful distinction may thus be made between fictions that deal essentially with characters presented by their creators as aware of what they are doing and of the potential consequences of these actions, and fictions that deal essentially with characters envisioned by their creators as altogether at the mercy of such forces as environment, heredity, instinct, and chance. (in Howard 1985: 104)

Howard correctly notes that this distinction neglects the role of a self-conscious agent operating in the text whether it be a fictional character or narrator who operates to provide a particular perspective on the various events. Various characters in Night of the Living Dead are victims of blind forces beyond their control and express no consciousness about the implications affecting their dilemma. Like a literary narrator, Romero provides a cinematic perspective and opportunity for audiences to draw their own conclusions but he does not intrude them into the text. Although his films often echo themes of naturalist determination, certain sections contain characters who are moving closer to the Jamesian tradition of self-consciousness. In Dawn of the Dead, Peter’s character parallels Ames in Sister Carrie; he expresses a self-awareness concerning the zombies relationship to human beings. In the same film, Fran is often both apprehensive and fully aware of the dangers facing her group inside the consumerist Mall environment. In Day of the Dead, Sarah (Lorie Cardille) and her multi-ethnic community distance themselves from an increasingly ugly civilised status quo represented by the military and scientific establishment. They attempt to find some form of utopian escape. However, both characters and audience may find themselves trapped into a situation of paralysis represented by the spectacular nature of an overpowering threat threatening their humanity as in naturalist novels. Towards the end of Dawn of the Dead, Peter and Fran fall into a temporary form of paralysis by masochistically submitting to the knight of the living dead

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zombie onslaught before deciding to escape. In the original screenplay and novelisation, they both commit suicide. Peter shoots himself and Fran allows the helicopter blades to decapitate her. Sarah and her companions magically escape from the zombies at the climax of Day of the Dead while Barbara in Tom Savini’s Night of the Living Dead makes self-aware decisions almost immediately, unlike her predecessor in Romero’s original.18 Although they escape from the outer darkness like Humphrey Van Weyden in The Sea Wolf and Jack London himself in The People of the Abyss, thus avoiding the fates of Hurstwood and Vandover, their freedom is only temporary. They still have to face unknown challenges after the conclusion of each film. Similarly, screen spectators may choose to become passive spectators by consuming the fetishistic nature of special effects. But they are also in danger of becoming consumed by the spectacle itself, like a literary naturalistic mob rather than moving beyond the seductively narcotic dominance of cinematic voyeurism. Like Hitchcock, Romero offers his spectators the opportunity of moving beyond spectacle to consider the actual nature of relevant social meanings concealed within such excessive displays. Similarly, both literary naturalism and Zola’s fiction offer spectators a choice between remaining shocked at the grotesque aspects of the narrative or understanding the circumstances which have initiated them and moving forward towards changing such conditions. Readers who remain appalled at Zola’s supposedly ‘sordid’ discourse, Hitchcock’s ‘bad taste’, and the gory spectacles of Romero’s zombie trilogy remain as trapped as those characters caught within naturalism’s supposedly deterministic framework. As Howard notes, although aspects of voyeuristic enclosure and paralysis appear in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and London’s The Sea Wolf these are not exclusive features within each text. We may also experience ‘both the radical disjuncture between understanding and action and the obsessive inscription of the observer into the narrative’ (1985: 114). Like Romero, both authors offer readers the possibility of choice in appealing to ‘a magical transformation of society by the will signified in and by a work of art’ (116). However, in all cases, tensions between determinism and change remain fully operational challenging both fictional characters and cinema audiences.

EC Comic Naturalism Romero’s films involve particular stylistic choices. One visual tradition he employs is a comic book style, especially that relating to s EC Comics condemned by so-called experts such as Frederic Wertham in The Seduction of the Innocents. The tradition was often misunderstood and still offends many critics. Vilified as negative influences on American children during the Cold War era, EC Comics were actually much more complex than their detractors admitted both then and now. Although condemned for graphic imagery and ‘gleefully perverse transgressions of almost every imaginable cultural taboo, including thematic treatments of incest, bondage and sadomasochism, dismemberment and disembowelment, and family murders of every possible combination’ (Witek : ),19 these comics actually provided culturally satirical antidotes to the hypocritical conformism of an era, typified by The Man in 22

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the Gray Flannel Suit. While the title character of Sloan Wilson’s novel represented a post-war veteran generation who sacrificed body and soul to corporate America, his comic strip contemporaries worked under publisher William Gaines in far less lucrative, but more satirically satisfying, conditions. They provided alternative and subversive imagery to a youthful world reacting against materialism and Cold War conformity. Many EC Comics artists had either undergone military service or knew the difference between actual combat and officially sanitised visual representations.20 The visual style contained in EC Comics was certainly graphic and ‘un-American’ for the times. But by continuing grotesque imagery characteristic of the American Gothic tradition in the works of writers such as Ambrose Bierce, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, EC Comics provided an antidote to a hypocritically sanitised world of American materialism. Bodies decayed after death. Violence caused bloodshed and pain. People were not always good and moral. Society contained a darker vision beyond those presented by comics sanctioned by the Comics Code Authority Seal of Approval and Walt Disney. Although EC Comics contained visually graphic details which offended 1950s sensibilities, the storylines often contained moral elements. They demonstrated the dangers of injustice and oppression to anyone considering such criminal paths. EC Comics suffered from similar judgements in condemning horror films. Criticism often focused upon the supposed unhealthy effects of sensational depictions rather than relating style to content. The EC Comics were not an early version of 1980s slasher films. They often contained plots paralleling the social justice aspects of literary naturalism and the moral vision of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. Robert M. Stewart has commented that during 1950–55 EC Comics exhibited the influence of three decades of popular culture such as film noir, radio drama, television, science fiction and detective pulps which combined tightly structured stories with diverse characterisations. As well as engaging in the media satire later developed by Mad magazine and occasional adaptations of writers such as Ray Bradbury, many non-horror EC Comics like Shock Suspense and Crime Suspense engaged in unAmerican social criticism—such as condemning blind patriotism and lynching. EC Comics often borrowed ‘punch endings’ from O. Henry while others echoed the ironic conclusions contained in the works of European writers of the Guy de Maupassant school. Stewart notes that Romero’s films often reflect some of EC’s ‘more persistent images’ involving corpses with decaying flesh rising from their graves and zombies, imagery Romero acknowledged in a 1978 interview. Finally, in view of their indebtedness to previous media discourses in American society, a case can also be made for understanding the EC Comics tradition as another form of that unstable, transitional modernism Michael Denning sees as characterising the proletarian grotesque associated with the cultural world of the 1930s popular front.21 Several EC Comic stories may have influenced Romero’s films. ‘Living dead’ themes were quite common: Al Feldstein’s ‘A Shocking Way to Die’ dealt with a gangster returning from the electric chair to avenge himself on judge and jury while his body progressively decayed;22 and the zombie motif occurs in Johnny Craig’s ‘Zombie’ and ‘Till Death’, the latter dealing with a plantation owner’s rotting zombie wife which Joseph Witek sees as a satire of ‘America’s obsession with hygienic commodities’.23 knight of the living dead

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Stewart also sees a relationship between Joe Orlando’s ‘Impressed by a Nightmare’ about a woman who believes that occult forces guide her life and ‘Jack’s Wife’ as well as the attack on the title character by the decaying corpses of the husbands she has murdered in Orlando’s ‘Madame Bluebeard’.24 This graphic imagery must certainly have contributed to scenes in later Romero films. For example, the cover of The Vault of Horror’s 1953 issue contained a graphic depiction of a living corpse with a meat cleaver in its head which visually foreshadows the fate of one zombie under attack by Tom Savini’s biker gang in Dawn of the Dead.25 EC artists such as Jack Davis, Joe Orlando, and Johnny Craig deserve further study. They may not only be authors within their own domain but also key influences on the future work of Romero. Although political and public pressure resulted in the demise of EC Comics, their satirical vision took on a new lease of life in the founding of Mad Magazine. Joseph Witek regards this as a major element in a cultural fusion which eventually resulted in the underground comics of the 1960s. This also stimulated the more widely accepted works of Harvey Pekar, Art Spiegelman and John Jackson in the 1980s. Many of the underground artists were just old enough to remember the pre-Comics Code EC comics and all grew up at a time when the sharpest satire of American culture was found each month in the pages of Mad (see Witek 1989: 45). Several obituaries of Gaines commented upon his cultural iconoclasm and influence on writers such as Stephen King and directors such as Wes Craven and George Romero.26 EC Comic employment of frantic verbal pacing, compulsive simile-making and quick, disconcerting jumps in point of view to heighten cultural anxiety anticipate many prominent stylistic features characteristic of Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies and Dawn of the Dead. Finally, the work of Stephen King occupies a central point of comparison with the films of George A. Romero. Both authors were influenced by EC Comics in their childhood and collaborated later. Although neglected by the critical literary establishment (unless condemned as a prolifically ungrammatical and unstylistic hack writer) or acclaimed solely for his horrific aspects, King’s fiction is a fundamental part of an American cultural tradition that also influences Romero’s films. As a chronicler of historical influences on American literature and cinema, King has frequently expressed acknowledgement of his country’s neglected naturalistic tradition, aspects of which appear in his writing.27 King’s fiction echoes many themes characteristic of contemporary American horror films especially those involving those struggling to survive in the dark side of the American Dream and falling into the fantastic worlds of horror which symbolise their daily experiences. The supernatural aspects of King’s novels are really secondary to the grim fictional realities of Americans attempting to survive in an uncaring materialist society. Indeed, King’s horrific dimensions actually parallel the dark realms depicted within EC Comics which allegorically depict the deadly nature of a material everyday existence responsible for acts of paranoia and violence. Many of King’s works complement consumerist critiques in Romero’s films. In The Shining, supernatural elements are less important than the historical and materialist factors causing the downfall of Jack Torrance. Salem’s Lot is King’s darkly ironic version of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Carrie, Cujo and Pet Sematary contain several examples of socially dysfunctional American families that rival Zola’s Rougon-Macquart group in the realms of neurosis and violence.28 ‘The Mist’ forms 24

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an ideal companion piece to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. It is not surprising that King has not only appeared in several Romero films but has actively collaborated with him on the two Creepshow films. The films of George A. Romero are not just exciting achievements in themselves. They also significantly relate to an important American cultural tradition, providing a relevant perspective for viewers to really appreciate the critical nature of his achievements in American cinema. Although prominently identified with the horror genre and a decade which saw many significant achievements within that field, Romero has real claims to be taken more seriously. Whether conscious or not, his films relate to key issues affecting American culture and society both past and present.

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chapter t wo

Night of the Living Dead

night of the living dead has long been associated with the derogative term ‘splatter movie’. It is now popularly regarded as the film which introduced gore and special effects into the contemporary horror film, a genre now almost entirely devoid of social meaning and dependent upon gratuitous sensationalism. However, Night of the Living Dead is much more than a mere horror film. As well as being a key work of independent low-budget cinema, it also combines several important cultural traditions such as the grotesque aspect of literary naturalism and the thematic traditions of 1950s EC Comics in terms of a devastating critique upon the deformations of human personality operating within a ruthless capitalist society. The film’s success took its creators by surprise; so much so that poor business and distribution deals resulted in the lack of economic returns to its original investors. It was a low-budget independent movie made over weekends by a group of enthusiasts who had little foreknowledge of their pioneering contribution to the contemporary horror film. Raw, unpolished in terms of eschewing the bland standards of media reproduction, lacking in Hollywood studio expertise, and shot on black-and-white stock, the film seemed destined for a limited life in drive-in theatres. But, on national release, the film caught the mood of an America in turmoil. It soon became a cult film which would endure over the years and lead to a 1990 remake. It also resulted in an unfortunate so-called direct-to-video ‘director’s cut’ by John Russo in 1999 adding footage shot some thirty years later. Romero had no involvement with this ‘version’. Night of the Living Dead broke many taboos. It lacked a ‘happy ending’ and left none of its central characters alive at the climax. No hero and heroine walked into the sunset after the cessation of the monstrous threat. Also, well before the emergence of the so-called ‘blaxploitation’ genre, Night of the Living Dead’s leading character was black, a fact Romero still ascribes today to mere coincidence. However, the film’s culturally-influential predecessors, such as Mad and 1950s EC Comics, also contained leading characters including Afro-Americans, Jews and even North Koreans, who were often depicted as victims of contemporary society. These ethnic figures also occasionally appeared in more heroic roles unlike their counterparts

in more mainstream forms of representations who were conspicuous by their very cultural absence.1 Unlike most of his heroic predecessors in horror films, Night of the Living Dead’s leading character, Ben, does not survive but dies a death which is absurd in nature. Although some horror films did contain leading characters who never survived into the final reel, convention often demanded that the future of humanity continue in the form of two young lovers. Tom and Judy fit the bill in this film, so much so that one of its ‘dead’ sequences involves a lovey-dovey moment between them—a staple of previous genre movies. But Tom and Judy literally become ‘dead meat’. Their flesh provides an unexpected barbecue meal for the marauding zombies. The human survivors never unite to defeat the zombies. They are constantly at each other’s throats and attempt to devour each other in an ironically metaphorical version of the outside assault by their living dead opponents. Indeed, the dead appear more united than the living in terms of their concentrated focus upon a specific aim. The zombies often mobilise by silent, intuitive communication. In most contemporary films the traumatised heroine usually recovers at the climax to battle heroically against the enemy. Barbara certainly does this. But, ironically, her efforts are too little, too late, and futile against the living dead adversaries. The zombie host entering the farmhouse towards the end of the film even includes her formerly alive brother who will now devour her in place of the candy bar he desired at the beginning of the film. Furthermore, Hollywood’s idealistic images of childhood become tarnished forever when young Karen begins to devour the dead body of her father and stabs her mother to death. Ironically, the conclusion shows that father really knows best. Ben finally takes refuge in the basement which aggressive patriarch Harry frequently asserted was the only safe place in the besieged farmhouse. As in EC comic book narratives, family values are thrown into question. Johnny and Barbara and the Cooper family engage in different forms of verbal aggression. Their combative mental cannibalism eventually concludes in a grotesque literal manner which logically represents the only manner the verbal conflict inside the farmhouse may reach its logical culmination. Night of the Living Dead is a film dealing with domination and possession on many levels. An unseen mother manipulates Johnny and Barbara into performing a ritual neither of them shows any real feeling for. Johnny attempts to scare Barbara in revenge for making him join her on a long journey to their father’s grave. Barbara’s attitudes certainly duplicate the very same type of passive-aggressive family mechanisms which her mother used on her so often in the past. Ben and Harry later verbally and physically fight over possessive mastery of the farmhouse and its strategic territorial space. Their conflict echoes that of two Cold War nations struggling for supremacy over a colonised area. Harry attempts to dominate his wife like a 1950s authoritarian patriarch in a manner both forced and ridiculous and is clearly resented by a spouse who mostly submits to male control except when it explicitly appears futile. Eventually, Helen’s possessive mother-love for her daughter (probably the only reason she stays with Harry) leads to her death in the victorious cannibal holocaust of the zombie aggressors. These figures also act out another logical result of a dysfunctional personal and social system which destroys everyone caught within its psychological traps. knight of the living dead

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Night of the Living Dead’s monochromatic style has several connections with early literary and cinematic naturalism. As in works such as Frank Norris’ McTeague (1900) and Vandover and the Brute (1894–95), human beings confront a threatening environmental situation which may devour them in more ways than one. Like Hurstwood in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1998), who leaves his secure Chicago environment and descends into New York’s hostile, unfamiliar urban landscape, Night of the Living Dead’s characters find themselves suddenly removed from their familiar surroundings and customary patterns of behaviour and thrust into a violent world that threatens their lives and securities. If they do not descend into the bestial, carnivore world of their zombie antagonists, they may find themselves reproducing the behaviour of their assailants on the verbal level by attempting to dominate (or consume) their conveniently designated opponents in a conquest for domination. The film has several reasons to be regarded as a naturalistic horror film. It uses the violent and grotesque imagery of its literary predecessor and fuses it with several of the concerns of 1950s EC comics such as social malaise and arbitrary violence that is more often than not connected with the body politic. These dark images from the American cultural underground were often too radical in the Cold War to receive full expression in the Eisenhower era. However, they erupted into full expression during the following decade. Night opens to reveal a bleak and deserted country road. The long shot shows the isolated terrain until viewers discern a car appearing microscopically in the background. Gradually it fills the image, moving from right to left into the foreground before leaving the frame. Romero then uses several successive shots cutting between different images depicting the car’s journey until it reaches an old cemetery. This location is as abandoned as the country road. A sign is splattered over with mud. The area appears tidy but not overtly. It exhibits rudimentary state care of a landscape containing the dead and useless products of American society. Following shots show the car driving past tombstones. One shot reveals it passing an American flag as the camera pans right. Romero’s director credit appears superimposed over this shot. It not only signifies cinematic authorship but also alerts the viewer to Night of the Living Dead’s examination of a culture characterised by death as well as life: ‘Old Glory’ will soon become an American landscape of ‘Old Gory’. A low-angle shot frames the car before we see the occupants. This angle emphasises a vision of the dominant technology which most Americans place their trust in. As twentieth-century successor to the covered wagon of pioneer days, the automobile promises easy transportation and accessibility as well as shelter from weather and possible attack. When pursued by the first zombie (Bill Hinzman), Barbara (Judith O’Dea) immediately seeks shelter inside only to find that the keys, which would activate her means of escape, are no longer there. The once-secure automobile becomes little better than a useless shell affording Barbara merely a temporary means of escape. Its redundant nature anticipates human reliance upon all forms of science and technology which will prove useless against the zombie assault in this film and the rest of the zombie trilogy. In fact, this significant ‘structure of meaning’ also appeared in the ECComic tradition as several illustrations affirm. For example, the cover of The Vault of Horror 26 contains an illustration of a late-model car threatened 28

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by the hands of the living dead breaking through the concrete.2 Thus, it is not accidental that the anachronistic science fiction ‘radiation’ formula used to explain tentatively the zombie phenomenon in the film originates in this aspect of the American cultural experience. We must also remember that the failure of human reliance upon advanced technology formed an important trope of most 1950s science fiction films from The Thing From Another World (1951) and The War of the Worlds (1953) onwards. Significantly, Johnny and Barbara’s car radio also appears to malfunction. The next scene reveals the two occupants, Barbara and her brother Johnny (Russell Streiner). Johnny first appears searching for a candy bar before he joins his sister outside. This fact initially appears redundant until later in the film when Barbara mentions it to Ben (Duane Jones) when recalling the events which led her to the farmhouse. Johnny feels hungry and wishes to consume a candy bar. Ironically, he later fulfills his wish by feasting on the living dead body of his sister. Before he leaves the car he turns the dial of their car radio which has seemingly broken down, the first evidence of technological malfunction appearing in the film. By the time they arrive it is 8pm. Expressing frustration against what he feels is an outmoded ritual, Johnny complains about his mother’s rigid attitudes in making her children visit the grave of a father he barely remembers: ‘We have to move mother out here or move the grave to Pittsburgh. We still remember! I don’t even remember what the man looks like so we drive three hundred miles into the country and she stays home.’ They arrive on a Sunday during the first day of daylight saving time. As they move towards father’s grave, the camera tilts down from the sky to reveal them at the right of the frame in a visually destabilising shot, suggesting the presence of ominous forces which will soon shatter their lives. Johnny also complains about the manufactured wreath he brings with him and suggests that the local graveyard officials remove the one they bring each year, repaint it, and sell it to them the following year (possibly making a profit over the transaction). If Johnny is correct, consumerism affects the dead as well as the living in American society. No longer active consumers, the dead now become profitable objects whose new value consists in making a buck from their still-living relatives. As Barbara kneels at her father’s graveside, Johnny becomes impatient, ‘Come on, Barbara. Church was this morning.’ The two siblings begin to argue over church attendance. A flash of lightning suddenly occurs followed by thunder ominously booming on the soundtrack, heralding both the beginning of Johnny’s verbal aggression towards his sister as well as the forthcoming appearance of the first zombie. Johnny remembers a past incident from their childhood when he scared his sister by leaping at her from behind a tombstone, an act that drew the wrath of their grandfather. Deciding to profit from his sister’s vulnerability to childhood fears, he begins to scare her by taking on a voice which parodies once-threatening Karloff-Lugosi imagery from classical horror films now rendered camp both by Halloween celebrations and pop songs such as ‘The Monster Mash’. He intones the sentence which has now passed into horror film legend, ‘They’re coming to get you Barbara.’ However, Johnny will soon find that his evocative imagery will be no joke. Although certain forms of horror now become harmless and parodic, new ones arise to take their place. knight of the living dead

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Johnny and Barbara revert to replaying features from an unhappy childhood experience never entirely distant from their more developed, supposedly adult, consciousness. In this sense, they fall into behavioural patterns reminiscent of those damaging forces of heredity and environment dominating the various members of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart family tree. Barbara’s passive-aggressive hold on her brother and her moralistic criticisms of his infrequent church attendance clearly represent revenge for her humiliation by the sadistic games he played on her in early childhood. Although she comments, ‘Stop it. You’re acting like a child’, she also falls into childhood fears as well as having feelings of shame concerning family responsibility towards the stumbling man Johnny taunts. However, as she appears to be just about to apologise for her brother’s regressive behaviour the man attacks her.3 At this point of the film, camera angles and movement become more destabilised with canted shots and shaky handheld movements prominent during the assault and chase scenes. The style abruptly changes from a documentary realist approach detailing the melodramatic family squabblings of two siblings (well-known from the 1960s Family series of documentaries such as An American Family and its British counterpart The Family) towards the dangerous visual instability associated with crime and horror genres. By setting the initial sequence in a graveyard Romero unconsciously evokes the spirit of the opening scene of Zola’s first Rougon-Macquart novel. The early graveyard meeting associated with the young lovers in La Fortune des Rougon acts as a metaphorical equivalent for the whole ideological message of the RougonMacquart trilogy, namely the destruction of youthful aspirations and idealism by the dead hand of the past. Ironically, Johnny immediately endures assault by a representative of those very forces he sneered at only a few seconds before. The choice of cinematic style is by no means accidental. As Paul R. Gagne (1987) points out, Romero directed Night of the Living Dead in a naturalist manner. His use of lighting and gritty black-and-white photography and a no-holds-barred approach to the horrific incidents gave the film a certain realistic feeling which co-scenarist John A. Russo cites as a key reason the film caught on with critics as well as audiences. Romero spoke of this as follows: ‘I think that if you make something that seems real and true to people, it then becomes possible for them to have the little kinds of insights and feelings and rationales that they call “hidden meanings” and “statements” and whatever.’4 Another corollary of Russo’s statement is that the worlds of everyday reality and horror are not as far apart as most believe. Although Johnny rescues his sister and struggles with the unknown assailant (whose physical prowess is stronger than those of his later companions), he falls to his death, his head banging on a tombstone. In one sense, this is a fittingly ironic demise for a young consumer-oriented American who is disdainful of religion (‘No real sense in going to Church’). However, Johnny will soon join a new corporate community represented by those living dead members he once despised. Night of the Living Dead’s use of Johnny does not merely reside in his surprise appearance towards the end of the film. The very nature of his death superbly reproduces the ironic morality of EC Comics whereby characters both get their just desserts and turn into the very figures they once despised. 30

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Barbara manages to run from the zombie and take refuge in the car. But she discovers the car keys are missing, ostensibly in the possession of her deceased brother. Releasing the handbrake, she manages to move the car automatically down a slope. But she fails in this strategy by not paying attention to the car’s progress. Her neglect results in the car crashing against a tree. As Barbara flees from the zombie, Romero films her pursuit through a variety of canted angle and low-angle shots as she runs along a deserted road. As she runs away, Barbara trips and loses both her shoes before rising and fleeing again—a typical 1950s generic stereotype which Romero will eliminate from his later screenplay for the Savini version. After stopping briefly by an outside petrol pump (which will function significantly later in the film) she runs inside a farmhouse for help. The interior proves no salvation. It is not only deserted but contains features anticipating her future fate. After finding the living room empty, she enters the kitchen and takes out a knife from a drawer. As she moves into another room, a montage of quick shots reveals animal heads on the wall with disorientating effect. Barbara has not only left a kitchen where humans once prepared meat for consumption but also enters another room where trophies ironically foreshadow the fate of the entire human species. These shots thus symbolise a reverse world where humans change from being consumers to a hunted species facing consumption; humans now face becoming sustenance for zombies. Barbara ascends the stairs to find the cannibalised head of the farmhouse’s female occupant. As with earlier shots revealing her terrified perspective when she confronts the animal heads, an abrupt jump cut and zoom-in to the half-consumed head aptly conveys Barbara’s terror. Although she decides to rush outside, she freezes into immobility on the porch under a car’s glaring headlights before Ben appears and pushes her inside. Barbara’s terrified posture represents another feature revealing human similarity to the zombie assailants since the latter often freeze before flames or car lights. Ben immediately takes charge of the situation, ‘Don’t worry about them. I can handle them,’ as if familiar with dealing with lynch mobs. When he later tells Barbara about witnessing zombies pursue a gas truck and fleeing from a besieged diner, his narrative evokes African-American experience of post-Reconstruction days in the American South. Also, Night of the Living Dead’s zombies are all white. It will not be until Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead that human antagonists will ironically represent the idyllic vision of a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic society that 1960s radicals promoted. Also, Ben’s decision to take control (although initially from an hysterical white female), resembles the Vietnam experience of working-class, ethnic groups bearing an over proportionate share of the conflict going on at the time of the film’s production and release. Ben is certainly not working class but appears to be a black man who has reached the lower middle-class ladder of economic success made possible after the gains of the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Although ostensibly a horror film, Night of the Living Dead symbolically captures the mood of its era by allegorically representing an America divided against itself. Like the films of Larry Cohen, however, Romero’s cinema never engages in any sense of reductive reverse discrimination. Although Ben appears to be the nominal hero whom audiences may identify with, he is a hero who makes mistakes and also knight of the living dead

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engages in a destructive masculine battle over possession of territory with his white middle-class antagonist Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman). As the film shows, the attitudes of the old society affect everyone, white and black, young and old. They also lead to chaos, disunity and destruction. Romero’s following sequences involve clever juxtapositions of image and sound, camera angle and behaviour, and rational and irrational behaviour that is indicative of a superior visual style. Before Ben and Barbara discover the presence of other humans in the cellar, he kills two male zombies outside and saves Barbara from another one entering the house. As he drags the body away, he warns Barbara who gazes at the still living corpse in fascination, ‘Don’t look at it.’ This is the first appearance of a compelling gaze between humans and zombies, which will occur throughout the trilogy. Despite the barriers separating both species, the looks often exchanged between hunters and hunted hints at some deep, unconscious connection between the living and the dead. Ben then tells Barbara about his experiences outside: ‘I was alone with fifty or sixty of those things just staring at me.’ Barbara then relates the events leading her to the farmhouse, even emphasising the supposedly irrelevant detail of Johnny’s desire for candy, before she breaks down into hysteria. This foreshadows the ironic nature of the final meeting with her deceased brother. Although Barbara manages to speak intermittently during parts of the film, she relapses into a catatonic situation, a condition illustrated by Romero’s revealing close-up of a music box opening to reveal panels with Barbara’s fragile face fragmented through the gaps. This scene occurs after Ben orders her to search for wood. It follows a significant diagonal pan from a mountain lion’s trophy head to the frail music box itself, a movement suggesting the dominance of a carnivore’s world over an insignificant signifier of human culture. When Barbara switches the radio on as Ben boards up the doors and windows, the commentator speaks of an ‘epidemic of mass homicide’ by an army of ‘unidentified assassins’ composed of ‘ordinary looking people in a state of trance’ in areas as far removed as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Miami. Both Ben and the zombies are equally ‘unidentified assassins’. Similarly, zombies and Barbara are ‘ordinary looking people . . . in a state of trance’. The camera then performs an ominous zoom-in to the cellar door after Ben’s removal of another door. This deliberately slow movement not only foreshadows the entrance of the other humans from the basement but also represents Barbara’s trancelike situation of her perception. The gaze is little different from that of any zombie. The following sequence emphasises suspense and vulnerability and also questions any barriers between living and dead. When a radio commentator makes disturbing references to the assailants’ cannibalist activities, two men emerge from the cellar. The sequence appears to operate on the level of pure frisson. But it is much more than a formal device for generating shock. The men’s entry initially suggests another form of threatening violence. But they are human not zombies. The very manner of their introduction, however, suggests little difference between either species. The film will soon depict the presence of violence among humans as the main threat to safety as Harry enters Ben’s world. The two men take an instant dislike to each other especially when Ben finds flaws in Harry’s story concerning his decision to remain in 32

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the cellar. Resenting Harry’s aggressiveness in ordering everyone into the cellar, Ben decides that the ground floor of the house offers the best chance of safety. Although the film ironically proves Harry to be correct and Ben wrong, the conflict between them is much more than a mere question of right and wrong. The two men from different classes and races prefer to battle competitively over power and possession as they would do in a normal business situation rather than work together for the common good. While Harry appears loud-mouthed and offensive, a failed bully for whom his wife has nothing but thinly veiled contempt, Ben also goes out of his way to provoke him by calling him a ‘stupid father’. He also egotistically reveals his own masculinist desires for property and control: ‘Get the hell to the cellar. You be the boss down there. I’ll be the boss here.’ Although Night of the Living Dead lacks the presence of a feminist perspective which will appear in both Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, it clearly recognises that the competitive arena of patriarchal aggression is no solution for the besieged humans. Harry decides to return to the security of the cellar while Tom (Keith Wayne) calls his girlfriend, Judy (Judith Ridley), to come upstairs. The world below reveals another example of the bankruptcy of the old society represented by the nuclear family. Harry (Karl Hardman) and Helen Cooper (Marilyn Eastman) uncomfortably co-exist in a frustrating marital situation. They remain married only for the sake of their little daughter Karen (Kyra Schon) who suffers from a zombie bite. Like Ben, Harry wishes to be sole master in his domain. As he nervously mentions, ‘I’m not going to take any more chances,’ Helen sarcastically replies in a muted manner, ‘Of course not! That’s important. To be always right and others wrong!’ When she learns of the presence of a radio upstairs, she insists Harry relinquish his stubborn attitude: ‘We may not enjoy living together but dying together will not solve anything. These people aren’t our enemies.’ Tom persuades Judy to relieve Helen from attending Karen so that the Coopers can join the others. Instead of beginning to collaborate with each other, Ben and Harry combatively exist in a state of mutual antagonism, which makes any attempt at common understanding and unity impossible. Harry surveys the boards Ben has hammered against the doors and windows, sneering, ‘This is ridiculous! There are a million weak spots up here.’ The discovery of a television set not only supplies more information about the zombie attacks but also implicitly condemns a government that is indirectly responsible for the ensuing chaos. Most commentators regard Night of the Living Dead ’s rational explanation for the return of the living dead as a hangover from 1950s science fiction films. In some ways it is, since this plot device does not reappear in the rest of the trilogy. But it does have a rationale of its own; as the local television newscaster provides further reports about the ‘unburied dead coming back to life and seeking new victims’, he provides additional information concerning the probable cause of the outbreak. An Explorer Satellite sent to Venus encountered a mysterious level of radiation, but the authorities exploded the vessel before it returned to Earth. However, like the similar situation in The Quatermass Xperiment (1954), the government and scientific establishment clearly bears indirect responsibility for causing the outbreak. Officialdom left it too late to destroy the satellite; it was already within Earth’s atmosphere and thus caused a disaster parallel to Three Mile Island. knight of the living dead

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Although this motif never receives further development in Night of the Living Dead, it does anticipate Romero’s later attacks on the government/military/media and scientific establishments both in the remainder of the trilogy and Romero’s other films such as The Crazies. The television station shows a live report from Washington D.C. as news reporter Don Quinn (played by Romero) attempts in vain to extract information from military and government figures who refuse to answer his questions. They clearly appear guiltily embarrassed over the entire incident. The newscaster then reports the latest information from the scientific establishment who now abruptly seek to overturn revered social customs due to this new life-threatening situation. Although this strategy is necessary on one level, it also ominously reveals the perspective of an inhumane scientific establishment totally oblivious to the traumatic effects this will have on surviving family members. The new measures may be essential but the method of their announcement is both callous and lacking in human sympathy: ‘The bereaved will have to forego the dubious comforts that a funeral service will give . . . They’re just dead flesh and dangerous.’ Dr Logan’s world in Day of the Dead is not too far away. Furthermore, after previously instructing their viewers to remain indoors, the media now suggest they attempt to reach the nearest safe station. This spurs into motion Ben’s plan to fill up a truck with gasoline so they can all travel to a safe haven. However, after Tom finds the keys to the truck in the basement, Ben states that he is unfamiliar with driving the vehicle. This leads Tom to take the initiative. Later events reveal that this supposed rational strategy for survival is flawed and undermined by damaging human insecurities, especially those involving Ben as self-nominated leader. Decisions are often made hastily rather than agreed upon in a calm and rational manner. Before Ben and Tom depart, Night of the Living Dead includes another redundant sequence which future generic films eliminate. This involves a romantic interlude between two young lovers who would ordinarily survive when all others are destroyed in most contemporary horror and science fiction films. But, as well as holding up the narrative, this also reveals an irony worthy of EC Comics. Original viewers identifying with Tom and Judy soon receive a nasty shock reminiscent of the best O. Henry climaxes in the original EC comic strips. Irrational behaviour and lack of foresight lead to antagonism within the farmhouse. While Harry distracts the zombies by throwing Molotov cocktails from the upper windows, Judy breaches the strategy originally agreed upon earlier by suddenly rushing out to accompany Tom in the truck. However, when Ben, Tom and Judy reach the petrol pump, Tom finds that the keys do not work. When Tom accidentally splashes petrol on the vehicle, Ben’s lighted torch sets in on fire. In his anxiety to shoot away the lock, Ben threw his torch too near the truck. Tom then attempts to drive the truck away, ignoring Ben’s advice to abandon it. The vehicle explodes while Tom and Judy are still inside. While their incinerated corpses provide an unexpected barbecue for the zombies, Ben makes his way back to the farmhouse and breaks down the door after Harry refuses to let him in. After both men temporarily co-operate in securing the entrance, violence breaks out. Ben assaults his cowardly partner and this leads to further tension and Harry’s decision to capture Ben’s shotgun despite Helen’s weary admonition, ‘Haven’t you had enough?’ 34

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The final onslaught of the zombies on the farmhouse commences. As Harry foretold, the zombies easily break through Ben’s fragile defenses. Instead of helping Ben when the zombies attempt to overpower him, Harry makes a move for the shotgun. Helen and Barbara rush to Ben’s defence and free him from the zombies. However, Ben retrieves the gun and shoots Harry. Ironically, the last ditch effort of both women proves futile. Barbara snaps out of her comatose condition to save Helen from the zombies but is herself caught in the embrace of brother Johnny. The dying Harry stumbles downstairs to Karen. While Ben struggles upstairs, Helen moves to the basement to find Karen devouring her late husband. Instead of rationally reevaluating the changed situation, she allows mother-love to dominate her feelings and falls victim to her daughter who rushes upstairs to assault Ben. Pushing her aside, he moves down to the basement and finishes off Harry and Helen before they can become a threat to him. Night of the Living Dead returns to day with a final ironic coda worthy of the best type of EC Comics story. In an earlier scene during the television broadcast, a reporter interviewed a team of redneck hunters led by Sheriff McClelland (George Kosana) who engage in a ‘search and destroy’ mission against zombies. He gleefully tells an accommodating news reporter of killing three figures who attempted to crawl away to safety. We have no means of knowing whether these were humans or zombies. Since this suggests redneck lack of discrimination between the living and the dead, the comments also ironically foreshadow Ben’s eventual fate in the film. Since all zombies seen in the film never appear to run away and hide during human assaults, the posse has probably killed living humans. The media representative appears complacent with the ‘official verdict’ and makes no attempt at any discriminating mode of investigative journalism. The final sequence of the film begins with a high-angle helicopter shot which visually suggests that there is no real difference between posse and zombies who are seen from above like ants. Both show no humanity when pursuing their victims. As the posse shoot various zombies and move their bodies away for incineration, Sheriff McClelland spots Ben in the farmhouse also raising his shotgun at them. He urges a sharpshooter (Vince Survinski) to shoot immediately at the target without really pausing to discover whether it is living or dead. Ben’s decision to aim with his shotgun at the figures outside rather than calling for help leads to the final act of violence depicted in the film. The sharpshooter kills him. Night of the Living Dead then moves into a series of grainy black-and-white still images reminiscent of both World War Two concentration camp footage and Vietnam War photography as the hunters enter the house, move Ben’s corpse with meathooks, and place his body next to that of the first zombie seen in the film, before lighting their funeral pyre. The last image in the film is a live-action shot of the flame engulfing the corpses in very much the same manner as the napalm then used in Vietnam. Night of the Living Dead is a significant achievement both as a horror film which would alter the genre’s formal operations as well as an initial statement of Romero’s thematic concerns. Like all great achievements, it has relevance far beyond its actual generic associations. In extending the boundaries of generic representation in its time, the film intuitively followed a tradition of grotesque realism, having links with knight of the living dead

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both the satirical tradition of both Rabelais and Zola. As Matthew Gumpert has argued, Zola’s fiction owes a debt to a transcendental metabolism in its links to Rabelais’ treatment of grotesque realism as related to the treatment of the body. As he states, ‘The world according to Zola functions as an immense, collective, living body, a body whose defining features and fundamental truths are the cyclical movements of metabolic creation and destruction’ (1993: 93). Gumbert also relates certain significant concepts of the ‘world turned into body; the universe made flesh; the life of the individual submerged in a primeval and collective body, the body of the people, the folk’ to Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of the ‘carnival’ or ‘grotesque realism’ contained in his book, Rabelais and His World (93). However, Romero’s vision represents a bleak, dark carnival depicted within the confines of the horror genre. In Night of the Living Dead, the word becomes flesh in many ways. The supposedly civilised aspects of rational human communication become reduced to verbal aggressiveness. Oral cannibalism soon becomes physical cannibalism as represented by the onslaught of the zombies against the humans. As the film intimates, little difference exists between both species at the climax suggesting then a naturalist determinism contained in certain works of Zola that Gumpert finds as ‘levelling distinctions between sentient and insentient beings, turning the cosmos into a homogenous substance’ (94) reducing everything to its basest form of animal and materialist existence. In this sense, the grainy imagery reminiscent of concentration camp footage that appears in the concluding scenes of Night of the Living Dead is not accidental. The camps reduced living human beings capable of culture and speech to basic material component elements of ash and dust. Similarly, the posse burn the bodies of once-living human beings at the climax of the film. The implications need little commentary here. As Barry K. Grant notes, the film is inextricably related to its historical context. Relating Night of the Living Dead to the events of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, the year of the film’s release, Grant furnishes a much more relevant perspective for understanding the film than those who merely regard it as the first ‘splatter’ movie. He comments that: I began to understand that the night of the living dead is not the evening of the film’s narrative, but the darkness in the human spirit brought about by the absence of compassion and understanding; and second, who the living dead really are—not the lurching zombies, but average folk like Harry Cooper, the sheriff and his men, and, ultimately, myself. The film didn’t preach this to me, but was instrumental in providing me with an experience with which I had to admit this truth—for I remembered that, given a choice in the resolution of the tension concerning my wish to have the zombies explained, and Ben’s frenzy to secure his position in the farmhouse, I would have, in effect, ‘sacrificed’ Ben, even as I identified with him, to satisfy that wish. Like the repulsive Harry Cooper, I was instinctively looking out for ‘number one’, an attitude which the film suggests is analogous to the desensitised state of the zombies. (1986: 12)

Grant acknowledges the rich nature of Night of the Living Dead in terms of its challenge to audience reception. On more formal levels, the film is merely cheap exploitation or a formalist ‘splatter’ rollercoaster. However, by reading the film in a more 36

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serious manner, the audience member has the choice of understanding its relevance to a particular social and historical situation. Referring to D. H. Lawrence’s characterisation of those who never embraced the life principle as the ‘living dead’, Grant sees the film as forcing us to acknowledge ‘that we have the capacity to be both Ben and Harry, however repugnant this notion may be’ ().5 In this manner, Romero also follows an important axiom of the naturalist tradition which warns its readers of the dangerous consequences of following destructive patterns of behaviour, both social and personal. The choice is up to the individual. Although Romero never presents any false optimistic hopes in his films, intuitively following the tendency of naturalist writers such as Zola, Norris and Dreiser, Night of the Living Dead does thematically interrogate the dysfunctional mechanisms of a deeply disturbed society. It explicitly presented the image of an America in which the old values were now harmful and obsolete, leading to a chaos very few would survive unless some drastic personal, political and social change would follow. That was the implicit message of Night of the Living Dead, a message Romero would develop in his other film.

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chapter three

There’s Always Vanilla

until its recent re-release on video, There’s Always Vanilla (aka The Affair) was a ‘lost’ film. Despite its status as the picture following Night of the Living Dead, it was unavailable for many years and only officially available in brief extracts on the laserdisc version of its predecessor. Romero regards the film as both an artistic and commercial failure. After gaining recognition as the innovator of a new type of generic product, Romero did not wish to be stereotyped as a horror film director and attempted to show that he could make other types of films also. Despite its independent, low-budget nature, the director also regarded it as a mistaken attempt to imitate Hollywood films such as Goodbye Columbus (1969) and The Graduate (1967).1 The result led to the breakup of his association with many of his collaborators on Night of the Living Dead such as co-producers Russell Streiner, John Russo and scenarist Rudolph J. Ricci. It left a trail of painful feelings and broken friendships, the extent of which Romero is still reluctant to speak about even today. However, despite its flaws, the film is not entirely devoid of value. It anticipates themes that appear in Romero’s later work and contains several relevant autobiographical elements based upon the director’s experience of filming television commercials. He engages in an ironic depiction of the deceptive media practices designed to sell products no matter how irrelevant and unnecessary these items are. The television commercial Romero shows Lynn working on uses those archetypal cultural images of Western freedom and romanticism which still remain predominant in most contemporary representations. However, the film shows that they have now become hopelessly corrupt and tarnished as a result of the manipulations practiced upon viewers by the dominant media. Romero presents his two lovers as existing in a world of romantic illusions fostered by advertising and the media; he presents their relationship in a framework whereby the mechanisms whereby human beings are molded by the dominant social apparatus are revealed. Although no horror film, There’s Always Vanilla raises questions which are inherent in Romero’s better known films, especially Dawn of the Dead, which deal with the contamination of the human personality within a world of consumerist plenty. Both films also intuitively question whether any love relationship can really flourish and survive in such a society. Romero also questions whether

it is even possible for human beings to develop on their own terms, thus opposing the dominant nature of dehumanising social structures. Shot in 16mm and later blown up to 35mm on a budget of about $100,000, There’s Always Vanilla derived from a 30-minute, 16mm, black-and-white film designed as an audition film for actor Ray Laine to show to Hollywood agents. Romero shot and edited the short film which Ricci wrote and directed. Judith Streiner (formerly Judith Ridley of Night of the Living Dead) also co-starred in a film designed merely to showcase Laine’s acting talents. Both Laine and Streiner would feature in the later full-length production. This became far removed from the spirit of the original version, which Ricci describes as ‘lighthearted’ and ‘fun’: ‘It was not heavy at all; just a fun romp with these two characters, namely a freewheeling creative guy and his more practical girlfriend who wanted him to think more about his career’ (quoted in Gagne 1987: 43). Angered by critical comments about Night of the Living Dead’s photography (due to the poor processing used at the time and corrected years later for the laserdisc version), Romero decided to make There’s Always Vanilla resemble a Hollywood film. So he directed, shot and edited the film from an expanded script by Ricci in this manner. Unfortunately, Romero and Ricci argued over expanding the script. Ricci eventually dropped out so Romero ended up by shooting improvised dialogues for Laine to speak directly to the camera to compensate for the lack of a finished screenplay. The production took over a year to complete. Gagne traces its problems to the involvement of too many people resulting in an uncohesive film which failed both critically and commercially.2 There’s Always Vanilla is certainly not Rudolph Ricci’s definition of a type of ‘elongated Pepsi commercial’.3 The film is definitely loose, lacking the tight structure of his predecessor, and confused in its aims. However, a certain message does appear in lines spoken by the leading character’s none-too-admirable father, Sam. He compares his son’s lifestyle problems to visiting Howard Johnson’s ice cream parlour and discovering all sorts of ‘wild, exotic, flavors’: ‘But, somehow, you always wind up with vanilla . . . There’s always vanilla, Chris.’ This message resembles the usual archetypal Hollywood ideology concerning the eventual conformity awaiting young Americans, even those supposedly rebellious figures embodied by Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1954) and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) who get over their various problems and take their place within the patriarchal family. However, since one of the most discredited and morally repugnant characters in the film utters this statement this suggestively alerts viewers that it is not to be taken seriously. The film ends on an ambiguous note with neither of the two major characters ever realising their creative and personal ambitions. They instead become trapped within ideological patterns of behaviour they cannot break out of in very much the same manner as all the characters in Night of the Living Dead. Chris (Ray Laine) embodies the persona of the archetypal wandering male hero familiar to readers of American literature and Hollywood cinema. He pursues a course of selfish, masculine behaviour. Chris never takes any responsibility for his actions nor does he see the need for any change. Lynn (Judith Streiner) eventually becomes trapped into following the ideologically defined role of wife and mother, knight of the living dead

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which she has initially reacted against for most of the film. Although Romero regards There’s Always Vanilla as now ‘dated’ as a film exercise, many features contained within its narrative have not. These involve dilemmas and problems that occur in a more developed manner in his later films. Although the film represents a change of style from his debut, it is not too far removed from it in spirit. In Night of the Living Dead lack of communication condemned all the main characters to destruction. The same dilemma also occurs in There’s Always Vanilla. But this time it appears during a love affair in a society in the process of change after the exciting 1960s decade. The society depicted in the film is actually one slowly reverting to old habits and negative patterns of behaviour which destroy any possibility for future development. It emphasises the particular forms of personal entrapment exemplified by its two leading youthful characters who should embody features of alternative patterns of behaviour inimical to the social structures surrounding them. Unfortunately, they do not.4 The film opens with two shots of a bizarre Heath-Robinson type machine which we later learn is constructed in front of the grounds of an advertising agency where Chris temporarily works. We then see him speaking the first of his many addresses to the camera: ‘If you can dig it, the whole thing was kind of like that machine.’ Two cuts showing the machine follow. The last concludes with a zoom out from the machine. Then the scene changes to Chris who adds ‘everything was so confused, everything going round and round, and we didn’t have to have caused that, and we couldn’t understand it.’ Chris’s various addresses to the camera are not mere fillers to an undeveloped screenplay nor are they irrelevant to the film’s structure. The affair in the film has a pertinent relationship both to the avant-garde machine set up before curious bystanders as well as the inability of the two lovers either to understand themselves or their relationship to society. In this manner There’s Always Vanilla begins to articulate issues which will recur in Romero’s other films such as Jack’s Wife, Martin, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. These involve situations where characters confront circumstances challenging their presupposed lifestyles and whether they can rationally respond to such dilemmas. Secondly, the reference to the machine unconsciously relates to the role of such imagery in naturalist novels contained within Zola’s works such as Germinal and Norris’ The Pit. In the first novel, the Voreux mines represent a mechanical devouring beast which both physically and mentally consumes the workers, imagery which later appears in a different context during one scene in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926). Although not as creatively written as The Octopus, the second novel in Norris’ uncompleted trilogy depicts the Chicago stock exchange in a similar manner operating as a beast devouring its victims. Although the machine depicted in the opening scene of There’s Always Vanilla appears as a harmless gadget, it metaphorically embodies the mechanical operation of harmful psychological factors dominating the human personality, factors which Romero’s characters must always struggle against. A placard describes the machine as ‘The Ultimate Machine’. Various shots show cogs and gears in operation intercut with images of perplexed observers. Voice-over dialogue occurs when an unseen commentator asks invisible spectators about the machine’s purpose: ‘What do you think of that machine?’ The answers are various 40

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and often reveal the ideological perspective of the addressee. One spectator describes the machine as ‘marvellous’ while another believes ‘a genius or a student’ made it. Diverse answers respond to the commentator’s ‘Do you think it means anything?’ As the camera lens zooms out from the machine and the spectators to show the credits, two people respond. One spectator states, ‘Everything that happens has to have some purpose to it.’ Another angry respondent comments, ‘I think they’re trying to make fun of us. Some college kids made this up and they’re trying to say that our society is screwed up.’ We then return to Chris’s address to the audience, ‘I tried to make the chick understand . . . I really tried to make her understand that.’ Then images of the machine and audience commentary occur again. It is interesting to note that Chris refers to Lynn as ‘the chick’ and not by her actual name. What he tries ‘to make her understand’ remains to be disclosed by the film. But it will be a disclosure which reflects negatively on him. Chris may attempt to make Lynn understand about the dangers of conformity, but the methods he adopts do not really work and have the opposite effect from what he intends. He does not really try to understand what motivates Lynn as well as anticipate the problems which will affect her later, problems he bears direct responsibility for. Audience comments on the ‘ultimate machine’ again reflect a diversity of opinion which never understand the real conditions of its operation. They reveal different forms of socially motivated prejudice which appear irrational and confused.5 ‘I like it . . . It’s more or less what the country needs. I think if more time was put into things like that, things that make people happy, things that make people get out on a sunny day like this, we wouldn’t be in Vietnam . . . our economy wouldn’t be screwed up and we probably wouldn’t have Spiro Agnew as our Vice-President.’ Another silent majority spectator comments, ‘I think if they don’t like it here they should get out.’ Another diverse opinion follows: ‘I think basically it’s camp.’ One commentator compares the machine to the future zombie invasions of Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead: ‘Pretty soon, the whole world will be covered with these things.’ Another spectator gloomily prognosticates that his first impression was ‘dismay’: ‘When I first saw that thing I knew there was no hope for us anyway.’ The responses represent a mixture of absurd, irrational comment which either attempts to understand the machine or react against it. During the demonstration, an operator dressed like a nineteenth-century railway driver sits quietly by the machine watching its operation, an image evoking unconscious echoes of the train in Zola’s La Bête Humaine hurtling on its way to destruction. The incongruity of a nineteenth-century costumed figure in a twentieth-century setting watching over an avant-garde machine ironically echoes the absurd nature of a different century unable, or unwilling, to heed the lessons of the previous one. The image then changes to show again Chris’s address to the camera as he tells the audience about the absurd nature of Army bureaucracy when a sergeant told him that a shower cabinet contained a filing cabinet without any thought of its incongruity there. The sergeant believed that the object belonged there so its presence in an inappropriate location was never questioned. Ironically, the final audience comment concerning the machine is ‘It’s beautiful. But what does it do?’ knight of the living dead

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This introductory sequence initially appears irrelevant to the fictional concerns of the main narrative as an extra-diegetic intrusion. But it is, nonetheless, crucial to There’s Always Vanilla’s premises. The people who comment on the machine rely on their everyday prejudices rather than rational analysis. But the key issue is ‘what does it do?’ The film never answers this question but leaves both audience and characters in limbo. After this scene, the film will move on to depict a relationship which just happens and goes nowhere. Both Chris and Lynn accidentally fall into an affair, but they never develop their brief personal relationship into a new, radical commitment that differs from the failed relationships embodied by both their parents. As heirs of the utopian hopes of the 1960s generation they dismally fail in realising its premises. Like Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), There’s Always Vanilla not only documents the failed aspirations of the 1960s generation but also implicitly argues for the rejection of deeply ingrained social modes of conditioning if any progress is ever to occur in human relationships. Ironically, when Chris later explains the reasons for quitting his job at the advertising agency to Lynn he critiques those ‘gray flannelled executives . . . staring at a silly old collection of gears and pulleys and trying to figure out the adjustments . . .’. At that point in the film, the audience then associates the dialogue with the earlier imagery contained within the prologue. However, There’s Always Vanilla reveals that an equally unperceptive hero is the one making this remark, a hero incapable of realising the concrete nature of important personal adjustments that would make his relationship work in the first place. Most viewers would immediately identify with the main narrator. But, like several of his literary predecessors and many key characters in naturalist fiction, Chris is an ‘unreliable narrator’ in more ways than one. His comments towards Lynn are extremely sexist and the developing narrative will undermine any superior claims he thinks he has. The opening sequence concludes with his final comments which compare Lynn to the spectators: ‘I could never get the chick to appreciate anything like that.’ However, what we later learn of his future behaviour will undermine any claims Chris has either in regard to intellectual and moral superiority or even empathy towards other people. Like Ben and Harry in Night of the Living Dead and Romero’s future masculinist characters, Chris believes in his supposedly infallible superior judgement which leads to the breakdown of his relationship with Lynn and his continuing role as an aimless wanderer existing in his own form of personal and social limbo. The following sequence reveals Chris’s dissatisfaction with working in the music industry and his decision to return to Pittsburgh: ‘I should have stayed with what I was into, playing the guitar. The money was good . . . but it became a drag to listen to myself on other people’s records.’ Succeeding shots of the record studio reveal Chris is as frustrated as Lynn is with her work in shooting advertising commercials. Like Romero’s later insert of his name on a production credit and brief appearance filming a sexually suggestive commercial, the names of There’s Always Vanilla coproducers Russell Streiner and John Russo also appear in the recording studio. This reproduces the self-reflexive aspect of the radical European cinema of the 1960s and 1970s associated with Jean-Luc Godard which temporarily influenced the contemporary New American Cinema. It also places Romero and his co-producers in the same 42

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position as their fictional creations in terms of their complicity with an industry manufacturing illusions despite their various attempts to break free from it. Far from being a spontaneous haven of alternative music, the recording studio reveals the various constraints affecting production. A producer constantly directs the music group while an associate times their music with a stopwatch ensuring that the requisite ‘three minutes and twenty-two seconds’ are reached—a similar time constraint to the ninety-minute formula for most contemporary narrative feature films. Chris expresses his discontent to a co-worker. He finds no opportunity for freedom in this environment: ‘I’m leaving today. I’m tired of hearing myself on other people’s records.’ But his colleague cannot hear him because of the studio noise. Chris comments, ‘It’s this noise. It’s driving me crazy . . . My brain. I’ve lost the ability to think. I think the sound is destroying my brain.’ In other words, Chris is in danger of becoming little better than a musical zombie in the industry. His remarks also uncannily foreshadow the contemporary world of action movies which aim to overwhelm viewers with spectacular, quickly-edited images and loud Dolby sound rather than evoking patterns of rational thought and reflection. Chris decides to leave the constricting world of the recording studio. Although we next see him travelling in his jeep to Pittsburgh, neither he nor Lynn will be entirely free from a system which attempts to control them and motivate their behaviour. Like Dr. Logan’s trained zombie Bub in Day of the Dead, Chris believes he has ‘lost the ability to think’. But, like Bub, he will find that socially ingrained negative patterns of behaviour still affect whatever independent aspirations he has for any type of freedom. Instead, they will result in personal frustration and creative inertia. As he drives back home, his voice-over on the soundtrack describes his future encounter with Lynn in retrospect. However, the very nature of his comments depicts the nature of their affair as one characterised by a lack of commitment. For Chris, it is merely a new experiment like taking drugs or engaging in another aspect of a superficial 1960s lifestyle: ‘It’s weird but I didn’t know I was coming back here . . . 100 miles on the road before I knew I was coming back. I guess that was the part of me that was ready for the whole mess. I guess everybody’s looking for a new thing like the chick. She was a model on local television commercials.’ The next sequence then depicts Lynn working in a similar artificially controlled environment as Chris. Like Chris, she is equally subject to a production process over which she has no control. After showing the television studio, Romero inserts various fragmented close-ups of a beer glass inserted in foam and washed to look glamorous for the purposes of a commercial. We also see the frenzied activities of the director (There’s Always Vanilla’s actual co-producer Russell Streiner) attempting to control the events like his counterpart in the previous recording studio sequence. Before the studio take, Lynn questions her role in the proceedings. But she receives nothing but ambiguous answers from producer Michael Dorian (Richard Ricci) who is only interested in an easy pick-up. As if acting out media desires to blur boundaries between illusion and reality so that audiences accept the former in place of the latter, he places two cigarettes in his mouth and lights them both offering one to Lynn employing the Hollywood romantic gesture used by Paul Henreid in Now Voyager (1942). However, Lynn quickly rebuffs his overture by abruptly stating, ‘I don’t knight of the living dead

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smoke.’ She then continues questioning her role as an accessory in manufacturing false media illusions: ‘Isn’t that cheating? Making the beer look better than it actually looks?’ Michael denies the relevance of her critique. He emphasises instead the economic and industrial dependence of all concerned in the enterprise: ‘You stand there talking to me because of the beer? . . . All of our salaries and our very existence depends on that beer and we’re all here to make that beer look as good as it possibly can.’ He critiques her glamorous posture as well as her complicity in manufacturing illusions, ‘That’s it. Beautiful. The mouth thing. Isn’t that cheating?’ Another of Chris’s addresses to camera interrupts this sequence. He tells viewers, ‘It was just a matter of timing. I didn’t have anything in mind, just my thing and the chick’s.’ On one level, this extra-diegetic insert may be regarded as merely another of Romero’s attempts at filling out an undeveloped screenplay. But ‘these raps’ are much more than the ‘cutesy’ attempts at ‘affectation’ Romero later described. If viewers are expected to understand these comments retrospectively based upon Lynn’s information to Chris concerning events he was never present at, then far from placing a narrator in a position of omniscient control they reveal him as lacking in a sympathetic understanding of the problems Lynn faced prior to their affair. Furthermore, even if Chris knew nothing of these events, his comments reveal him as little better than a sexist male falling into an affair with a ‘chick’ without making any real attempts to know her and understand her personal dilemmas. Later events in the film support both these interpretations. The scene then returns to the television studio showing the director creating a false romantic scene for Lynn and a fellow actor to sell the beer commercial. He suggests they both kiss and make up lines. These improvisations will neither synchronise (or even be heard) in the soundtrack manufactured in the final edited illusion. The ‘romantic couple’ begin to insult each other: ‘You are a frumpy little chick with all your brains up your ass.’ Lynn replies, ‘You’ve got a piece of spinach in your teeth.’ This scene both complements and anticipates themes in the film. Chris has referred to Lynn exclusively as a ‘chick’ in his addresses to the audience. He will insult her physical appearance immediately after their first encounter. The antagonistic nature of the television commercial relationship soon reoccurs in the later stages of Chris and Lynn’s affair. They begin their relationship like the naive doomed young couple Tom and Judy but will end it in a manner paralleling the frustrated marital union of the Coopers in Night of the Living Dead. The next scene shows Chris arriving in Pittsburgh outside a local rendezvous, Mahoney’s. As he enters, a woman sings a song whose significant lines are ‘The Wild and Woolly Years/Tell me where did they go?’ The lyrics suggest recognition of a difference between the formerly radical era of the 1960s and the present jaded realm of the 1970s. Various influences such as the Vietnam War’s lack of resolution, a screwedup economy and the presence of Spiro Agnew as Vice-President are all possible reasons for the new decade’s activist fatigue. It is an era in which There’s Always Vanilla’s central characters all appear caught up within their solipsistic concerns. But they also bear responsibility for failing to realise those radical potentials which the previous decade offered them in terms of personal and historical challenges. Although the 44

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sexual revolution is still in force, the movement now appears compromised by the very nature of the people who attempt to follow its supposedly liberating dimensions. Chris sees his father Roger (Roger McGovern) at Mahoney’s. Roger has used the sexual revolution for his own selfish ends as a means of cheating on his wife. Although he enjoys access to easy lays, he also openly sneers at other minority groups and their claims for equal recognition. Chris greets Roger with the revealing comment, ‘Three years Dad and you’re still here.’ Roger sits at a table with a young businessman whose glass of wine Chris accidentally jostles when he approaches. After the younger man leaves for a meeting, naturally concerned about the wine stains on his business suit, Roger caustically comments, ‘Business is getting full of faggots.’ He then sneakily enquires into his son’s sexuality, ‘You’re not turning into a faggot, are you?’ Chris finds that his father still lives with his mother whom he describes as ‘out of her mind.’ When Chris’s mother appears towards the end of the film, we learn that she has also adopted 1960s habits by calling police ‘pigs’; yet she also relies on them to remove intruders from her property. Chris’s parents are both hypocritical by appropriating selected aspects of 1960s lifestyles but never changing their patterns of behaviour inherited from the 1950s. The prodigal son is not entirely blameless as succeeding events in the film reveal. During the scenes between Chris and Roger, Romero inserts sequences involving Lynn and Dorian who attempts a hypocritical act of seduction on her. Dorian presents himself to Lynn as a potential saviour. He talks about ‘building bridges between people and skyscrapers’ and represents himself as someone who will save the world from exploding. However, Dorian’s method of salvation is as dubious as those paths followed by Chris and his father: ‘But if [the world] is ever going to be saved, it’s the communications people who are going to do it.’ At this point, Lynn wishes to further her career in the advertising business and states her compliance in whatever it will take to get ahead in the profession. She states, ‘I’d like to get to know everyone.’ But she does not realise the full extent of the personal and professional compromises she will have to make. The alternating nature of both sequences reveals certain parallels between hypocritical, unscrupulous males attempting to use and abuse females. But while Dorian and Roger are both clearly aware of what they are doing, Chris exists in a state of blissful ignorance blinding him to the extent of his actual contamination by patriarchal attitudes. At Mahoney’s, Roger ogles a young go-go dancer and boasts about his sexual prowess: ‘Your old man can still cut the mustard.’ After commenting, ‘You really believe that, don’t you, old man’, Chris takes him at his word and surprises him by fixing him up. The event results in Roger’s embarrassment. Chris then inquires about his former girlfriend, Terri, whose photo they view on the wall in her former go-go dancer role as the ‘Electric Madonna’. Roger significantly comments, ‘She’s not a real thing.’ This is a pertinent statement since none of the males in There’s Always Vanilla view women as ‘real’ beings but merely as disposable objects for gratification very much like artifacts in television commercials. Chris later affirms this perception in his next address to the audience when they visit Terri’s apartment: ‘She was just a regular screwed-up broad, but was she beautiful’, a statement paralleling Roger’s description of his wife as ‘out of her mind’. knight of the living dead

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When we first see Terri she wears a glamorous wig similar to her objectified photo as the Electric Madonna. But she is not happy to see her former lover who has decided to return home after three years without informing her. While Roger unexpectedly finds Chris’s companion eager to bed him after a night of drug taking, Terri refuses to take up their former relationship. She condemns Chris’s selfish attitude: ‘You spoiled my whole life, ran away from your past, from me, you prick. How the hell did you wind up back here?’ After telling Chris she killed their son, Terri removes her wig and puts it on the top of a large toy signifying her refusal to play any role accommodating to male desire any longer. She tells him, ‘He’s across the hall with the neighbors.’ The following morning, after Roger guiltily asks Chris how much money he should pay for his night’s pleasure, Terri ironically introduces her son to them in words clearly denoting the shared patriarchal selfishness existing between Chris and his father: ‘Chrissie. This is your Daddy. There’s your Daddy’s Daddy.’ Romero’s intercutting of this sequence with Lynn and Dorian’s encounter provides a mirror image of a world of patriarchal manipulation and female vulnerability. Lynn feels guilty about her complicity in the world of television commercials: ‘I think commercials tend to break down communications rather than build them up.’ But Dorian denies her critical comments about the media industry and significantly speaks of commercials in terms of being a form of artificial sexual stimulation helping viewers to deny reality: ‘So much bad news comes over that tube every night that for just one brief minute, 60 bubbly seconds, I can sit back and dream of a glass of cold “Bold Gold” . . . If we could live like that violently, that passionately [italics mine], for every 60 seconds of every 24 hours, we’d burn, we’d wear ourselves out . . .’ Within their respective positions in society, Chris, Roger and Dorian all yearn for a quick sexual fix rather than engage in any form of fulfilling personal and political relationships which may challenge the moribund society they inhabit. These jaded males easily appropriate any new social custom providing them with easy access to pleasure, particularly those last remnants of the 1960s sexual revolution which (feminists later correctly recognised) benefited males more than females. Lynn refuses Dorian’s advances, ‘Look, how do you want it?’ He accuses her of ‘playing games’ and orders her out of his apartment. But, at least at this point in the film, Lynn opposes her male-determined role. She refuses to participate in a ‘game’ whereby her future media career depends upon her sexual compliance. The next morning Chris sees Roger return home. He denies his paternity of Terri’s child: ‘I think she’s lying. I don’t think it’s my kid.’ Chris then accidentally encounters Lynn as she rushes to an audition for a toilet bowl commercial. After refusing Dorian’s advances, Lynn has now become as disposable as the waste products ironically referred to in this type of commercial. At this point of the film, the path is open for a significant romantic encounter which could have the potentiality of benefitting and redeeming both partners according to the classical Hollywood romantic formula depicted in Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness. But such a strategy is both foreign to Romero and as artificial as the false romanticism seen in the depicted television commercials. Like the ironic nature of the EC comic narrative influencing Romero as a director, the events in There’s Always Vanilla will not conclude in the normally accepted manner. 46

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Both Chris and Lynn are affected by various aspects of their family and environment in ways similar to Zola’s Rougon-Macquart offspring. Chris already has many of his father’s attitudes deeply embedded within him; Lynn is vulnerable, wishes to assert some form of independence, and does not want to make the same mistakes her mother did. There’s Always Vanilla will depict an unhappy ending for the two lovers, but it will also attempt to clarify how the actual family and social circumstances affecting both characters result in this conclusion. Although lacking the more mature treatment characteristic of Romero’s later films, There’s Always Vanilla suggests that the contemporary world of personal and social relationships can never bring true fulfilment. While their attitudes differ, Chris and Lynn fall swiftly into an affair which will never benefit them either on the personal or social levels. Despite scenes showing them buying new hippie-type clothes and indulging in a lyrical outing to a zoo, their affair never exhibits any alternative and progressive signs of 1960s sexual freedom nor one leading to a rejection of the society surrounding them. Their relationship is contaminated from the very beginning. Chris makes condescending remarks about Lynn throughout the narrative as he looks back on their affair. His extra-diegetic address reveals a male reluctance to engage in a committed relationship that is fully respectful of Lynn: ‘The last thing that I wanted in the world happened right then . . . Then, all of a sudden, boom. There it was. I couldn’t turn around and walk away from it . . . I sure as hell wasn’t looking for any other real involvement. I wasn’t looking for another lady. I wasn’t looking to get my life any more screwed-up than it was then—but . . .’ But, despite all his reservations stated from the convenient perspective of hindsight, Chris sleeps with her, begins an affair and shows no real concern for his partner’s feelings in this flawed relationship. Despite sleeping with Chris, Lynn initially wishes to keep her independence. She provides a separate couch bed for him in her apartment, ‘I’ve never done that before. It’s the only thing I’ve never done.’ Her statement applies both to her first sexual experience as well as accepting Chris into her personal life. Chris quickly invades her space and moves in with her. However, she soon expresses her genuine love for him. But the film makes clear that it is only Lynn who ever says, ‘I love you.’ Chris never utters it either in his various addresses to camera or within the narrative. He is always non-committal: ‘All I could ever come up with was that she was a beautiful lady. But that wasn’t enough . . . There was a certain part of Lynn that got to me . . . I couldn’t figure it and I couldn’t tell her . . . I still can’t figure out how the whole thing happened.’ When he later presents her with a photo of them both, the image actually speaks volumes about their relationship. While Lynn faces the camera, Chris’s back is to the viewer as if hesitant of revealing his true personality. Romero’s consistent critique of patriarchal attitudes and his sympathy towards female characters thus already appears in this early work. The next morning a talk-radio programme wakes Chris up. As he looks around the room, he sees a photo of her father, news commentator Lyle Harris. Lynn has left a note for him, ‘I’ve set the programme for 11 o’clock. It’s Daddy’s programme.’ However, Daddy’s programme is nothing for her to be proud of. It is as condescending and manipulative as the talk-show programme in Martin. This media world is knight of the living dead

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also one into which Lynn desperately wishes to gain acceptance. She does not condemn its values by developing her hesitant critiques concerning that environment’s ‘cheating’ and manipulative nature and rejecting it entirely. Both Chris and Lynn are products of that environment and do not realise how their very personalities are formed by it. Their inability to recognise the contaminating reality of the surrounding social world by moving towards alternative forms of personal existence results in their respective personal defeats. From this point on, their relationship begins to deteriorate. Chris makes an attempt to become a writer. But when questioned by Lynn about what he is writing, he brusquely replies, ‘Nothing.’ Lynn later tells Chris about an impressionable cinematic memory from On the Beach (1959) which is far from romantic. She remembers the death scene between Anthony Perkins and Donna Anderson after they have taken the suicide pills: ‘They had to wait. They didn’t know when it would happen.’ Rather than discerning that their relationship is dying, Chris denies the warning signals present in Lynn’s comments concerning the eventual death of their relationship as well as denying his share of responsibility for its deterioration. He remarks in his address to the camera that ‘I didn’t know if the girl was stoned or not . . . Who the hell knows what they want, who knows right and wrong, why they do everything they do. Sometimes we get fouled up looking for too many answers and we end up doing nothing . . . Why do I have to keep spending my time trying to figure out why . . . I don’t know why it happened.’ This direct-to-camera sequence actually begins with a quick insert of a studio interior. Other rapid inserts reveal more shots of the studio before showing Dorian supervising a bath tub commercial with an attractive female. However, prior to these scenes, earlier images revealed Chris’s hesitant look as Lynn again affirmed her need for a relationship he has no real commitment to: ‘It doesn’t matter why we want each other.’ The studio sequences reveal the presence of an illusionary and manipulative world surrounding both protagonists. Its ideological values both intrude into and exacerbate the deterioration of personal relationships by promoting false ideals. The next sequence shows Lynn visiting her mother in hospital before she undergoes an operation. It reveals Lynn’s own particular vulnerability to a parental discourse which parallels Chris’s own condition insofar as both offspring in There’s Always Vanilla never entirely separate themselves from old values. Lynn speaks of her discontent with the phony world of television commercials: ‘I just get so sick of it, sometimes. Just turning this way and that, sweating under the hot lights, trying to get excited about a lousy glass of beer. It’s just frustrating. Maybe, I’m just content to be a wife and mother.’ However, after asking Lynn to find her make-up, her mother launches into a tirade against marriage: ‘Marriage! Look what marriage did for me? The perfect couple they called us. I was the perfect wife. I was the perfect hostess. I gave perfect dinner parties. I gave perfect small talk just to push that big baboon to the top.’ After further criticising Lynn’s father, she confesses her early uncertainty about which path she would follow. Her earlier problems also parallel Lynn’s own present dilemma. However, she then urges her daughter to follow a path similar to Dorian’s values: ‘If only I had known what I know now . . . I really didn’t know what 48

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I wanted . . . You want to get ahead and make a lot of money, your own money. That’s what you want.’ Inevitably, domestic discord begins. Both Chris and Lynn succumb to deeply ingrained negative tendencies which inhibit both of them from developing a relationship uncontaminated by the negative elements contained in parental and social values. Chris continues his freewheeling lifestyle by attempting to write the ‘great American novel’ and living off Lynn. Lynn yearns for a life of domesticity. She criticises Chris’s inability to decide what he really wants to do. Lack of communication between them develops to the extent that neither really listens to nor understands the other. The seeds for the later-deteriorating relationship depicted between Fran and David in Dawn of the Dead are already present in this early couple. This lack of communication becomes explicit when Lynn reveals her pregnancy to Chris after a domestic squabble. Chris proves himself absolutely incapable of responding to her dilemma so she lies to him: ‘I’m not pregnant. I’m sorry.’ The next morning Chris lies on the couch after Lynn has locked him out of her bedroom. Since her mother will visit her, she expects Chris to move his things out temporarily. Although Chris regards her action as ‘cheating’ (the same word Lynn uses for her involvement in television commercials), he does not even attempt to understand her dilemma but whines about not having sex for three days. Chris then decides to spend the day with Terri and his young son. But his alreadydisillusioned former girlfriend rejects his superficial attempt at being a ‘Daddy’, commenting, ‘It’s too late to be involved. I don’t need you any more.’ At the same time, Lynn attempts to speak to Dorian while he supervises a risqué television commercial using sexual innuendo to vulgarise human relationships. Romero also makes a cameo appearance as the director of the commercial here. As we learn later, she wishes to obtain information for an abortion. Chris also applies for a job with an advertising agency and infiltrates his way into the system by using language almost identical to that used earlier by Dorian in his attempted seduction of Lynn: ‘A pimp makes a natural advertiser. Pimp and advertiser both deal with a public in the same way offering a release, a fulfilment of desire, a solution for frustration. One seeks a quick piece of ass, the other a new deodorant or a toilet cleaner.’ Chris’s ‘honesty’ gets him the job. But he has clearly compromised himself by selling out and soon quits when he learns that his trial assignment will involve promoting the military image during a time when the Vietnam War is still continuing. Although this sequence contains Romero’s humorous jibes at an industry whose operations he knows only too well, it conflicts with the rest of the film. It is impossible to imagine Chris even taking the job in the first place in view of his previouslyvoiced attitudes. However, as an indication of the personal contamination he faces and the breakdown of any true relationship he has with Lynn, it functions appropriately within the narrative. He has compromised both himself and his values by involving himself in this manipulative occupation. It is not surprising that during the next dialogue between Chris and Lynn when he upsets her by telling her about wanting to be a father to Terri’s son, the sound of a machine (made either by recording studio noise or the cable car we see Dorian travelling on) both drowns the discussion and acts as a distracting background noise. This sound not only parallels the knight of the living dead

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earlier noise in the recording studio (which caused Chris to quit because it drove him crazy), but also allegorically functions as an aural metaphor for dominating familial and social influences which prevent their relationship from developing positively. Ironically, Chris’s camera address in this scene actually asserts, ‘If Lynn and I had a kid, I would marry her.’ This totally contradicts his earlier behaviour when she announced her pregnancy. The following sequence is a crucial one. It intercuts scenes of Chris sitting alone in the apartment and condemning Lynn for not being there with her traumatic visit to an abortionist. Although Chris is not present at the visit, the editing pattern makes clear his culpability for the situation in which Lynn finds herself in. We must remember that There’s Always Vanilla appeared two years before the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court Decision so that Lynn now finds herself participating in both a criminal act as well as one causing her great personal trauma. The visit and Lynn’s flight from the two men involved in this illegal abortion employs a sombre visual style and canted angles reminiscent of Night of the Living Dead. As Lynn is about to undergo a procedure supervised by a dubious doctor who utters another of the many lines spoken by hypocritical males in the film—‘I think the greatest crime in the world is for a woman to have a baby she doesn’t want’—a line spoken not by a female but by a sinister male who merely views Lynn as an object, the sequence inserts shots of Chris as well as the revealing photo he earlier purchased for her showing them both within the frame. Chris shows no awareness of her predicament. His final voice-over in this sequence asserts his own selfish feelings: ‘I didn’t know where she was. I didn’t care. I was happy she wasn’t there. I was angry with her and happy to get the hell out of it.’ During the preliminaries for the dangerous and illegal operation, Romero inserts three shots of the photograph showing Chris with his back to the camera and Lynn facing it. The first shot shows them both in the photo after the abortionist’s sleazy-looking assistant has given Lynn a drink. When the doctor tells her to get on a table, another insert of the photo appears. This time it is a close-up only showing the back of Chris’s head. After another insert of both Chris and Lynn in the photo, Lynn becomes reluctant to undergo the abortion and runs away. Her single image in the photo then appears as she flees like Barbara escaping from the zombie in Night of the Living Dead. After she returns to the apartment, Lynn locks the door and the photo appears for the last time in the sequence. The connection of Lynn’s dilemma to her involvement with Chris is obvious. He bears responsibility for placing her in a situation of personal danger that could have resulted in her death, a result of regarding their relationship as a mere ‘affair’ (the significantly alternative title of There’s Always Vanilla). The montage associations evoked by the photo in this sequence clearly equates Chris with the abortionist and blames him for causing her dilemma. When Chris finds that Terri has vacated her apartment, he returns home to his father and mother. They find him perched on a tree like a young boy. When Chris tells his woes to Roger, he receives the dubious consolation embodied in the film’s title, ‘There’s always vanilla, Chris,’ a strategy meant to get him to accept the status quo and begin work in his baby food factory. However, vanilla is also a manufactured product like all those other exotic ice creams provided by the corporate company Howard Johnson’s. Accepting the status quo will not result in any form of happiness 50

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as the next sequence shows. We see Lynn, now heavily pregnant, who has decided to pursue her option of marriage and children rather than following any other alternatives which might have developed her potentialities. She watches the finished television commercial on which she worked. It opens with her and a lover riding a horse in classic western imagery, kissing, and mouthing some sentences left silent on the soundtrack but ones we already know are false. A mailman (Vince Survinski) delivers a large package to her and her husband. When they open the light box outside sent by Chris, two blue and red balloons, symbolising the empty and fragile nature of their past relationship drift into the sky. The film concludes. There’s Always Vanilla ends on a pessimistic note with a coda depicting a failed relationship involving two characters who cannot communicate and end up compromised by their various social roles. The supposed liberatory potentials of the 1960s era have benefited nobody and its legacy is now bankrupt in a new decade where everybody becomes as compromised as their predecessors in previous generations. Earlier in the film, Lynn commented to Chris about his supposed ‘honesty’ after their lovemaking. During this sequence the artificially manufactured world of the television studio intruded more and more into their private world via various inserts which became more extended in length during each successive appearance. Although mistaken about Chris, Lynn expressed optimism about a relationship, an optimism which could have had positive practical consequences had things been different. After stating ‘and you’re honest about everything’, she continues, ‘People should be like that. It could be the easiest thing in the world.’ Unfortunately, it is not. But the ideal remains. It is that which haunts Romero’s various films, an ideal determining whether humans become free or merely another recruit to the army of the living dead.

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chapter four

Jack’s Wife

like there’s always Vanilla, Jack’s Wife became another of Romero’s ill-fated ventures that sought to break away from horror films. Although it touches on supernatural elements, they are less important than its affinity with issues raised explicitly in his previous film, namely a person’s unsuccessful attempt to break away from particular modes of individual and social entrapment and move towards a new form of existence. Shot in 1972 with a small crew on 16mm and later blown up into 35mm, the film suffered from budget problems affecting both production and post-production. After attempting to make a film originally budgeted at $250,000 for $100,000, Jack’s Wife had the additional misfortune to fall into the hands of distributor Jack (The Blob) Harris, who drastically recut it and tried to market it as a soft-porn film under the different title, Hungry Wives! After releasing it in 1973 and finding it unable to attract an audience, Harris removed it from distribution and later tried to redistribute it under another title, Season of the Witch, as a new Romero film following the success of Dawn of the Dead.1 Even then it did not succeed theatrically and went directly into the video market. Due to its problematic history, neither the original negative nor Romero’s first cut survives today. Yet, despite all the various problems affecting its production and marketing, critics such as Paul R. Gagne regard Jack’s Wife as one of Romero’s significant films, anticipating Martin, and described by Romero and commentators as his most accomplished film (see Gagne 1987: 46–50). Although the original version is now lost, enough remains in the re-edited work currently in circulation to trace the important message Romero has inserted into another of his early works foreshadowing themes within his later films. Jack’s Wife is an important work whose ideas both inform and complement Romero’s better-known films such as the zombie trilogy and Martin. Jack’s Wife certainly shares many of the problems affecting There’s Always Vanilla, such as minimal production values, uneven acting, and a tendency to appear as merely a dated product of its time. However, it also has many positive affinities with the director’s earlier work. Both films centre on confused characters who attempt to seek some form of positive direction in their lives and eventually fail miserably

in the process. Gagne recognises that Jack’s Wife deals with the nature of false perceptions. His book includes an intriguing quotation from Romero himself concerning the idea that individual perception of reality may often obscure the actual truth: ‘The Fact is that every forward motion in the film is caused by that person . . . yet she perceives the world as making everything happen to her. In fact, she can’t do any of it without being able to conjure up, pun intended, a reason for it happening that is not coming from within her. She needs to be able to say, “The Devil made me do it!” Which at once is the plight of womanhood, or any minority, and the genocide—it’s very hard to perceive yourself as the cause of something that might make it better’ (49).

Romero’s comments are relevant in more than one sense. They identify the director as someone who intelligently recognises the importance of contemporary modes of conduct influencing the behavioural patterns of all characters who appear in his various films. In Night of the Living Dead, both Ben and Harry blame each other as the enemy instead of rationally collaborating against the greater threat outside. Chris and Lynn in There’s AlwaysVanilla never bother to analyse their personal flaws. They are also blind in seeing how relevant social and family patterns generating such problems affect their relationship thus making any potential alternatives for them to follow ultimately impossible. The individuals and society of The Crazies pursue a path leading to destruction as a result of their inability to cease looking outside and start looking within their own personalities. Those who tentatively survive in Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead eventually realise that the old world of capitalist acquisitiveness and possessiveness really represents a contaminating force which they must purge from their very beings. In Knightriders, Billy’s utopian medieval society initially collapses because it lacks the power to confront and defeat such contamination while the various individuals in Monkey Shines, Creepshow and The Dark Half survive or die depending upon their abilities to interrogate their own selves, understand the potentials they have for engaging in alternative strategies, and cease blaming conveniently external scapegoats. Jack’s Wife anticipates all these future developments in Romero’s work. Despite its production problems, Jack’s Wife represents one of Romero’s most sophisticated attempts to analyse the personal dilemmas affecting individuals in contemporary society who are often faced with different choices but who end up choosing the wrong path. Romero’s various screen characters variously engage in processes of denial that harm their very personalities and prevent them realising their real potential as free individuals. As with Martin, it is often difficult to distinguish the fantasy sequences in Jack’s Wife from the world of everyday reality, although one abrupt transition from a scene showing a masked intruder attacking Joan Mitchell (Jan White) to another depicting her awakening from a nightmare does formally distinguish between the two levels. However, as in Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, the fantastic levels of meaning complement, rather than contradict, the realistic aspects of the narrative. As Peter recognises in Dawn of the Dead, the zombies are ‘us’. Despite the tendencies of most critics and audiences to emphasise Romero’s knight of the living dead

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films exclusively in terms of the horror genre and concentrate upon special effects, like the better examples contained within the field they speak to issues far beyond their generic boundaries. In Jack’s Wife the fantasy eventually becomes a reality, while in Martin they are already indistinguishable and indulged in by the title character who cannot (or does not want to) tell the difference between them. As Romero has noted, the scene involving Nikki, Gregg, Shirley, and Joan really summarises the theme of Jack’s Wife. After teasing Joan and Shirley over their visit to self-styled witch Marion, Gregg emphasises the power of auto-suggestion and compares it to people who worry themselves into a heart attack: ‘You get a guy who believes in the power of voodoo or something and he knows the hex has been put on him, he worries himself to death.’ Gregg later demonstrates his point when he makes Shirley believe she has inhaled marijuana rather than an ordinary cigarette. He succeeds not merely due to her vulnerable position following the amount of alcohol that Shirley has already consumed but also because of the fact that she already wishes to ‘cut loose and do something’, a tendency she condemns Joan for, despite the disastrous example she has set for her friend. Like Day of the Dead, Jack’s Wife opens with a deceptive image which seems realistic at first. But, unlike the later film, it follows it with another sequence which initially appears realistic but is nonetheless an illusion—despite its placement in the world of everyday normality. Both visions symbolically represent Joan’s real life problems and challenge her to respond to them. The film opens to reveal a deserted wood. Like the opening of Night of the Living Dead, we then see two figures approaching the camera from a distance in long shot. Jack Mitchell (Bill Thunhurst) walks ahead of his wife. He reads a newspaper and appears oblivious to her presence. Joan submissively walks behind him. Two other shots show the couple from the camera’s perspective first behind some leafless branches seen in soft focus and later with the branches in sharp focus as if contrasting two forms of vision challenging both title character and audience in terms of working towards a necessarily appropriate perspective. As this sequence proceeds, the camera reveals Joan’s perspective. She watches her husband walk forward, ignore her very presence and allow branches to brush back from his body into her face. During the walk, Joan’s face becomes more scratched and bloody. As they walk forward, organ music and electronic sounds appear on the soundtrack emphasising both the religious nature of Joan’s self-oppression and her discordant apprehension of her current position. As Jack and Joan walk through the wood, she sees a baby seated on the ground and looks at it apprehensively as if vaguely perceiving motherhood as another link in the chain of patriarchal oppression. The next image reveals the first of the many mirror images which structure the film. Joan sees herself on a swing, its very presence suggesting a potential liberation she may eventually obtain. However, this possibility becomes brutally curtailed. Jack hits her on the nose with his newspaper and places a dog collar around her neck, seeing his wife as little better than a household pet. As church bells ring, he leads her inside a dog compound and locks her in a cage commenting, ‘I’ll be gone about a week.’ The scene ends with Joan looking at a bulldog in the next cage before the next sequence begins suggesting a movement from nightmare into reality. But, as the film reveals, they are both the same. 54

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This opening sequence already foreshadows the film’s dilemma of a frustrated housewife experiencing both alienation and lack of self-esteem within her current social position. Like the prologue of Night of the Living Dead, it introduces two characters, male and female, bound in a frustrating family relationship. Jack’s physical acts of violence towards Joan in this sequence parallel Johnny’s verbal aggression towards Barbara in the earlier film. Furthermore, the sounds of organ music and church bells signify the role of religion as an oppressive force in Joan’s life, a force which emphasises female submission as it did for Barbara in the earlier film. Jack’s act of violence towards Joan in the opening fantasy sequence also foreshadows his later physical assault on her when he learns of their daughter Nikki’s departure from home. The next sequence also plays with audience expectations. A real estate agent (played by Bill Hinzman, the first zombie to appear in Night of the Living Dead) leads Joan on a tour. This scene initially appears realistic before the presence of discordant features lead viewers to question its veracity. Joan again exhibits silence as the agent takes her around her own home. He lists various features, both material and personal, which appear as alienating as those in the previous sequence. The agent begins by detailing the home’s interior features and then opens a door to reveal Gregg (Ray Laine), smiling at her from inside. Gregg’s presence initially appears unusual. It will not be until later into the narrative that audiences actually meet this character. Gregg’s introductory appearance in this sequence also occurs well before Joan actually meets him in the film. This intimates that what initially appears to be a chronologically positioned opening dream sequence actually belongs to the film’s actual conclusion. Romero does not only break down traditional cinematic barriers between reality and fantasy but also those dominating classical Hollywood narrative construction. According to this system, the end must answer the beginning.2 By placing a character the audience meets later at the very beginning of the film, Romero suggests that Joan’s dilemma will never reach any firm resolution but is actually circular in nature. Despite Joan’s later rejection of Gregg, he still returns to haunt her in her fantasies in a similar way to the masked intruder. Thus, despite the film’s conclusion in which everything appears settled for the title character who is on her way to a new life, she may actually be still wrestling with the same type of problems which initially caused her dilemma. As we shall see, she ends the film still known as ‘Jack’s Wife’. By employing the type of contemporary avant-garde discourses common to Hollywood cinema of the 1960s and 1970s in films such as Mickey One (1965), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1968) and Alex in Wonderland (1970), Romero suggests that his early version of the woman’s nightmare will never end. It will continue well beyond the film’s actual conclusion trapping her in a type of psychic-repetition compulsive situation due to the fact that she is not really as liberated as she believes. Another door opens for Joan which also depicts a personal dead end. She sees her ladies coffee circle shot via a grotesque use of wide angle lens and roughly edited cuts whom the agent describes as ‘available for luncheon, tea, bridge, etc, etc.’ It is already clear from Joan’s bored demeanour that the mindless chatter of her WASP female social circle provides her with no positive alternative channels for her energy. knight of the living dead

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Joan is also alienated from her adolescent daughter, Nikki (Joedda McClain), as the next image reveals. Introduced to her as ‘your daughter’, Nikki passes her on the stairs. Nikki is oblivious to her mother’s presence as if she were actually dead. In a sense, Joan is. She is already one of Romero’s ‘living dead’ in spirit. As she enters her daughter’s room, Joan sees the first of several mirror image shots in this sequence representing her as an old woman approaching death after she has fulfilled her function within patriarchy. The images correspond to Joan’s low self-esteem. She internally feels herself to be someone who is old and useless with nowhere else to go except the grave. When the agent shows Joan her own room, he points out many material artifacts such as fashionable clothes and jewellery. But these consumerist things certainly provide no satisfactory substitute for Joan’s frustrated life. He also points out the supply of pills in Joan’s bathroom cabinet as well as the ‘phone numbers of doctor, police, priest, neighbour’, all of whom play ideologically proscribed roles of trapping Joan into a life of bourgeois conformity and preventing her from reaching an awareness of fulfilling alternatives to overcome her alienated existence. The agent finally leaves after uttering an archetypal everyday American ‘feel good’ platitude stressing the importance of being an economically responsible housewife within capitalism: ‘Don’t forget to pay the bills and, have a good day.’ The sequence concludes by revealing a long shot of Joan going to her dressing room mirror and again seeing the reflection of her aged self. She then sees her aged self reclining on the bed before she finally wakes up from her nightmares. Joan’s schizophrenic vision reveals the true nature of her personality as a human being suffering the process of decay in a manner parallel to Romero’s zombies. Joan awakes from her dreams next to Jack in bed. Their relationship appears lifeless, mechanical and perfunctory. It appears little different from the instinctual behavioural patterns of the zombies in Romero’s trilogy. Like the zombies, Joan and her husband merely perform reflex motions in their everyday life. They have no real conversation. Joan merely utters platitudes to Jack such as ‘Are you up, hon?’, ‘Have a good day, hon,’ to which he barely responds or not at all. After Jack leaves, Joan apprehensively looks at her image in her large mirror. The camera then zooms in to her diminished reflection in the small circular mirror on her left. Although Joan does not see her aged self as in the fantasy, she recognises the subordinated nature of her personality in a frustrating marital relationship. A bell sounds before electronic buzzing occurs on the soundtrack. These two noises complement those heard in the first fantasy suggesting that a combination of religious and mechanical forces bear the responsibility both for programming Joan’s behaviour and causing the unhealthy nature of the frustration with her everyday life. Already Romero suggests the presence of features he will develop explicitly in Day of the Dead, namely that oppressive social forces are really responsible for dysfunctional human behaviour, making their victims nothing more than living dead, whether humans or zombies. Joan then consults her male psychiatrist. He dismisses any potentials she may have towards understanding the nature of her dilemma by describing her as ‘the least qualified person to understand a dream’. It is already clear that the masculine world shows little sympathy for her plight. But the avenues Joan eventually chooses also 56

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provide very little alternative help. As her psychiatrist also states, ‘The only person imprisoning Joan is Joan’, a statement metaphorically envisaged by the two shots of her claustrophobically sitting inside her vehicle while it remains stationary during a car wash. The car wash is merely a temporary cosmetic process similar to Joan’s psychiatric sessions. It may remove stains like the psychiatrist’s attempt to explain away troubling dreams but the remedy is merely temporary. Both car stains and psychological trauma will return sooner or later. During the party sequence, viewers gain further insights into Joan’s sterile world. Various middle-aged, lavishly dressed, over-coiffered matrons engage in banal small talk ranging from menopausal problems to ‘making money’. They point to another guest, Marion (Virginia Greenwald), who appears to be the outsider in their social group, as a ‘good witch’, and compare witchcraft to a religion. As one male guest does a ‘reading of my favourite television program’ intimating the cultural horizons the dominant culture allows him, Jack compares the whole party to a ‘dog pound’ thus equating the environment with Joan’s earlier nightmare. Despite the polite levels of social intercourse, the respective positions affecting both males and females are really based upon patriarchal control whether expressed in physical violence or not. This becomes clear in the next sequence which opens with an exterior shot of the Mitchells’ house, significantly numbered ‘1246’ which add up to the total ‘13’. After Joan asks Jack how long he will be away on one of his frequent business trips, the scene changes. It moves on to employ all the visual generic devices associated with horror and suspense cinema to show Joan alone, frightened by various night sounds, windows suddenly opening, and the sudden appearance of a male shadow. Joan then sees hands appearing from below her bed. But they actually belong to Jack who has been exercising before his early morning departure. Joan has thus experienced another nightmare. Like the others in the opening sequences of the film, it is one relevant to her situation as an unhappy woman. As Robin Wood has pointed out in another context, Romero’s fantasy sequences often embody a particular form of a woman’s nightmare within patriarchy (1987: 45–9). The hands also foreshadow the zombie hands reaching out to grab Sarah in Day of the Dead. Joan is also susceptible to influences in her everyday life as well as the world of fantasy. Nikki commends her as still being attractive: ‘You never think of your mother having a great body. You really look good.’ After Nikki leaves, Joan decides not to swallow her tranquiliser but puts it into the toilet bowl. She then looks at herself in her dressing table mirror, decides to remove her slippers, and then her dressing gown. After narcissistically gazing at her nude body in the mirror, she lies down on her bed. This sequence may be read as one of the few instances of true mother-daughter communication within the entire film. However, the communication is merely superficial since it deals entirely with the fact of bodily attractiveness rather than personal liberation and the progressive aspects of a mother-daughter relationship. Of course, Joan is much more attractive than she believes. But Nikki’s comments are really not suitable enough for a true bonding between an oppressed mother and daughter to really develop. Although Nikki resents her father’s condescending attitudes such as his paternal admonition to ‘Try to stay virgin’ before he departs on one of his frequent business trips, her path towards liberation will be as flawed and problematic knight of the living dead

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as her mother’s. Nikki makes bad friendships, as we see from her liaison with Gregg, and eventually leaves home. Her action results more from pique than any carefully thought out plans concerning her future. It foreshadows Christine’s attitude in Martin where a daughter seeks to escape from home using any means possible, no matter how much it may result in another dead end. Nikki merely influences her mother into becoming narcissistic, an attitude symbolised by Joan’s self-absorbed gazing at her body. Joan may be headed towards the first stage of female pleasure, but it will not lead towards any true sense of independence and liberation. At this stage, it is merely indulgent self-exhibitionism as the following scenes suggest. The next sequence shows Joan and Shirley (Anne Muffly) visiting Marion and pruriently investigating her involvement in witchcraft. Shirley merely indulges in gossipy and voyeuristic exploration as a means of relieving her mundane life from daily boredom. She describes Joan as ‘an academic’ who fears taking any form of action. Joan, however, believes a witch is merely an ‘exhibitionist’, an ironic comment in view of her behaviour in the previous sequence. However, like the parallels between religion and witchcraft in the party sequence, these comments are revealing. They implicitly associate Joan’s normal life with the supposedly alternative world of the supernatural she is tempted to enter. While Marion talks to Shirley about witchcraft, Joan superficially distances herself from the conversation. But she also skims through a primer, ‘How to be a Witch’, resting on Marion’s bookshelf. However, as Marion continues her conversation it becomes clear that her status as a witch is merely the result of social custom rather than independent choice: ‘It’s a religion really. My mother was a witch. My father belonged. So it was easy for me.’ This is not only the second reference to witchcraft as ‘a religion’ in the film but also another indication that divisions between this supposedly alternative movement and Joan’s own Catholicism are not as radical as she believes. Marion was brought up in a witchcraft family and may have unthinkingly followed the path as Joan’s own family life instilled in her the virtues of Catholicism as the true religion. While Joan reads further, Marion speaks about witches in extremely vague terms: ‘There’s something about them that we haven’t got the power to define.’ This intimates a lack of rationality hindering the investigation of any supposed alternative traditions this movement may appear to have. In Jack’s Wife, witchcraft appears to be just another ideologically-induced custom as Catholicism and family life. During Marion’s monologue, Romero cuts into Joan’s perspective by using a number of point-of-view shots as she observes various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century female miniatures and portraits which may depict Marion’s own family members. Although these images do not represent the usual stereotypical images of witches on broomsticks, they depict fashionable, upper-class ladies who have obviously benefited from belonging to an affluent social world. Such images and dialogue actually question, rather than affirm, the path Joan is tempted towards. Witchcraft is thus viewed as another socially fashionable path rather than a radical alternative designed to question programmed behavioural patterns, both past and present. When Joan later returns home with Shirley, she finds Nikki with college professor Gregg Williamson. As played by Ray Laine, this character again embodies all the self-assured male arrogance of his previous role as Chris in There’s Always Vanilla. 58

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Like Bill Hinzman’s earlier cameo appearance, the casting cannot be regarded as merely accidental or coincidental. While Joan wishes to do ‘something meaningful’, Gregg sneers at the affluent wives who engage in ‘community relations’ by painting the houses of the underprivileged as a ‘new thing’ for their group to become involved in. Although Gregg challenges Joan by using offensive language in her presence and contradicts the values she has previously lived by, his role as a provocateur is solely related to his male ego. He wishes to dominate her in a different, yet similar way, to Jack. Gregg demonstrates the power of suggestion to Joan by making the already-drunk Shirley believe she has smoked marijuana. However, his male victory is tarnished in several ways. Shirley is already susceptible to his influence both as a result of her heavy alcohol consumption and her personal vulnerability as a woman conscious of both ageing and being trapped in an unfulfilling marriage. As with Joan later in the film, Gregg chooses his victims carefully since he knows they lack the necessary self-awareness to recognise the nature of the manipulative patriarchal mind games he uses on them. The already distraught Shirley compares herself with Joan and regards herself as ‘past my prime’: ‘I’m no young chicken but Joan is a young chicken.’ Shirley does not believe she is finished but wishes to ‘do things’. Unfortunately, Shirley’s anguish at her present position in American society as an older woman no longer attractive and chained to an unhappy marriage takes the negatively exclusive forms of self-pity, jealousy at Joan, and lack of awareness of feminist alternatives open to her as an independent woman. After Gregg has achieved his goal of manipulating Shirley, she pleads with Joan to go home with her to avoid an expected confrontation with her unpleasant husband: ‘He won’t be able to jump over me, if you’re there.’ Despite her plea for help, Shirley also criticises Joan’s personal armour of opinionated superiority: ‘You should really try it sometime.’ ‘How come you have so many opinions without having done anything?’ ‘One of these days you’re going to find yourself with a jackass between your legs.’ Her remarks to Joan act as a catalyst in many ways. Shirley recognises her friend’s tendencies to conceal her true feelings behind merely uttering opinions and not daring to experience anything. However, rather than forcing Joan to re-evaluate her personal and social position within patriarchal society and move towards a more dignified and liberating way of finding real alternatives, Shirley’s criticisms have disastrous consequences. They merely lead to Joan’s temptations towards dabbling in forbidden paths and not having the courage to recognise that she bears the responsibility for the decisions she makes. Ironically, Joan will soon have a ‘jackass’ between her legs. She remains in her car as Shirley stumbles in a drunken stupor towards her husband who waits for her behind the screen door. Although Shirley falls down, her husband makes no effort to help her up but merely stands and watches his wife pick herself up from the ground. The next sequence shows Joan’s return home. It opens with a shot of the Mitchells’ house number, 1246, again affirming the ‘unlucky’ nature of the Mitchell family domicile. Inside, Joan finds the witchcraft primer significantly positioned next to a whiskey bottle. She then hears the sounds of Nikki having an orgasm with an unseen lover. Rather than making sounds announcing her return home, Joan goes to her bed knight of the living dead

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and masturbates, thus sublimating her feelings of repressed sexuality and desire to participate in the sexuality her daughter now enjoys. During this scene, Romero constantly cuts to a bull figure in Joan’s room as well as showing its shadow on her wall. Its phallic connotations are obvious. The sequence ends with a zoom-in to Nikki in the doorway condemning her mother for her voyeuristic proclivities. After Nikki leaves home, the next sequence shows Joan with her psychiatrist. He affirms one intuitive comment she makes about her daughter’s activities: ‘I’m more worried about me than I am about her.’ But Joan can only go so far. The next scene shows Jack’s angry reaction to Joan’s news about a daughter whom he earlier pompously ordered to ‘Try to stay virgin’. He blames Joan and hits her twice, affirming the male’s right to punitive violence: ‘You kick some ass, don’t you, you kick some ass.’ Instead of recognising the vicious nature of a patriarchal world which has oppressed her for so long, Joan then decides ‘to cut loose and do something’. But she moves in the wrong direction. Although she decides to wear different clothes as a means of asserting a different identity, she falls into another kind of personal trap by flirting with the world of sexual promiscuity represented by Gregg. However, their next meeting shows her subjected to another form of male control. Romero shoots the scene in Gregg’s classroom with Joan positioned in the student area and Gregg clearly ensconced in his authoritative instructor role. Despite his taunting her as ‘Mrs Robinson’, Joan does not heed this early warning signal. It is not surprising that the film’s second fantasy sequence follows this scene. Joan believes a masked intruder breaks into her home and rapes her. But before she can pull off the mask, the dream ends to show her waking up in bed next to Jack. The next day, Joan drives to Pittsburgh to purchase witch culture artefacts. During a sequence in an antique shop with Donovan’s ‘Season of the Witch’ providing musical accompaniment on the soundtrack, we see Joan purchasing various items. But Romero intercuts shots of the shop’s male owner spying on Joan either through shelves or from the top of a book he reads. This suggests that Joan’s alternative path is compromised by another form of patriarchal control which spies on her very moves. When Joan returns home, various shots show her practicing witchcraft rituals. One shot in particular shows her writing The Lord’s Prayer backwards. Although this represents one of the well-known inverse practices of Satanism, its very duality not only relates to the frequent mirror shots employed in the film but also reveals the connection of a dominant signifier of Western patriarchal ideology to its supposedly countercultural opposite. Witchcraft is still a religion very much like Catholicism headed by a male deity. It also involves established patriarchal family control as Marion’s status in the film reveals. Before departing on one of his frequent business trips, Jack makes a belated apology to Joan. But it is clearly perfunctory. The next sequence shows Joan with her coffee circle. They all discuss the disappointing aspects of marital life. This stimulates Joan into deciding to cast her first major witchcraft spell. She clearly wishes for an extra-marital fling. But Joan can not come to terms with her conscious desires for such a drastic move away from her normal routine. Joan then ‘conjures’ Gregg to come to her. However, Romero provides some relevant information to viewers who may choose to benefit from a more objective perspective to analyse critically Joan’s 60

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actions. Jack’s wife is never capable of performing such functions throughout the entire film. As she performs the necessary rituals, bells occur on the soundtrack equating Joan’s ‘deviant’ activities with her former Catholicism. Both systems rely upon belief and faith as well as self-deception rather than rational analysis. Romero then shows Joan switching on the television set and listening to a sports game in boredom, the type of action usually associated with tired husbands returning from work. This shot not only signifies that Joan treats the witchcraft ritual as a mere game to attract Gregg but also evokes the earlier party scene where a male guest did a performance of his ‘favourite television program’ as a party act. After bells occur again on the soundtrack, Joan pours herself a glass of whiskey and then decides to follow the advice of the Letter of St. James by relying on ‘works’ rather than the Pauline doctrine of faith. She phones Gregg and invites him over. Although Joan takes the initiative, she refuses to entertain any responsibility for her action and believes Gregg’s arrival results from magical spells beyond her conscious control. However, Gregg sees his opportunity for an easy conquest. He now employs some degree of strategic tact rather than the explicitly aggressive attitude he has displayed towards Joan on their previous meetings. Despite Joan’s attempt to place herself into a position of control—‘This isn’t going to be any kind of regular thing, you know’—Gregg suggests a truce for a guilt-free liaison. But although he appears to compromise, ‘You have your reasons, I have mine’, and suggests a mutual ‘thank you’ to begin their relationship on a note of equality, his final comments reveal the still-ingrained presence of his earlier male sarcasm towards her—‘Thank you, Mrs Robinson.’ Ironically, bells again sound to signify the real nature of an exchange Joan really does not understand. Whether embodied in the figure of a religious deity or ‘swinging sixties’ unattached male, the Law of the Father still dominates Joan. Joan then visits Marion and states her desire to be accepted as a witch. But, as the following dialogue reveals, Joan merely exchanges one world of conformity and selfdeception for another. Marion reassures Joan that ‘being afraid is necessary to believing’, a comment which parallels traditional criticisms of Catholicism as a religion of fear.3 Joan believes that she has ‘caused things to actually happen’. Marion replies that witchcraft ‘won’t work, more often than not, if you use it lightly’ which accurately describes Joan’s real attitude towards it at this time. For Joan, it is merely a means of experimenting with taboo concepts as well as flirting with getting an easy lay without accepting the full responsibility for her actions. Marion also comments that ‘knowing you’ve abused it can destroy you from within, from fear, if nothing else’. Her comments also intuitively evoke 1960s experimentation with drugs, sex and alternative lifestyles which many indulged in as a form of escapism without really understanding the full implications involved. The world of There’s Always Vanilla sketched out the dead-end implications of the flirtation philosophy also influencing Joan Mitchell. Marion’s statement also evokes Joan’s third nightmare involving the masked intruder. It abruptly ceases when her phone rings and a police lieutenant informs her than Nikki has been found. Clearly Joan’s deviant yearnings conjure up the world of the supernatural in very much the same way as Thérèse and Laurent’s sexual guilt in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin evokes the ghostly presence of her deceased husband. The firm knight of the living dead

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connection between the personal and supernatural realms now becomes evident in the next shot. Joan looks at her reflection in the mirror as she drinks. Her drinking now places her in the earlier position of Shirley, who wanted a new experience but wished to blame her yearnings on a suitable scapegoat, absolving her of any responsibility for her actions. When Gregg arrives, Joan announces her interest in witchcraft and begins a ritual to evoke her aptly-named familiar spirit, ‘Virago’. But she now encounters her lover’s explicit masculine contempt for her. Gregg describes her in terms similar to Shirley as ‘another screwed-up woman . . . looking for a cop out’ while really desiring ‘getting balled’. Gregg then assaults her in a manner reminiscent of Joan’s fantasy nightmare intruder. He later repeats this action after Joan completes her ritual to conjure up Virago; this leads to the final breach in their relationship. When Gregg drives away for the last time Joan conjures up more spells; this leads to another nightmare intrusion by the masked figure. He now wears an animal head resembling the cat which entered her house prior to Gregg’s last sexual assault. Joan fails to comprehend the nature of her personal entrapment. Her attempts to seek out false alternatives that harm her potential for true independence lead to escalating patterns of supernatural chaos and violence. The original nightmares emerged from her uneasy relationship with her boorish husband. But they also take on a sinister form of development as a result of her flirtation with a world of witchcraft which is as equally conformist as the deadly social world she seeks escape from. Joan has also hidden dysfunctional masochistic yearnings towards another male figure who is as equally contemptuous of her as her husband. In Jack’s Wife, the supernatural imagery has close connections to Joan’s middle-class world which she inhabits as a living dead victim of patriarchal capitalism. The nightmares are displaced versions of her dilemmas in everyday life. But rather than learning from them and moving towards some form of rational self-awareness, Joan exchanges one form of self-oppression for another. Her husband and lover are contemptuously violent males whose abusive actions reappear in Joan’s nightmare symbolised in the figure of the dark intruder. Joan’s failure to recognise the real nature of her dilemma results in cataclysmic violence and her eventual return to another form of living dead existence. Jack’s Wife ends bleakly. It appears to lead towards another nightmare which will end as inconclusively as its predecessors. Joan wakes up in bed. The ominous cat appears once more. But, outside, Jack returns home late at night. He finds the door bolted. Inside her home, Joan sees a shadowy figure of an ‘intruder’ before a window. She fires at the figure using the shotgun from the basement she was unable to use in her last nightmare. Romero cuts to Jack before the window and then Joan shooting him from inside. Jack collapses on the lawn outside. The penultimate sequence intercuts Joan’s initiation into a female coven with Jack’s dying moments. Although these two scenes are temporally distant, they both significantly complement each other in several ways. Joan gains her freedom due to an act of mistaken violence resulting from her misinterpretation of events. Instead of gaining her freedom by asserting her independence as a woman and moving away from home she actually becomes a ‘free’ woman due to events over which she has no conscious control. She accidentally kills her husband. But the killing results from forces she has unleashed from her very psyche, forces she claims no responsibility 62

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for. But she has deliberately nurtured them within her own subconscious. As with Romero’s other films, Jack’s Wife suggests that there is no real necessity for the violence; other solutions are also possible. Once irrationality gains control everything is finally lost. While Jack dies, Romero films the new rituals Joan undergoes in the initiation ceremony. Nude, silent and submissive, she passively undergoes another process over which she has no control. Joan’s submission during this ritual resembles her actions in the opening fantasy sequence. Witchcraft is clearly no progressive movement which will result in her independence. It is as constrained and controlled as the patriarchal world she intuitively sought escape from. During the ritual, Marion ties a cord round Joan’s neck and ties it to an altar ring, an action paralleling Jack’s in the opening sequence when he put a dog collar around his wife’s neck and led her to the dog pound. Also, Joan undergoes a ritual flagellation to the coven’s chanting of the deterministic line, ‘So, must it be.’ Although Joan’s chastisement is ritualistically light, it evokes those violent scenes of her beating at the hands of Jack and her rape by Gregg. When the coven chant ‘Lips that shall speak the holy secret’ during the ceremony, Romero cuts to a zoom-out from Jack’s bleeding lips as if suggesting a dark equation between the worlds of patriarchy and the supernatural. Joan clearly exchanges one form of self-oppression for another. Finally, as Jack dies, Romero includes an offscreen comment from a policeman: ‘She’s lying but she’ll get away with it.’ This interpretation is both correct and incorrect. It is incorrect insofar as Joan has not meant to kill her husband, but it is correct since Joan has lied to herself throughout the film and allowed unhealthy fantasies to dominate her consciousness. Rather than attempting to arrive at some form of rational self-awareness and break free from an unhappy marriage and sterile social situation that will allow her to find her true identity elsewhere, Joan has taken the easy way out by resorting to violence. Jack dies as a result of repressed forces in Joan’s psyche. Her act of violence represents her form of revenge for the daily humiliations she suffered at his hands. But Jack’s death was unnecessary in the first place. Although the police verdict is factually incorrect it does represent the view of an angry patriarchal world which will attempt to keep women and minorities in their place. However, both Joan and law enforcement representatives are equally wrong. They refuse to investigate further and arrive at an understanding of the real complexities of the situation. Joan now survives as a single woman, yet her victory is short-lived. She merely replaces Marion as the source for scandal in her social world. The final scene of the film reprises the party activity of the earlier sequence. Bored housewives continue to gossip about others and discuss the same petty concerns as before. These latter concerns mostly involve material affluence or ‘money in your hands’. Although Joan now becomes the new centre of attention and the recipient of fawning comments, ‘Everybody’s talking about you, great to see you back in circulation,’ she achieves no real personal victory. Although Joan describes herself as a ‘witch’ when another woman who obviously will be the next person to follow in her path (‘I’d really like to get near to her’) asks her name, Romero ironically concludes his film with two zoomins to Joan’s face as she flinches when she overhears somebody saying, ‘You remember Jack’s wife.’ She has really achieved nothing and has merely exchanged one form of knight of the living dead

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oppression for another. As in the more supernaturally-inclined worlds of Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, violence represents no satisfactory solution for real social dilemmas. Like Martin, Jack’s Wife illustrates a failed route where the worlds of everyday reality and fantasy merge resulting in cataclysmic violence which solves nothing. Like Martin, Joan becomes a victim of her fantasies. Rather than moving beyond her world of self-indulgent nightmares towards a deeper form of self-realisation, she becomes trapped in her fantasies and ends up in a situation which is really circular.

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chapter five

The Crazies

as a moderately successful Romero film, The Crazies remains relatively neglected in terms of critical examination despite its theatrical re-release as Code Name: Trixie and subsequent reissues on video. Romero described it as a rushed film lacking cohesive structure. But he also believes that ‘it came close to representing for the first time, my film-making personality’ (quoted in Gagne 1987: 56). Robin Wood also regards it as ‘an ambitious and neglected work that demands parenthetical attention here for its confirmation of Romero’s thematic concerns and the particular emphasis it gives them’.1 The Crazies does contain the problematic flaws cited by Romero such as uneven acting, frenzied direction and an over-abrupt editing style. Although the last factor appeared excessive at the time it actually anticipates the mode of fast cutting typical of MTV and television commercials. However, although these factors remove The Crazies from any comparison to a big-budget, professional Hollywood project, they are minor in nature. Stylistically and thematically, the film is a good example of the type of contemporary independent commercial film-making that offered a more critical view of American society than contemporaneous major studio films. The Crazies also functions as an allegorical critique of America’s denial of the Vietnam syndrome at a time when Hollywood refused to engage in any direct cinematic representations since The Green Berets (1968). Furthermore, the film represents Romero’s development of the EC comic book style which always fascinated him. This appears in his recurrent use of movement within stationary camera angles and editing practices resembling a comic book artist’s use of panels. His choice of style complements cinematic content. The predominantly ‘nervous’ excessive montage technique in which one scene abruptly cuts to another aptly complements the type of hysterical world depicted. Both individuals and society become equally crazy in a world heading towards destruction. The Crazies is certainly Romero’s most accomplished work prior to his association with Richard Rubinstein and the Laurel Company. It not only reveals the close association between the personal and social levels of existence characterising Romero’s films but also utilises one of the key tenets of the naturalist tradition, namely the disjuncture between the biological and social circulus which often, paradoxically,

results in a conjuncture between individual and historical chaos as illustrated by Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series of novels and his theoretical explorations in ‘The Experimental Novel’. The film also makes explicit ideas which already existed implicitly in There’s Always Vanilla and Jack’s Wife involving the individual’s undiscerning awareness of their actual relationship to social and historical forces conditioning their very identities and behavior patterns. In Romero’s earlier films, the main figures never reach any form of social awareness and pay the personal costs for their failure. The Crazies is the first film in which certain characters do obtain some degree of awareness. But it is not enough to save them from the social chaos and disintegrating fabric of their everyday world. Like There’s Always Vanilla and Jack’s Wife, The Crazies needs no supernatural symbols such as zombies to allegorise Romero’s theme of a world which is already crazy. It is also one where boundaries between sane and insane are already becoming increasingly blurred and non-existent. The old order is not only extremely corrupt and inimical to the true development of human personality but also doomed by the very destructive forces it employs to protect its own existence. The Crazies also emphasises a plot motif already present in Night of the Living Dead which most critics regarded as redundant to the latter film, namely government responsibility for the chaos affecting human society. In the earlier film, the Venus probe radiation appears as the science fiction generic rationalisation for the zombie outbreak. Although such an explanation typical of 1950s science fiction generic films appears marginal to the concerns of Night of the Living Dead, it does make connections between the world of individual violence and an unseen government bureaucracy actually responsible for negative consequences. By making this motif explicit, The Crazies represents the return of a political repressed already contained within the original structure of Night of the Living Dead. In The Crazies, the government-military-scientific establishment bears the guilt for the chemical spill of a bio-toxin, code name: Trixie, into the water supply of rural Evans City in Pennsylvania. The military arrive and attempt a botched coverup treating the citizens as little better than Vietnamese rounded up and relocated into unjustified incarceration due to the arbitrary decisions of a distant bureaucracy. The decisions resemble those made in past and present historical eras. Evans City inhabitants suddenly find themselves stripped of their supposedly secure democratic rights under the American constitution and placed in the same position as patriotic Japanese-Americans during World War Two who were rounded up and placed in relocation camps. The Crazies also parallels recent historical incidents during the Vietnam War when South Vietnamese villagers were rounded up and removed from their villages. As Mark Walker and other critics have noticed, The Crazies has distinct Vietnam allegorical associations which also emphasise many key themes implicit in Night of the Living Dead.2 Romero’s film operates as a bleakly ironic inverse allegory of American involvement in Vietnam with Americans playing the roles of occupier and occupied, soldier and civilian, exploiter and exploited. The disintegrating chaos has relevant political associations. A priest burns himself in protest against the military like the Buddhist monk protesting against South Vietnam’s Diem regime. Troops burn corpses with flame throwers. One character dies with a bullet through 66

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his head like the Viet Cong suspect in Eddie Adam’s famous 1968 photo. A helicopter chases a group of fugitives through the woods only to be shot down easily by a simple weapon similar to the Viet Cong’s frequent defeats of technologically-advanced enemies. During the round-up of civilians, a ‘crazy’ spits at a soldier’s gas mask. The action also recalls the many stories of returning soldiers from Vietnam being spat upon by anti-war activists at the airport. However, despite these interesting parallels, The Crazies is also a Romero film containing ideas very close to the director as well as having an indelible relationship to an influential historical period. Romero describes it not as a Vietnam film but rather ‘an anti-military film’ in a ‘comic book context’ (quoted in Yakir 1977: 64). The Crazies cannot be entirely divorced from this latter description. As far as its EC-influenced style goes, The Crazies anticipates the type of comic strip depiction used in conservative 1980s Vietnam films such as Missing in Action (1984) and Rambo (1985). But Romero’s use of this style is much more mature and progressive. It belongs to the tradition of EC comic strips such as Two Fisted Tales, which often contained many stories avoiding the glamorisation of war typical of Cold War Hollywood films such as The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), as well as containing several anti-militaristic narratives from different periods of world history. Two Fisted Tales also complemented the gritty realism and comic strip character depiction present in Samuel Fuller’s The Steel Helmet (1950) and Fixed Bayonets (1951). Fuller’s military characters were not only often reduced to basic stock generic types but also represented soldiers who reduce their personalities to the most appropriate functional mode in order to survive in a wartime situation. As Wood notices, the opening scene operates as a reprise of those early images in Night of the Living Dead, moving out from its ‘concentration on the family unit into a more generalised treatment of social disintegration (a progression Dawn of the Dead will complete)’ (1986: 116). Instead of daytime, the film opens at night with a long shot of a quiet farmhouse against the sky. Rapid cuts reveal a toy, a little girl getting a cup of water from the kitchen tap (an action we later realise has ominous consequences), followed by the appropriate sound of a cuckoo clock ironically announcing the film’s theme of a world gone entirely crazy or ‘cuckoo’. The sound also foreshadows the pollution already in the water supply which will drive everyone insane. As in Jack’s Wife, sounds, as well as images, occur as equal signifiers of appropriate meaning. The film is tightly directed from a meaningful screenplay in which no action or dialogue is ever superfluous. A young boy engages in a game and terrorises his younger sister in the same manner as the more adult Johnny does to Barbara in the opening images of Night of the Living Dead. But this time they are not in a graveyard but inside their supposedly safe and secure home. When the little girl finds herself unable to switch on the light she finds herself the victim of her younger brother’s manipulative activities. She pleads, ‘Stop it, Billy. I’m scared’, as he plays the monster in their basement. However, as in Night of the Living Dead, such ‘playful’ activities herald the appearance of a much more serious threat. The real monster is not late in appearing as indicated by a shadow behind the little girl which abruptly concludes Billy’s game. The next image shows their father on a rampage smashing up domestic items. knight of the living dead

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As the first ‘crazy’ in the film, he scares his children. When the little girl rushes to her parents’ bedroom she finds a sheet covering a body. A bloodstain slowly appears on the sheet, the first colour contrast in a film engaging in predominant clashes of white and red. Father suddenly appears in the doorway, but Billy flashes a torch in his face allowing his sister to escape. This feature also evokes imagery in Night of the Living Dead when light and fire temporarily stop any violent zombie; in the earlier film, the zombies have to smash Ben’s headlights before they can continue their assault. When the little girl removes the sheet she discovers her mother dead in bed. Father then starts a fire and the film’s credits roll. But they roll against the background of military drums, the first appearance of a frequent sound motif employed by Romero throughout the film. These sounds not only anticipate the arrival of the soldiers later in the film. They also suggest that the supposedly isolated microcosmic family violence has associations with the encroaching macrocosmic threat of military violence developing throughout the film. Despite their supposedly secure constitutional rights, the American citizens in The Crazies find themselves treated as ‘enemy aliens’ by a state machinery indiscriminately regarding them as threats to the status quo. The presence of individual chaos results in the institution of brutal repression and violence approved by a government machinery intent on keeping order and showing little interest in investigating (and remedying) the actual causes. Little difference exists between military activities home and abroad. As in Night of the Living Dead, a family unit violently acts out the repressed energies upon which civilisation depends for its existence. But these energies have now become uncontrollable. While a boy terrorises his younger and vulnerable sister, father has murdered mother and left her body in the family bedroom. He then goes on the rampage and destroys material items relating to the home. It is a further symbiotic enactment of repressed desires resulting from the murder of his spouse. He now removes all traces of female domestic oppression from an environment he can now claim as his own. Father then sets the dairy farm on fire after dousing the interior with kerosene. This is another intuitive recognition of the oppressive nature of an environment operating as a psychic and physical prison for all its victims. The sequence complements a later scene when a soldier ascends the stairs of a farmhouse after killing a father attempting to defend his home from military intruders. After finding the daughter playing the piano, perhaps as a means of disavowing the violence she has witnessed, the soldier finds grandmother knitting in a rocking chair. The sweet old lady then stabs him with her knitting needle in a scene whose rapidly edited montage associations evokes Karen’s stabbing of Helen in Night of the Living Dead. As the soldier falls downstairs, the twine becomes temporarily caught in his body. It ironically renders his male presence impotent as a result of the deadly use of a supposedly harmless domestic artifact relegated to grandmother. After her most productive years as wife and mother, she is now confined to a rocking chair continuing her use-value to society by knitting. Like Karen avenging her subordinate status in the Cooper family, grandmother also appropriately reacts against a patriarchal culture which sees no use for her aged status other than being confined to a rocking chair upstairs. These two sequences also echo the return of the repressed motif 68

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occurring in many family horror films in this period whereby hidden tensions erupt against their ideological confinement. The second sequence introduces the audience to Judy (Lane Carroll) and David (W. G. McMillan), Romero’s version of the ‘last romantic couple’ theme, familiar from works as diverse as They Live By Night (1948) and Pierrot le Fou (1965), who would normally be expected to survive after the final reel in most Hollywood movies. However, the formative world of EC Comics and Night of the Living Dead already suggest that such a conclusion would be inappropriate in this context, especially when the heroine’s first name evokes that of her unfortunate predecessor in the earlier film. Judy and David are unmarried, deeply in love and expecting their first child. However, although their circumstances foreshadows the later situation of Stephen and Fran in Dawn of the Dead, the relationship appears more intimate and closer in these brief introductory scenes. Like the mistaken proposal by Stephen in the later film, a marital union appears probable. But this fact has ominous overtones considering the depiction of dysfunctional couples such as the Coopers in Night of the Living Dead and the ‘crazy’ family seen in the pre-credit sequences. Marriage is not really a necessity for either. But Judy’s comment suggests the presence of an oppressive social coercion they should both reject but which occupies a dominant ideological hold over their consciousness: ‘I have a feeling that if anything happened to this baby, you won’t marry me.’ As a volunteer fireman, David moves into action after hearing the fire siren. Judy also receives an emergency call informing her about a fire at the dairy farm seen in the pre-credits sequence. He leaves to join his fellow volunteers while Judy dresses to perform her function as a nurse who tends to the two badly-burned children. The scene ominously ends with Judy performing the same function as the little girl in the opening sequence by drinking water from the kitchen tap. Then the soundtrack breaks out into an ominous rendition of the old Civil War ballad, ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’, hummed ironically by a female singer. This critical militaristic musical leitmotif applies less to David but more to the future invaders and his Army buddy Clank (Harold Wayne Jones). When we first see Clank an older fireman comments on his presence at the fire station, ‘Doesn’t it bother you . . . You must need this.’ It significantly reveals the older man’s recognition of Clank’s aimless existence. Clank has ‘no particular place to go’, and depends upon the presence of action and adventure to take his mind off his present frustrations. Clank affirms this when he replies that the fire call is just ‘Something to do’ as he gets his fireman’s uniform after hearing about the sighted presence of soldiers in the area. Clank sees Judy as she drops David off at the fire station. We also learn that she had been Clank’s former girlfriend before taking up with David. Although Clank appears to have accepted the situation, Romero also shows him expressing repressed feelings of regret, feelings which will later explicitly emerge in antagonistic ways. Clank also begins the first of a series of ‘one-upmanship’ tactics against his romantic rival: ‘You’re late. I was the first one here.’ When Judy reports to Dr. Brookmyre (Will Disney) she sees a masked, whiteclothed figure in the morgue performing an autopsy on one of the children. He brusquely orders her away in a domineering militaristic fashion, ‘Move now.’ It is knight of the living dead

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not accidental that the second death we see in the film involves a female victim since Romero’s films often involve an intuitive feminist awareness of who the most vulnerable victims of patriarchal society often are during times of conflict. The military doctor comments, ‘The girl just died. I think I can save the boy.’ But we later see that the boy survives as a ‘crazy’, the term the military uses to objectify their victims. This term parallels the similar objectifying term ‘gook’, then used in Vietnam for the Vietnamese whether they were friendly or hostile. Judy discovers Brookmyre in conference with Major Ryder (Harry Spillman) concerning toxic chemicals infiltrating the town’s water supply and the necessity for martial law and quarantine: ‘We never thought it would happen.’ Evans City’s supposedly secure civilian world, believing in democracy and freedom, soon undergoes its first shock. It discovers not only the suspension of rights supposedly guaranteed under the Constitution but also its new status as a potential enemy similar to the Vietnamese nation its government still fights in South-East Asia. Like their American predecessors such as pre-World War One Socialists, German-Americans, Nisei and Cold War-era Communists, feminists and liberals, the small community now finds itself arbitrarily designated as the enemy and stripped of their guaranteed democratic rights. At the farm house, firemen watch the blaze. The insane father is now handcuffed to the police car, impotently asserting his last vestige of patriarchal authority as he attempts to direct the firefighters. David then learns about his situation. Father is described as a man who ‘just went crazy’ before a brief moment of sanity: ‘When he realised what he did, he cried like a baby.’ Although father obviously believed he did not know best, he still hysterically continues to direct the firefighting operation like the military high command seen throughout the film. As Wood pertinently notes, The continuity suggested by the opening between normality and craziness is sustained throughout the film; indeed, one of its most fascinating aspects is the way the boundary between the two is continually blurred . . . The crazies, in other words, represent merely an extension of normality, not its opposite. The spontaneous violence of the mad appears scarcely more grotesque than the organised violence of the authorities. (1986: 116–17)

Wood also regards The Crazies as repeating the pattern of Night of the Living Dead with crazies substituting for zombies and the military for the posse. But even here divisions are not clearly drawn. Any attempted demarcation between craziness and normality becomes increasingly blurred and diffuse as the film continues. In this manner, the diffusion resembles the structure of Jack’s Wife, where fantasy and the real world become difficult to distinguish. As the film progresses, the borderlines become redundant, leaving both individuals and society suffering from the same type of chaos that eventually leads to total destruction. In this manner, The Crazies resembles the conclusions of Zola’s novels such as Nana and La Bête Humaine, in which both individuals and society are caught up in a mad frenzy leading to the Franco-Prussian War depicted in Le Débâcle, a mood also superbly depicted by the Zola-influenced first part of The New Babylon (1929), co-directed by Grigori Kosintsev and Leonid Trauberg.3 70

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Already personally subjected to martial law, Dr. Brookmyre wishes to save Judy, David and their unborn child from contamination. He gives her some serum, suggests she sneak away, avoid the imminent quarantine and ‘Stay away from people’. Brookmyre’s warning not only echoes Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Hell is other people’ conclusion from No Exit but also contains the implicit appearance of a theme Romero develops in his zombie trilogy—the necessity for forming a new society due to the moral bankruptcy of the old order. Brookmyre already knows that the military intend to reserve the serum exclusively for themselves, a fact corroborated by a newly arrived Evans City cop: ‘They’re giving the soldiers some kind of injection. They say there’s not enough for the town.’ When Brinkmyre protests about this, Major Ryder reveals that the whole area is under a national security alert due to a plane crash. The plane secretly carried an experimental vaccine (now known to contain an infectious virus) which has now contaminated the city water supply. While news media such as the radio merely report the weather, soldiers round up civilians without any word of explanation, place them in a poorly-organised relocation camp inside a high school gymnasium, confiscate their weapons (violating the enshrined constitutional ‘right to bear arms’) and jam airwaves to prevent radio hams revealing information to the outside world. In The Crazies, Romero makes explicit an axiom relevant to both the 1960s and later decades, namely that the American military-political-scientific establishment has never believed in the best interests of its citizens at any time and regards them as expendable whenever convenient. The following sequences emphasise this point. We next see supercilious politician Brubaker (played by W. L. Thunhurst, Joan Mitchell’s disdainful husband from Jack’s Wife) inhumanely discussing relevant options with his fellow bureaucrats about dropping a nuclear weapon on Evans City during a ‘training mission’. Like those ruthless politicians in Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977), they regard human life as expendable in any government cover-up operation. Brubaker intends to inform the President about his plan involving a plane containing a weapon and ‘what size weapon it should carry to burn out the infected area’. This sequence also depicts supposedly rational people discussing an insanely violent scenario in much the same terms as 1950s EC Comics engaged in black satire of its culture’s Cold War mentality. The scene also represents a darkly ironic American version of The Wahnsee Declaration. At the same time, Dr. Watts (Richard France), one of the original scientists who worked on the Trixie project, faces military relocation to Evans City despite the fact that he needs essential equipment to find the antidote. We also discover that he never managed to complete his original research on Trixie because the military removed his funding. Despite his rational objections, the soldiers intend to follow ‘orders’ even if they are as irrational and poorly planned as the martial law operations affecting Evans City. When Watts complains, ‘You’ll have a hell of a job getting me on that plane, soldier’, he gets the reply, ‘Maybe so, sir. But we’ll do it.’ Although Major Ryder speaks about his superior officer Colonel Peckham’s description of the occupying force as ‘a highly original riot-trained army’, Romero produces a quick series of ironic shots which contradict this description. They present the invaders as little better than their brutal counterparts in South Vietnam. knight of the living dead

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White-garbed, gas-masked soldiers invade motels, bedrooms and homes brusquely rounding up civilians without any word of explanation. As a middle-aged couple are led away, Romero cuts to a photo of their son in military uniform who is probably doing the same things to helpless Vietnamese in his current tour of duty. A soldier lifts up a young child performing a similar action to his counterparts in Vietnam often seen photographed in the same way as they move villagers into relocation centres, an action also reproduced at the climax of the village-burning sequence in Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986). Other scenes show one soldier engaged in looting as he breaks open a glass case to remove a fishing rod while others confiscate rifles from another home as they ironically walk over toy soldiers scattered on the floor, a symbolic depiction of American culture’s fascination with military violence and its ideological aims to indoctrinate younger male members as early as possible. Back at Dr. Brookmyre’s office, the officer assigned to quarantine the area, Col. Chris Peckham (Lloyd Haller), arrives to take charge. Although the sheriff exclaims ‘Son of a bitch!’, presumably reacting to Peckham’s Afro-American status, the audience has already been introduced to him as a professional soldier in an earlier scene and would naturally not share in the perception of an ignorant and prejudiced civilian. Peckham has the same racial identity as Ben in Night of the Living Dead. The film also represents him sympathetically as a good man performing a bad task. Nothing further is made of his racial origins. This emerges in a later scene. Peckham comments after the accidental shooting of a policeman who refuses to hand over his arms by complying to the abandonment of civil law, ‘This was exactly the kind of thing we wanted to prevent.’ But, like Ben, Peckham finds that he is in an uncontrollable situation as the following sequence shows. Immediately after these lines, Romero shows the military shooting a farmer who may either be crazy or justifiably defending himself from attackers. Peckham is no Hollywood-manufactured Sidney Poitier nor any black action genre hero like Jim Brown or Fred Williamson. Romero not only avoids ‘identity politics’ in his films, but also shows that all sectors of society can be equally trapped by the same oppressive circumstances. Although Peckham does not reproduce Ben’s aggressive activities in Night of the Living Dead, he participates in an institutional system responsible for oppression and violence. Like Ben, he appears late in the film to take control, but Peckham is no hero. Despite his selfawareness, he does not reject an institutional structure which has provided him with a career and a social status his ethnicity would not otherwise have offered him. As Peckham remarks later to Ryder, ‘I’m a combat man. I shouldn’t even be here. I just happened to be available—even expendable!’ The next sequence shows David, Clank and Judy reunited before being arrested by the military and placed in the back of a van with three other prisoners, an older man suffering from the virus and father and daughter, Artie (Richard Liberty) and Kathy (Lynn Lowry). Despite Judy’s pleas, the military confiscate the serum she has not been able to give to David. Although Judy received an injection at Dr. Brookmyre’s office, the audience has already seen her drinking contaminated water. Clank reacts against martial law as a soldier moves him inside, deliberately concluding his comment, ‘No problem’, with the significantly conclusive word, ‘yet’, uttered the moment he is safely inside and unheard by those outside. While David appears calm 72

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and accepts the situation, Clank regards the confinement as an affront to his masculinity and clearly relishes the moment when he can react with violence. The close-up of his angry face eloquently reveals his real feelings. In Brookmyre’s office, now the centre for military operations, Peckham informs Ryder about the real facts of the martial-law situation involving cases of Trixie ending up in the Evans City water supply. Typical of its predecessors both before and after, the American government has lied to its people. Peckham reveals that Trixie was not developed as a vaccine but as ‘a biological weapon’, something officially banned under the Geneva Convention but still manufactured today for possible use in any wartime situation. Although Peckham does not give further details, it is obvious that Trixie has been specially prepared for use in the Vietnam War. But now, ironically, the war has come home to America with a vengeance. Ryder replies in amazement, ‘I fell for that story, hook, line and sinker.’ Peckham brusquely comments, ‘That was the idea.’ His comment recalls the scene in Night of the Living Dead when news reporters attempt in vain to interview a diffident government-military establishment concerning their responsibility over the Venus space probe. The comment by the captives in the van concerning their situation, ‘Maybe, we’re in some kind of war’ is ironic in more than one sense. Evans City civilians now find the military at war with them when they do not obey orders. This situation reveals that citizens have always been ideologically assaulted as objects of propaganda exercises which lead to bloodier reprisals if they refuse military discipline. The later image of the military shooting an escaping civilian who attempts running across a bridge in daylight illustrates this. Romero also reprises ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ on the soundtrack as he shows soldiers gathering outside the post office and another stealing trading stamps from inside an abandoned car. The Crazies develops Romero’s consistent critique of a ruthless government establishment which is actually responsible for various types of social chaos. It is one faintly present in Night of the Living Dead and explicitly developed in Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. When Dr. Watts appears at Peckham’s headquarters, the representatives of the military and scientific establishments engage in a conflict over responsibility reminiscent of the type of debate which later appears in Day of the Dead. While Ryder blames Watts—‘It’s you think boys who created the thing in the first place’—the scientist complains about his removal from a laboratory he needed access to in order to find an antidote. Watts also mentions that a considerable difference exists between the military’s 99 per cent assurance concerning the virus’s supposed inactivity and the scientific world’s need of 100 per cent certainty. In any case, the difference is both minor and ludicrous in terms of the danger. Both establishments bear responsibility for the Evans City incident. Furthermore, their activity is now too little and too late: ‘Trixie has been in those containers for six days. Any truck driver could have taken it out of the perimeter.’ The civilian population appears. Whatever resolution the authorities adopt, questions will still remain concerning the presence of victims either dead or incurably mad: ‘How can you explain away a town which has been wiped from the map or a people into mindlessness?’ In either scenario, individuals do not count. Institutional calculations will lead to more chaos and destruction. knight of the living dead

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This factor emerges in the next sequence which shows an increasingly ailing Kathy and Clank following the escape from the military van taking them to quarantine. Kathy comments to Clank, ‘All these people dying and my father can’t feel that.’ She unconsciously compares Artie to the unseen government bureaucrat Brubaker. But ironically Kathy appeals in vain to another male who shares the same attributes, ‘I know you can.’ Like Artie and Brubaker, Clank has his own personal agenda which does not involve any consideration for the feelings of other people. When Clank goes to the whiskey cabinet, David warns him about over-indulgence in one permitted narcotic which the status quo allows to anyone not challenging its institutions: ‘Just don’t get yourself tanked, Clank.’ David also recognises the dangers of a world getting increasingly out of control, one in which local redneck hunters relish in following their aggressive activities. Parallels with the violent hunters of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead appear in scenes showing rednecks engaging in shooting contests with the military in dealing with the present emergency. Kathy misinterprets Clank’s character, a feature she shares in common with the heroine of There’s Always Vanilla. Clank merely regards her as a dangerous infection. As he tells David, ‘The chick’s got the bug’, describing her by the same demeaning term used by Chris in his debasing camera addresses to the audience in Vanilla. The world of masculinity will prove a woman’s nightmare in more ways than one. It is a danger on the micro-level of the family as well as the macro-levels of government, military and scientific institutions. The media is also complicit in manipulating its listeners as much as the advertising world is in Vanilla. During this sequence, only music occurs on the airwaves, rather than news informing listeners about the present emergency. This act symbolises the type of media denial mechanism the establishment uses in concealing its oppressive activities. As in Night of the Living Dead, David and Judy’s relationship appears as vulnerable and doomed as the earlier one between Tom and Judy. Romero also inserts a brief lyrical interlude into the narrative that involves them both, a contrast with the violent world surrounding them. But this time the sequence appears less redundant than its earlier counterpart. While David and Judy converse in a private moment, the soundtrack plays a theme associated with their relationship, the anti-war ballad ‘Tin Soldier’ whose lyrics again occur in the final scenes of the film. David and Judy are no stereotyped young lovers from 1950s horror and science fiction films like their predecessors in Night of the Living Dead. They are mature and have more life experience. As the music plays, David tells Judy about his earlier vulnerability and macho role-playing which he now rejects: ‘When I was in Nam, I thought you were Clank’s girl.’ He speaks of seeing her with Clank one day at a game when his friend was the ‘big football hero’ and reveals to her his insecure feelings at that time. David also rejects his earlier persona where he unthinkingly followed the masculine pursuits of his culture and showed no awareness of a woman’s real personality: ‘I didn’t really know you, didn’t know about you.’ David’s confession reveals a much more progressive perspective than one displayed by the arrogant Chris of There’s Always Vanilla. David further reveals his pursuit of the wrong path: ‘Action, adventure. Evans City’s only Green Beret. I couldn’t believe this was me.’ Judy consoles him, ‘We’re going to be all right.’ Although resembling Night’s earlier lyrical interlude between Tom 74

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and Judy, this scene reveals the conscious development of a male hero who learns from his past mistakes, rejects the macho values of his culture, and wishes to pursue a new direction for his life. It signifies Romero’s deepest concerns in articulating the necessary personal trajectory of breaking away from deeply ingrained ideologicallyinduced cultural habits and trying to move towards a new form of society. Romero significantly illustrates this moment in David’s consciousness by framing his head in sharp focus while a rifle muzzle appears in soft focus until he pushes it away and out of the shot. No matter how fragile this movement may be, it is much better than continuing to follow the life-denying patterns of everyday social life. The scene represents an important development in his work and one highly relevant to any accurate interpretation of The Crazies. David also realises the whole absurdity of the situation now affecting his community: ‘How can you tell who’s infected and who isn’t?’ His sensitive character and his rejection of a weapon anticipates Peter’s climactic gesture in Dawn of the Dead. David is also aware of the Army’s dangerous involvement in this situation in a line strongly evoking the Kent State Massacre when he points out that the military ‘can turn a campus protest into a shooting war’. His following sentence poignantly anticipates the tragic conclusion of his romance with Judy: ‘Some of the rednecks who live in this area could be shooting at each other and not even care.’ During the next sequence, Romero reveals both the incompetence and moral bankruptcy of the old order. Peckham orders the execution of any civilian resisting the military by refusing to heed one warning shot. As in Night of the Living Dead, bodies are to be burned. Like Vietnam, many soldiers in The Crazies have no idea as to why they are engaged in this containment operation: ‘Few of the men have ever been told of this . . . If these men knew the whole truth they’ll be breaking the perimeter themselves.’ As well as commenting on the ‘shoddy’ nature of the operation, Dr. Brookmyre utters the premise of the entire film: ‘Who can you tell who’s infected or not?’ Peckham describes himself as little better than an obedient soldier merely carrying out orders, a line the captured sergeant repeats later in the film. He is a ‘combat officer, merely available, just expendable’. But his comment is inexcusable on more than one level. First, Peckham’s argument parallels the line of Nazi war criminals which the Nuremberg trials rendered indefensible. We must also remember that during the time Romero filmed The Crazies analogies between American soldiers in Vietnam and Nazis were very common. The film also appeared three years after The Winter Soldier investigations when veterans openly confessed to committing atrocities and several years after the My Lai Massacre. Secondly, as succeeding scenes show, Peckham’s soldiers engage in activities reminiscent of war crimes. They kill a man as well as his wife who may be merely defending home and family. After incinerating the father’s body with a flame thrower, they place the mother’s body on top in a manner reproducing the type of Nazi efficiency used in disposing bodies from the gas chamber. Screams erupt on the soundtrack clearly intimating that the woman is still alive. Another scene shows body bags used for dead ‘crazies’, another common Vietnam image. Soldiers divide among themselves the personal property they have looted from dead bodies. They also carry away little children in their arms like contemporary photographs of Americans carrying South Vietnamese infants knight of the living dead

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away to ‘safety’. David’s comments concerning an Army who ‘can turn a campus protest into a war’ prove factual. Clank supports him: ‘The Army’s nobody’s friend. We know cause we’ve been in.’ The military’s activities are little different from the redneck posse in Night of the Living Dead, the only distinction being that they have official approval for their actions by an establishment who find the option of dropping a nuclear bomb on the area really ‘no problem’. The following sequences depict further institutional violence and chaos as well as suggesting that old systems of personal relationships are no longer viable. As Dr. Watts works intensely to find an antidote, he removes his gas mask, an action followed by his middle-aged laboratory assistant (Edith Bell) who receives a spontaneous marriage proposal from him. Although she understands the real significance of his offer, ‘I assume from that you mean our chances are good’, the very nature of Watts’ offer is both redundant and trivial under the present emergency. Things are never going to be the same again. Also hierarchy exists between them involving male superiority and status. When Watts later finds the antidote he never bothers to share his discovery with her. Instead he rushes away in an act of male arrogance regarding her as a lowly female technician and ignoring her pleas, ‘If you can explain it to me, sir. I can help.’ In the next sequence, Dr. Brookmyre states that he gave Judy serum to give to Dave to ensure the safety of their marriage and future parenthood. Ironically, before he reveals this, the military doctor, first seen by Judy when she first arrived at Brookmyre’s office, becomes insane. In the cases of Dr. Watts and Judy, previous forms of institutional relationships are now redundant. This is especially so when viewers reflect on these two sequences in the light of the film’s tragic climax. Artie’s inability to act as a real father to Kathy in the following sequences further undermines the legitimacy of the family unit. Something better is needed to replace a now outmoded system based upon patriarchal authority and male violence. Later that night, Clank and David decide to employ their former military training by overpowering soldiers who have taken over the Country Club. Although Clank relishes the opportunity to indulge in violence by shooting them before they have a chance to surrender, David expresses unease. When they interrogate the surviving sergeant, he admits to the presence of the virus as well as absolving himself of any responsibility for his actions: ‘How does the Army get involved in anything? I don’t know. It’s a police action. The Army only tells us what they want to. We’re only following orders.’ The term ‘police action’ ironically evokes the diplomatic language used to justify American involvement in Vietnam as well as other future conflicts. After the sergeant makes an attempt to escape, Clank shoots him in the back jeering at David’s reluctance towards using violence: ‘David, the Green Beret! Strong man! Hey man, you really messed up. I thought that David was Special Forces. I thought he was some kind of god. I never came close to it. Regular Army was all I made.’ He takes pleasure in killing ‘five of them sons of bitches’ and mocks David’s reluctance to resort to violence. These lines reveal Clank as an early example of those insecure males in Romero’s films who take pleasure in immersing themselves in a world of masculine violence which often results in their downfall, such as David and Roger in Dawn of the Dead and Captain Rhodes in Day of the Dead. Already feeling himself 76

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affected by the virus, Clank compensates for growing feelings of vulnerability by bossing David and rushing upstairs to his former lover, Judy. After David prevails on Clank to leave, Romero depicts the second private moment between them since the crisis began, one in which Judy feels that David has a ‘natural immunity’ to the virus. The Crazies supplies no factual reason for David’s immunity. Instead, it implicitly suggests that David’s conscious rejection of a crazy world of patriarchal violence may be the reason for his immunity from a virus which releases repressed tensions existing within the body politic. The next juxtaposed sequences depict the negative values contained in an old world suffering from craziness. When Clank returns downstairs, he listens to Artie revealing his feelings of patriarchal possessiveness and incestuous desires for a daughter he has never allowed to date. The moral bankruptcy of capitalist family values becomes clearly evident well before the scene where Artie rapes his own daughter. In other contexts Romero reveals the ruthless nature and corrupt values of the system Artie supports. Brubaker plans a diplomatic strategy involving the nuclear destruction of Evans City and accompanying propaganda the government will employ after the fact: ‘If we have to push the button, we’ll have to say that the weapon went off ’ (presumably by accident). Brubaker then gets the President (an unseen figure the back of whose head appears on a television monitor) to agree to his strategy. He then asks him to keep the lines of communication open for the final decision. The planned nuclear annihilation of innocent Americans is both an act of craziness and the final act of an inhumane system regarding its citizens as less than human beings and mere disposable objects. This political resonance merges with the personal in the following scene showing Artie’s incestuous assault on Kathy. Romero shows Kathy clutching a miniature portrait of a Puritan figure in a house containing portraits and pictures of family members from past historical epochs. This emphasises both the complicity of past generations as well as continuity of a family violence witnessed by the audience, a violence generated by Puritan religious repression. Clank arrives on the scene too late. Although condemning Artie for his assault, this has less to do with any sympathy he has for Kathy and more to do with another convenient situation within which he may demonstrate his male aggressiveness. After David and Clank discover Artie’s body hanging above the basement, The Crazies quickly moves towards its bleak conclusion. Unable to come to terms with his incestuous desires, the father has hung himself. Meanwhile, his daughter wanders outside to confront approaching soldiers. Romero significantly pans left from Kathy at the right frame of the screen to show a herd of sheep rushing away towards the military. Frightened of becoming contaminated, the men shoot her although Kathy only wishes to approach them out of friendship as she asks each one, ‘What’s your name?’ Her association with the sheep contains ironic religious associations. It also counterpoints an earlier scene when a Catholic priest incinerated himself with a zippo lighter outside his church when soldiers refused his constant pleas to regard the building as a sanctuary. Although the priest may have been affected by the virus, his hysterical reactions may actually result from realising that socially cherished ideological beliefs supposedly guaranteed by his government are actually worthless. knight of the living dead

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He becomes a martyr but his gesture is futile. A soldier shoots him and abruptly curtails his protest. Similarly, Kathy wanders insanely like a female good shepherd anti-war protestor attempting to persuade soldiers to make love and not war. In both cases, the actions of the priest and Kathy are futile before the violent repression of the status quo. As Wood eloquently states concerning the priest’s action: We never know whether he is a victim of the virus (acting, in his case, on a desire for martyrdom). Once such a doubt is implanted, uncertainty arises over what provokes the uncontrolled and violent behaviour of virtually everyone in the film. The hysteria of the quarantined can be attributed equally to the spread of contagion among them or to their brutal and ignominious herding together in claustrophobically close quarters by the military; the various individual characters who overstep the bounds of recognisably normal behaviour may simply be reacting to conditions of extreme stress. The crazies, in other words, represent merely an extension of normality, not its opposite. (1986: 117)4

Similarly, Kathy may also be traumatically affected by the father’s incestuous assault on her body as well as suffering from the virus. Both effects are not really separable. As Artie told Clank earlier, he has already previously attempted to control both his daughter’s mind and body. Kathy’s infected condition may really be family-related. After dismissing David and Judy, Clank decides to make a futile ‘Last Stand’. As his contemptuous comment to David reveals, ‘Big Green Hat’, he does this less to ensure his own safety but more to fuel his own ego and compensate for feelings of inadequacy he has towards David. After killing several soldiers, Clank’s final words are ‘I think I’m going to do some drinking’, before a bullet passes through his head. The comment not only refers to his masculine reliance on alcohol (prior to his discovery of Artie’s assault, he was seen swigging a whiskey bottle). It also metaphorically illustrates Romero’s ‘MacGuffin’ motif in The Crazies, namely the contaminated water supply supposedly responsible for a virus after victims have drunk from it.5 After Watts’ death, following his aborted attempt to reveal the discovery of an antidote to the authorities, the film moves towards its poignant conclusion. David attempts to conceal Judy from the soldiers. But he finds himself again forced to use the old methods of violence he wished to reject by killing a soldier and putting on his uniform to save Judy. Although he shoots another soldier to prevent Judy’s discovery, David understands that circumstances now overcome the reluctance to use violence he has exhibited throughout the film. Finally, a group of marauding youngsters shoot at David and Judy believing them to be soldiers. One bullet hits Judy. After David kills most of their number, he lets the sole survivor live since he is merely a scared youngster who may or may not be affected by the virus. This time it really does not matter. David then throws away his rifle in a gesture anticipating Peter’s surrender of his rifle in the concluding scenes of Dawn of the Dead. Although trapped by different sets of circumstances both men eventually realise that violence is no real solution. It is actually a virus, a form of contamination blurring boundaries between humans and zombies in Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, and civilian victims and oppressive authoritarian forces in The Crazies. David then poignantly hears the dying Judy name their never-to-be-born child after him. 78

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This tragically acknowledges the lost potential their relationship could have had for beginning a new society especially if the son had taken after his father. The soldiers take David into custody. The Crazies’ final scenes are as bleak and ironic as any EC Comic. Peckham receives a new assignment after supposedly successfully controlling the Evans City situation. Many have died. But there are ‘2,100 survivors—if you can call them survivors’. He is assigned to Louisville, Kentucky, to deal with another Trixie situation. His unseen commanding officer congratulates him on the phone in absurdly inaccurate and irrational terms: ‘You have one under your belt now. You have done a great job.’ But the film’s entire narrative already reveals this as another government lie. Nothing but chaos and oppressive violence has resulted. As Peckham moves away to his next assignment, soldiers bring David in. Both men exchange glances as they briefly encounter each other silently for the first and last time. David is about to receive a test for immunity. But a military doctor, who earlier assured Peckham that ‘sooner or later’ an immune human will be discovered, regards it as a waste of time. Despite his potential in providing a cure to the virus, the authorities conveniently classify David as a ‘crazy’. The film concludes with an overhead helicopter shot of Peckham removing his contaminated overalls outside in the darkness, changing into fresh clothes, and moving out of the Evans City area. His solitary figure becomes more immersed by the encroaching darkness as a military helicopter circles overhead before moving him away. Despite Romero’s critical misgivings, The Crazies is not really a failure; it does represent a significant advance in his directorial vision. Although the structure may be bleak, The Crazies presents a frightening vision still relevant today about governments lying to its citizens and even planning to exterminate them should circumstances demand it. Like Night of the Living Dead, There’s Always Vanilla and Jack’s Wife, The Crazies also depicts a world of inhabitants dominated by past outmoded values detrimental to their full potentialities as human beings. The film presents an apocalyptic vision of a society in the process of collapse from which its more conscious survivors must remove themselves physically and mentally. Without resorting to zombies or the supernatural, Romero presents a world of living dead inhabitants. Although supposedly living human beings, many characters are dominated by the dead hand of a past controlling both their conscious minds and any possibility of moving towards positive personal and social alternatives. They operate on an instinctual basis like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. But, as the latter reveals, these very ‘instincts’ are not natural and spontaneous; they result from deliberately induced dangerous mechanisms of social control. Only David escapes, but he finds his life destroyed and alternative avenues blocked. However, despite its pessimistic conclusion, The Crazies is an important film. It reveals Romero as beginning to articulate clearly his creative role as a knight of the living dead, whether they be fictional human characters, zombies or cinema audiences.

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chapter six

Martin

like other films after Night of the Living Dead, Martin had its share of technical problems, such as an inappropriate budget and a few unpolished acting performances in secondary roles. Some viewers often expect cohesive narratives and, in many cases, react against those films which deliberately engage in breaking down divisions between reality and fantasy. However, as John Woo remarked on one occasion, such products characterise the type of film the industry attempts to force upon viewers rather than stimulating them towards cinematically creative and imaginative possibilities. Martin is not unique in questioning convenient divisions between the worlds of fantasy and reality. These issues also occur in Romero’s post-Night of the Living Dead films. But Martin shows Romero extending his earlier techniques into new directions. It also reveals a more detailed interrogation of the modern world’s use and abuse of traditional Gothic fantasy as well as the destructive traps awaiting not only those who choose entrapment within anachronistic beliefs but also others who submit to the debilitating world of everyday life without considering viable alternatives. In 1985 Romero regarded Martin as ‘still my favorite film’ and his ‘most realized’ work (quoted in Gagne 1987: 80, 71). Paul Gagne regards it as the director’s most intelligent treatment of themes appearing throughout his films. Martin is certainly more accomplished structurally than Romero’s earlier works, but it is also indebted to its predecessors; the film develops ideas already present in There’s Always Vanilla, Jack’s Wife and The Crazies. Shot in 16mm on a budget of $100,000 and later blown up to 35mm for theatrical release, cinematographer Michael Gornick used reversal stock rather than negative to achieve a more debilitated form of colour saturation. The resulting style significantly clashes with images contained in Romero’s preceding and succeeding films. Director and photographer chose the correct formal means to represent Martin’s everyday world as drained of life and vitality in a manner similar to the body of a vampire’s victim in traditional vampire imagery. The world of Braddock seen in the film is an expressionistically rendered living dead environment draining its inhabitants of all vitality and rendering their lives both futile and wasted. As Gagne points out, Martin was originally intended to be a black-and-white film, but marketing considerations led to the eventual appearance of the colour version

currently in circulation. Romero and his collaborators aimed at a saturation technique draining colours of any form of vitality, thus approximating the visual style of EC Comic books which also satirically broke down traditional barriers between fantasy and reality.1 Like Chris and Lynn in There’s Always Vanilla and Joan Mitchell of Jack’s Wife, Martin is a character who exists in a world of illusions. But his malaise is much more extreme than that of his predecessors in Romero’s previous films. Martin’s chosen path of personal self-expression is highly detrimental to his development and hinders any potential he has of becoming a real human being. But his dilemma is much more life-threatening by affecting both himself and others. Despite his vulnerability, he is a psychotic murderer choosing to live entirely in his self-created world of fantasy modelled according to the Gothic tradition in film and literature. Like Romero’s earlier characters, Martin is victimised by self-indulgent, misleading fantasies involving his real personality. But he is surrounded by other harmful influences such as Cuda and the talk-show radio host who feed his already dangerous fantasies rather than help him towards the road of recovery. Martin is another sacrificial victim of negative tendencies existing in his own society which also seek to destroy him personally and physically in a manner akin to the victims embodied within his own destructive fantasies. Martin’s eventual fate echoes those affecting most of the characters in The Crazies who perish as a result of violent factors within their environment. Like Chris, Lynn and Joan Mitchell, Martin lives in his own fantasy world. His condition resembles that of Joan; as in Jack’s Wife, he exchanges one form of oppression for another. Both Joan and Martin seek escape from a hostile family environment, but they move towards the dangerous world of harmful fantasies which they choose to nurture and end up never progressing towards a more healthy form of existence. The various roads they choose actually lead nowhere. Joan is still ‘Jack’s Wife’ at the climax and Martin dies the death of a traditional vampire, a fate his earlier fantasies would eventually suggest. Although it is possible to differentiate formally between the worlds of reality and fantasy affecting various characters in Romero’s earlier films, this strategy is more challenging to the viewer in Martin. Romero has created a deliberately ambiguous situation for both his title character and audience. Unlike Jack’s Wife, no formal divisions between the worlds of fantasy and reality exist in the Gothic reproductions of Martin’s life in the Old World. Viewers are now trapped within Martin’s emotional world. It is impossible to discern whether his Gothic fantasies are merely imaginary or actually based upon Cuda’s interpretation. The visual evidence supplied in the film is ambiguous; unlike the earlier films, viewers can no longer sit back and distance themselves from the title character’s dilemma. Despite the extreme nature of Martin’s situation, Romero challenges his viewers to question whether they are also victims of oppressive social environments denied by escapist indulgence in (sometimes harmless) fantasies? Romero also stated that he went through a similar form of confusion when engaging in pre-production: ‘I wound up with so many thoughts and so many directions to go that I really got confused and I sort of became Martin . . . I didn’t know whether I wanted my character to be a vampire or just think he was a vampire’ (quoted in Gagne 1987: 71). knight of the living dead

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Since Martin actually drinks blood he is a vampire in one sense but, while agreeing that the film is open to other interpretations, Romero also comments that Martin ‘may not be a supernatural character. I don’t believe he’s eighty-four years old. I think those are things that have been drummed into him from infancy by people like his grandfather Cuda. So he’s a victim and when he tries to explain his problem, the people around him don’t listen or don’t take him seriously’ (quoted in Yakir 1977: 63). Martin thus explores another key theme in Romero’s cinema. It again examines the lack of communication between individuals who prefer to remain in their own ideologically generated fantasy worlds. They do this either by rejecting their own valid personal feelings or by denying to others the opportunity for self-development and eventual independence. The film ends tragically. Although Martin never reaches the type of self-realisation seen in David in The Crazies and Peter in Dawn of the Dead, he is on the way to moving forward before his abrupt demise. However, an institutional agent of social normality brutally curtails any possibility Martin had to develop and become a healthier person. This family agent is depicted as dangerous as the military doctor who categorises David as just another crazy in the climax of Romero’s preceding film. Martin may also be viewed as Romero’s demystification of the horror genre’s conventions. Although most audiences prefer gore, supernatural elements and zombies to indulge in a fantasy world, Martin aims to educate them into a different form of perception. Several times throughout the film Martin attempts in vain to make his cousin Cuda realise that his ideological attachment to Old World supernatural conventions is really irrational. One key scene occurs at the dinner table when Martin plays with a miniature guillotine he uses to cut celery. He attempts in vain to persuade Cuda’s granddaughter Christine (Christine Forrest) to insert her finger inside. After realising that Christine will not trust him by making the attempt, Martin puts his finger inside. The blade falls into the second hole of the artifact. Martin then explains that he has held the real blade back: ‘See, it has two blades, a real one and a trick one . . . Things only seem to be magic. There is no real magic.’ Later in the film, after escaping from Cuda’s ridiculous exorcism attempt, Martin frightens his tormentor by dressing up like a traditional vampire only to spit out his fangs and reveal the real nature of his phoney masquerade. Both demonstrations have no effect upon their intended audience; Cuda (and, by implication, most horror film audiences) prefers the imaginary narcotic and spectacular aspects of magic which rely upon unquestioning emotional effect. The display is a mere box of tricks effected by real material causes. They are much more than fantastic devices aiming to condition their audiences into unquestioning submission. Everything imaginary has a particular social cause. Martin thus attempts to stimulate its audiences into questioning the very origins of the fantastic and move them towards investigating the more relevant oppressive material causes of everyday existence which rely upon the concealing devices of superstition, fantasy and custom for their very existence. As Richard Lippe (1979) has convincingly demonstrated, Martin attempts to explore self-reflexively the very conventions of the horror genre itself. But it also aims to show that these conventions 82

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are actually redundant. They can never satisfactorily explain the very real social conditions generating the horror of everyday existence. As the credits roll, Martin (John Amplas) is seen at Indianapolis boarding the Pittsburgh-New York Amtrak and selecting his next victim (Fran Middleton). Succeeding shots show him checking his equipment of hypodermic needle and razor blade before entering her compartment. Before he does so Martin experiences a fantasy depicted in black-and-white footage of the well-groomed, night-gowned female, welcoming his advances like a lover. This imagery is obviously derived from Martin’s experiences of watching classic horror films, but the reality is much different. The film stock returns to colour and its supposed associations of everyday normality. After hearing the mundane sound of a flushing toilet, Martin instead encounters an unglamorous women whose face is covered in a beauty mask, making her resemble one of Romero’s ‘living dead’ zombies. When he attacks she struggles to defend herself, using coarse language absent from most traditional horror films. Finally, the drug overcomes her, allowing Martin the freedom of performing a perverse sexual ritual upon her helpless body. He slashes her wrists in order to drink her blood. After performing his grotesque ceremony, making him appear little better than the ‘rapist asshole’ of his victim’s description, Martin leaves the train as it arrives at Pittsburgh. This opening sequence contains little sympathy for Martin. Although clearly insecure and vulnerable like Norman Bates of Psycho (1960), Martin has committed a brutal act on a defenceless female. His actions are clearly inexcusable. But the film develops a much broader picture of its title character revealing him to be both victim as well as victimiser. Martin’s murderous psychotic actions are never isolated from their social surroundings, nor are they caused by any supposed individual ‘bad seed’ in his personal hereditary background. Like the various characters in Zola’s RougonMacquart family tree, Martin’s dilemma results from a deadly interaction of negative family and social circumstances affecting his whole being. The first appearance of Martin’s elderly cousin Cuda (Lincoln Maazel) depicts him in imagery reminiscent of a classical horror film. It is as stylistically fantastic as Martin’s own imaginations prior to his deadly attack on the helpless woman in the train. Cuda suddenly appears in the frame. He is dressed entirely in white surrounded by a cloud of grey smoke. But the audience soon discovers that this supposedly living dead apparition is actually real and the suggestively magical smoke nothing more than steam from the train. Cuda’s initial appearance thus foreshadows the later line in the film where Martin states that magic does not really exist. It is all superficial trickery. Cuda says little more to Martin other than ordering him to follow him to the next platform and catch the train to Braddock. Although different in tone, the imagery introducing the film’s two main characters is highly significant. It intimates that both characters choose to live a particular form of fantasy life within a declining society which they ignore in different ways. Martin is actually no traditional vampire despite the nature of his fantasies. Indeed, he denies the concept throughout the entire film. Martin’s dilemma is more akin to that of a modern psychologically disturbed serial killer dependent upon sexual necrophilia like his earlier twentieth-century counterparts such as Germany’s Peter Kurten. knight of the living dead

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However, Martin chooses to veil his dilemma by indulging in fantasy imagery derived from representations of traditional vampires. It is both a means of affirming his own sense of perverse individuality as well as a device chosen to distance himself from the real nature of everyday social circumstances which actually motivate his behaviour. Clearly, Martin’s denial mechanisms are deliberately chosen. Any recognition of the real causes of his dilemma might result in a tentative process of self-discovery leading to a possible cure. He would be thus free of delusions and escape from his particular form of ideological entrapment. However, he does not choose this path despite the fact that he lives in the modern world and not the artificial studio-recreated European milieu of Universal horror movies. Similarly, despite Cuda’s awareness of his declining New World environment, he chooses to maintain the Old World superstitions he should have discarded once he crossed the Atlantic. Both characters stubbornly affirm beliefs which are anachronistic, redundant and bear little relationship to either their real personalities or to the environment which surrounds them. At this stage in the film, they cling to hopelessly outmoded values and blind themselves to the operation of other more relevant circumstances which condition the very forms of their existence. Cuda holds firmly to Old World values involving vampires and family superstitions. He is as much caught up in an imaginary world of fantasy as Martin. Both Cuda and Martin indulge in the same set of Gothic values and refuse to consider any other alternatives which would contradict their chosen beliefs. Cuda believes the nineteen-year-old Martin to be nothing more than an eighty-four-year-old vampire from the Old World passed on to him by family tradition. Both characters symbiotically need each other to indulge in their fantasies. At the same time, they are both victims of harmful ideologies which corrupt their different personalities. Cuda and Martin arrive in Braddock, a declining industrial suburb outside Pittsburgh. Once a key part of a strong and productive twentieth-century manufacturing industry, it is now part of America’s rust-belt in terminal decline with a diminishing population. As Cuda and Martin walk to Cuda’s home they pass a used car lot where once functional vehicles are now being reduced to scrap metal. Deeply immersed in reactionary patriarchal values, the ageing Cuda informs Martin that he intends to save his soul and then destroy him in terms similar to a Salem witch trial judge. Martin is already at the stage arrived at by Joan Mitchell in the climactic moments of Jack’s Wife. He cannot distinguish fantasy from reality. Martin is also the victim of self-induced illusions as well as his social environment. These two factors are so closely intermingled that they are impossible to separate both for Martin and the film’s audience. Since Martin has a clear American accent he is by no means a new arrival from Europe, but he is arbitrarily defined as a monster by Cuda and his family values. Martin’s dilemma bears a close relationship to that of those schizophrenic family victims documented by R. D. Laing in works such as The Divided Self as well as the Schreber case misread by Freud according to Morton Schatzman’s Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family.2 In two of Martin’s black-and-white ‘flashbacks’ we see him surrounded by family members who clearly believe him to be a vampire. The imagery and costume appear to belong to the early twentieth century. Although Martin may 84

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have recently suffered from an abusive family situation, he could be repressing his traumatic pain by depicting the actual circumstances according to manifest imagery within the dream work by using his familiarity with old horror films to try to understand the origins of his persecution.3 This is possible. But Romero leaves the interpretation open for audiences. Martin chooses to retreat into fantasy like young Amy in Curse of the Cat People (1944). However, as in the case of Irena in The Cat People (1942), no certainty is ever possible concerning the actual causes of Martin’s condition. Simone Simon’s character in the earlier film flees the superstitious values of an Old World designating her as a dangerous monster to seek refuge in a New World supposedly guaranteeing her respect and safety. But like Martin, she finds that the American Dream is both deadly and dangerous. As in the case of Irena, it is also impossible to tell whether Martin’s fantasies represent a distorted version of the truth or whether they may be merely illusionary in nature. Most characters in the film practice some form of self-denial. They also engage in distracting diversions as a means of denying the sterile condition of their living dead existence in a decaying environment. While Martin and Cuda bask in their own futile forms of fantasy, the latter’s granddaughter Christine indulges in an apathetic existence. Like her boyfriend Arthur (Tom Savini) who wishes to make a decent living as a mechanic outside a declining industrial area, she dreams of escape and eventually uses him as her meal ticket to move elsewhere. She also spends most of her time at home, never seems to have an occupation, bickers constantly with Arthur either in her bedroom or on the phone, and denies the reality of her situation by engaging in casual sex like Martin’s bored businessman’s wife victim (Sarah Venable) or Mrs Santini (Elyane Nadeau). All the film’s characters suffer both from frustrated personal potentials and a stagnating social system inhibiting their real needs and aspirations; they thus resemble twentieth-century versions of Zola’s fictional characters. As Cuda later tells Arthur when he criticises him for wanting to move away to make a better living as a car mechanic as well as attempting to dissuade him from marrying Christine, ‘This is a town for old people.’ Cuda affirms a world of traditional and stagnant values in which no alternatives can ever occur. The very environment of Braddock represents as much of a deadly trap for its victims in a manner similar to the defeated realm of Plassans, under occupation by both Second Empire monarchists and Abbé Faujas in Zola’s novel La Conquête de Plassans (1874). No equivalent to the Faujas character exists in Martin. However, the similar tendencies of both Cuda and Martin to engage in dangerous fantasies bearing no relationship to their real conditions of existence parallels the psychopathological patterns of behaviour Faujas evokes within the family members of the Plassans household he inhabits. The Mouret family react in different ways to the dominance of a religiously powerful force overpowering their various personalities and forcing them to submit to conditions which are really irrational in origin. However, although Cuda disavows the obvious signs of urban stagnation affecting Braddock, he is not totally immersed in a world of supernatural prejudice. When he informs his middle-aged female customers about Martin’s employment at his store he quickly rebuts insinuations concerning two young people living in the same house: ‘It looks the way you want it to look, Mrs Brennan. Martin knows how to knight of the living dead

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behave.’ Unfortunately, Cuda’s one instance of accurate insight remains an isolated one in the film. He clearly wishes to manipulate Christine and Arthur, as well as Martin, into accepting the values of the socially dead environment he has lived in for so long. But his antiquated ideological values of family prestige and supernatural possession are no longer relevant to the declining world of Braddock, as the religious service performed in the film reveals. After waking Martin up on a Sunday morning to attend church, Romero reveals the interior of the building as being in drastic need of repair. People attend the service out of a sense of bored obligation while the young neighbourhood priest Father Howard (played by Romero) clearly appears bemused by performing a ritual he obviously regards as being of little relevance to the surrounding world. When Cuda invites Father Howard home for dinner, the young man tells him that he was transferred to Braddock after his predecessor fell ill with cancer. Worldlywise, at home with good food and wine, Father Howard dismisses Cuda’s veiled hope that he could perform an exorcism on Martin by cynically referring to The Exorcist’s false influence on contemporary consciousness. Father Howard also disparagingly refers to the poor state of communion wine in the parish. But Cuda does not learn from his parish priest’s dismissal of Old World values. He later persuades an elderly priest, Father Zulemas (J. Clifford Forrest Jr.), to perform an exorcism on Martin. While Martin crouches before the absurd ritual performed by two elderly men, his mind appears to ‘flash back’ to an earlier exorcism performed on him by his European relatives. But Martin may also be recreating the experience in terms of old Hollywood movies he has viewed and used as his cultural models. Like Martin’s previous memories of his past, the footage is black-and-white. In both instances, Martin runs away from an oppressive Old World ritual more concerned with affirming anachronistic values rather than attempting to understand and cure a traumatised victim. However, Martin soon decides to take his revenge on Cuda. The following sequence shows Martin dressed like a typical vampire, stalking and terrorising Cuda in a playground. This activity lasts until he spits out his fangs in an attempt to show his elderly oppressor that it is all a silly game. It is far from coincidental that the incident occurs in a playground, aptly illustrating the nature of Cuda’s childish beliefs. Both Christine and Mrs Santini attempt to reach out to Martin in different ways but their actions eventually prove to be misguided. Although Martin does reach some form of self-realisation concerning the pathological nature of his activities, it is not enough to save him at the end. Christine attempts to give Martin the little sympathy she can afford, but she is totally caught up in her dead-end relationship with Arthur and her anger at Cuda’s patriarchal attitudes. Cuda has attempted to destroy her relationship with Arthur by hinting at her supposed hereditary characteristics. He also wants to control Christine in the same way as Martin. Although Cuda’s physically abusive actions finally result in her leaving home, she promises to keep in touch with Martin, yet Martin recognises correctly that she won’t remember him after she leaves. Christine also suggests the importance of communication and influences Martin into getting a phone. But Martin’s only telephone conversation with the outside world is with an unseen cynical talk-show host (Michael Gornick). This off-camera voice feigns sympathy and understanding to keep Martin on the line as an 86

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attraction for his voyeuristic listeners to boost audience ratings. The talk-show host feeds off Martin’s dilemma like a twentieth-century vampire and tosses juicy verbal titbits to his audience like Bram Stoker’s Count in the original novel, who provides his ladies of the night with a new-born baby. He condescendingly refers to Martin as ‘the Count’ and never attempts to talk him out of his psychological dilemma into some constructive path of healthy reality. As in Night of the Living Dead, There’s Always Vanilla, Jack’s Wife and The Crazies, the media is part of an institutional system designed to deceive, demean, and exploit its victims. They will never find any real form of close communication within the media as long as the present form of society remains in existence. The talk-show represents a debased form of communication which deliberately sets out to humiliate its compliant victims. Romero remarkably recognises this fact well before the emergence of the more repugnant television versions represented by Oprah Winfrey, Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer and its derivative British versions such as Kilroy and Vanessa when so-called ‘quality television’ proved itself as equally corrupt as its American counterpart. Braddock’s world is also one of declining cultural values as signified by the Mozart and nineteenth-century jingles heard on an ice-cream van. Again Romero anticipates the tendency of the system to appropriate and debase any creatively original achievement for the purposes of the market economy whether it be ice-cream jingle, ‘easy listening’ or trivial Shakespeare representations such as Shakespeare in Love (1998). All the characters in Martin attempt to reach out to others and achieve some form of communication. But like various characters in Night of the Living Dead, There’s Always Vanilla, Jack’s Wife and The Crazies, their efforts are often contaminated by personal prejudices, mistaken decisions and wrong actions resulting from their entrapment within negative social situations they can never really negotiate their way out of. Furthermore, the appearance of repugnant shows such as The Weakest Link, Big Brother, the rise of demeaning television ‘reality shows’ and the British version of The Apprentice reveal further signs of deterioration, to say nothing of the dubious status of Jonathan Ross. Bored housewife Mrs Santini becomes attracted to Martin. But her seduction is little better than an indulgent act of self-gratification. When she drives Martin home she tells him that his silence reminds her of an old cat she used to have that would just stare and listen. Frustrated by a sterile existence as a lonely housewife whose husband is often absent on business trips, she resembles Joan Mitchell of Jack’s Wife in several ways. Like Joan, she drifts into an affair as a means to avoid confronting the drab reality of her everyday life as well as taking effective action to rise above her frustrating circumstances. After initiating Martin into his first sexual experience, she breaks out in tears. Mrs Santini possibly realises she has manipulated him for her own gratification and has cheated him out of the intimacy and communication he really needs. But this brief act of self-realisation remains undeveloped. She eventually commits suicide, an act indirectly leading to Martin’s destruction at the climax. Despite the dead-end nature of the relationship with Mrs Santini, one paralleling the type of contact between Christine and Arthur where no real communication actually takes place, Martin does undergo a tentative form of development. It could have resulted in a positive form of self-awareness leading to his eventual liberation knight of the living dead

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from his unhealthy pathological practices. On his next assault on a defenseless woman, Martin again recreates the experience in Gothic horror imagery by fantasising the image of a young attractive female beckoning him and calling his name. As in his first assault, he again uses modern technology such as syringes to further his aims. Like Mrs Santini, his next victim is a bored housewife whose husband (played by Martin’s producer Richard P. Rubinstein) is away on a business trip. However, after subduing the woman and her lover Lewis (Al Levitsky), Martin appears to let her live rather than slashing her wrists. His Gothic fantasy suggests this resolution since it shows his young female victim alive, rather than drained of blood, at its climax. However, Martin drags the drugged Lewis outside and this time uses his body to drink blood from rather than his usual supply of female victims. The act not only suggests deep homosexual feelings repressed in Martin’s unconsciousness, which his family environment would regard as taboo as his supposed vampire origins, but also a possible deep disgust at his previous activities of preying on vulnerable females. Martin uses and abuses Lewis as a surrogate sacrificial victim in as much the same way Cuda does at the film’s climax. Like Tony Buba’s perceptive documentaries The Braddock Chronicles (1972–85) and Lightning Over Braddock (1988), Martin depicts a world whose grim reality needs no recourse to fantastic explanations for understanding its real significance. The Braddock environment parallels those life-denying industrial worlds threatening the futures of Zola’s characters in L’Assommoir and Germinal who are also affected by some form of hereditary mechanisms. Romero’s Martin is a character who suffers from both these factors which will eventually cause his destruction. He is also a horror film character parallel to Jacques Lantier of La Bête Humaine, a character whose involvement in murderous circumstances eventually evokes the manifestation of destructive tendencies within his own personality, tendencies Zola ascribes to the character’s degenerative family background. Virtually all Martin’s characters parallel the attitudes of the real-life character Sal who appears in Sweet Sal (1979). In Buba’s acclaimed first feature-length documentary, Buba plays himself as a director trying to make a film with crazy Braddock street hustler Sal, who considers himself responsible for Buba’s success. As a long-time associate of George Romero, it is surely no accident that Buba has appropriated certain ideas from his mentor, particularly Martin which saw his first collaboration on Romero’s films. Sal constantly deceives himself about his own personality and actual significance in his hometown. Sal’s denials represent his way of dealing with living in a declining environment which offers no personal hope or salvation for him. In other words, he chooses to retreat into his own form of personal fantasy like Joan Mitchell and Martin rather than deal with the bleak circumstances of his everyday reality. One key scene in Sweet Sal shows Sal visiting his father’s grave, talking to him as if alive, and kissing the small marker in a manner evocative of the opening association of Night of the Living Dead. Tony Buba and his brother Pasquale (another future Romero collaborator) play drug dealers in one of Martin’s brief, but telling scenes: Martin accidentally stumbles on them evoking the anger of the third dealer (Clayton McKinnon) before the police arrive and begin a shoot-out.

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This sequence complements another when Martin attacks two winos (played by Romero’s technical assistants Regis J. Survinski and Tony Panatello) and drinks the blood of one of them. Martin’s action here shows him moving away from attacking defenceless women. But he is still trapped by psychopathological beliefs that he is a vampire. Furthermore, drugs and alcohol are other forms of self-indulgent escapism open to Braddock’s inhabitants as is sex for bored housewives like Mrs Santini and superstition for Cuda. The film also shows adolescent punks outside a shopping mall having nothing better to do than sexually harass young housewives. Ironically, these two sequences never show the older women who appear to prefer Cuda’s oldfashioned store, one of whom verbally assaults Martin. By this time, Martin has grown weary of immediate retaliation and allows his last victim to live. Prior to discovering Mrs Santini’s body, he marches behind an amateur band playing a military theme. This represents another of his belated attempts at communion with others which the film will abruptly nip in the bud. It is better than indulging in deadly fantasies and experiencing exploitation at the hands of cynical talk-show hosts. Martin is at least out in the open daylight and becoming part of a living crowd. Romero begins the film’s final sequence ironically. It opens with individual shots of church spires which commenced the earlier sequence of Martin going to church. But this time, Martin will experience a deadly form of patriarchal salvation. During Martin’s arrival at Cuda’s house, he received the warning that any attack on a Braddock inhabitant would not be tolerated. Ironically, although not responsible for Mrs Santini’s suicide, Cuda blames him and plunges a stake through his heart in typical vampire-hunter manner. Martin’s death has poignant overtones since he appeared to be on the verge of breaking out of his dilemma. Like David in The Crazies, any future potential Martin has for development is brutally curtailed. The film concludes with images of Cuda completing his burial of Martin while the culturally debased sounds of the ice-cream jingle and talk-show host occur on the soundtrack. Although Martin can never respond to the sound of another tormentor, the host concludes by telling his audience that a listener believes he knows the Count. Martin finally comes to a physical as well as a spiritual dead end, the sacrificial victim of an intellectually bankrupt and materially debased culture which is more of a threat to its victims than Martin’s pathetic recreations of Universal horror films can ever be. As Richard Lippe aptly notices, near the end of the film Martin witnesses chickens being slaughtered and prepared for human consumption, a sequence filmed in detailed close-up shots—‘a brief documentary episode in a fictional narrative film that serves to metaphorically reflect the real horror the film explores’.4 The episode also reveals the naturalist associations existing in Romero’s work which always suggestively emphasise grim conditions within an extremely sick society. These often give rise either to violence or self-denying escapism in one form or another, whether drink, drugs, sex, talk-show humiliation or Gothic fantasies. As in all Romero’s works, the divisions between humans and monsters become increasingly blurred until both conditions become identical. His next film reveals this explicitly and merges the supposedly distinct worlds of literary naturalism, EC comics and the horror genre in a highly original manner.

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chapter seven

Dawn of the Dead

laurel entertainment’s highly successful Dawn of the Dead not only saw Romero’s return to the zombie motifs of his first feature film but also resulted in a synthesis of many ideas present in There’s Always Vanilla, Jack’s Wife, The Crazies and Martin. The primary colours and camera angles featured in scenes shot at the Monroeville mall represent a more assured and deliberate utilisation of the visual world of EC Comics both in style and content. Dawn of the Dead is a film which links together the special effects endemic to the horror genre as well as significant social meanings Romero always brings into his work. But the film also unconsciously refers to naturalist elements associated with Zola and other writers which have key associations with the horror genre. Since the film is popularly regarded as a ‘gross-out’ horror film relying on the EC Comic tradition, it is necessary at this point to note its intrinsic relationship to the naturalist tradition. Although not operating within the black-and-white ‘realism’ of Night of the Living Dead and the social worlds contained in There’s Always Vanilla, Jack’s Wife and Martin, Dawn of the Dead belongs to this cultural world despite its supernatural zombie context. As Dieter Meindl points out, certain strains of American fiction illustrate significant conflicts between ideology and the real conditions of existence governing American life which may receive a metaphorical form of expression in grotesque representations.1 One recent example of this phenomenon is Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, a work whose detailed description of the serial killer exploits of Patrick Bateman is less than celebratory. Cataloguing the material artifacts of Bateman’s world in a manner akin to the factual detail of classical naturalism, along with recognising the contrasts between the increasingly divided world of rich and poor, American Psycho develops into an apocalyptic vision. The savage exploits of Bateman appear a natural consequence of a world in which people have been reduced to the status of dehumanised automatons functioning according to levels of basic instincts determined by their class status. Like its naturalist predecessors, American Psycho’s episodes of grotesque violence appear natural results of the inhumane society its inhabitants accept and profit from both emotionally and materially.2 Bateman’s violent activities are the logical culmination of those spiritual dead-ends catalogued

in previous Ellis novels such as Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction, whose individual characters are lifeless products of consumer capitalism and little better than cannibalistic zombies with their ‘use and abuse’ attitudes. In Less Than Zero, the violence which appears in minor discordant incidents within the affluent world of its rich characters breaks out with a vengeance in full unrepressed force in American Psycho. It is the natural grotesque signifier of an inhumane materialist civilisation typified by its narcissistic title character. During a later scene in the novel Bateman discovers a rat which has emerged from a toilet bowl, an appropriate metaphorical signifier of his own personality and his grotesque world. This image also parallels the significance of the zombie motif in Romero’s own trilogy.3 Such features are not new but have their origins in classical forms of representation. Meindl points out that the grotesque can express the non-rational dimensions of human life and quotes Thomas Mann’s definition of grotesqueness as a ‘genuine anti-bourgeois style’.4 This is particularly so whenever authors depict the mechanical aspect of bourgeois existence as being little better than a death-in-life or ‘zombie’ form of existence. Meindl’s description of Herman Melville’s Bartleby succinctly analyses the author’s manner of describing his title character in such terms: ‘In preferring stasis, passivity, nonaction, Bartleby apparently prefers a deathlike state of being to the movement toward death, that is man’s life’ (Meindle 1996: 85).5 Bartleby is little better than a corpse or mort vivant. His facial features parallel a corpse’s pallor and he operates according to a passive and instinctual level of existence foreshadowing Romero’s zombies throughout the trilogy. Both Bartleby and the zombies cannot exercise any form of free will. Furthermore, Meindl also sees an important relationship between grotesque imagery and violent social satire which again parallels both the EC Comic tradition and many examples of Romero’s work. This also has an intrinsic association with certain literary forms such as realism which often superficially appear to have little involvement with excessive depictions. However, as Zola’s explorations of naturalism show, boundaries often creatively dissolve in the practical worlds of literary and cinematic genres.6 During Dawn of the Dead ’s initial release, many commentators noted the lighthearted nature of Romero’s treatment, which contrasted with his earlier depiction in Night of the Living Dead. Although many drew comparisons to the EC Comic tradition of irony and satire, the comedic elements in the film also have significant connections to American literary naturalism. All the characters throughout the zombie trilogy face overwhelming odds which they may not personally or physically overcome. Whether threatened by the growing number of zombies outside or trapped by flaws within their own personality resulting from social conditioning, these figures confront adverse situations which are often deterministic in nature. These deterministic situations parallel those adverse social and psychological factors facing characters in American and European naturalism whether they be the unfortunate members of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart family or Frank Norris’ McTeague. However, as noted in the introductory chapter, determinism does not operate as a rigidly defining principle in many novels despite the assertions of hostile critics of this literary movement. As Meindl notes, ‘Accepting determinism as the principle defining naturalism does not prevent one from finding in naturalist novels a knight of the living dead

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determinism modified, in varying degrees, by humanistic values and concessions to individual worth’ (1996: 109). Such concessions are eventually made to characters such as Fran and Peter in Dawn of the Dead and Sarah and her multi-ethnic companions in Day of the Dead. Meindl also comments that the frequent compatibility of naturalism and the grotesque in literature relates to the presence of extraordinary and excessive features in human nature as well as the social environment influencing them. Sometimes literary treatments indulge in ironic representations as in Stephen Crane’s ‘The Blue Hotel’ with its parallels between men and lice. For Meindl, ‘Such imagery, which proceeds by grotesque diminution and distortion, contributes to establishing an ironic view of man inhabiting a disdainful universe’ (110). This also foreshadows the ironic view of human nature taken in Romero’s zombie trilogy where formerly live beings are now reduced to grotesque versions of their former selves. In many cases, grotesque irony becomes a central device in the narrative as Crane’s Maggie illustrates. Frank Norris’ McTeague and many of Jack London’s writings also reveal an ironic use of animal imagery, foreshadowing the instinctual carnivore-like activities of Romero’s zombies. Finally, American literature often complements the EC comic book tradition with similar representations of zombies or living dead figures. The title character of William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Miss Emily’ is one such example. Her possessive attitude and special form of conspicuous consumption eventually make her resemble a bloated corpse.7 She exists in a macabre living dead relationship which also echoes many features contained within Romero’s films. The possessive attitudes characterising characters such as McTeague’s Trina and Faulkner’s Miss Emily anticipate Romero’s zombies. Dawn of the Dead contains frequent parallels between the nameless army of the living dead and the quartet of human consumers inside the Monroeville mall. The mall itself represents a twentieth-century development of Zola’s ‘Au Bonheur des Dames’ in the novel of the same name, a nineteenth-century version of The Society of the Spectacle representing the latest development of conspicuous consumption in the Paris of the Second Empire. As Rachel Bowlby notes, Octave Mouret’s establishment represents the transfiguration of capitalist merchandise into spectacular effects designed to captivate the female consumer (1985: 6). Caught within the frenzy of a deliberately designed mass form of commodification and exploitation, Parisian ladies become objectified and lose their vitality, becoming little better than dead bodies within a mechanical parody of equality, a situation resembling both contemporary mall shoppers and Dawn of the Dead’s actual zombies (76).8 Bowlby regards the female situation depicted in the novel as being nothing less than a form of capitalist cannibalism of individuals trapped within a Darwinist world where big beasts eat their victims. Far from being a dream palace, the ‘ladies paradise’ of the novel is actually a savage jungle for the unwary.9 Zola’s early vision of conspicuous consumption thus anticipates many of the features which characterises Romero’s concept in the second part of his trilogy. But there is one major difference. Males, as well as females, are now trapped within the mechanical dance of death engendered by conspicuous capitalist consumption. Romero’s heroine Fran soon perceives the empty nature of possessiveness when she later comments, ‘What have we done 92

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to ourselves?’ Human beings may survive, die or join a growing army of zombies depending upon the degree of self-realisation contained within their very personalities and how they mobilise to prevent their capitulation to what appears to be a life-threatening deterministic situation. Like Night of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead contrasts individuals with the mindless crowd surrounding them, whether living or dead. In this sense, the film replicates Zola’s perennial life/death opposition which runs throughout his Rougon-Macquart series novels from La Fortune des Rougon onwards. The opening chapter sees Miette and Silvère, Zola’s version of Tom and Judy from Night of the Living Dead, meeting secretly in an abandoned cemetary. Bowlby points out that the gypsies who live near the former cemetery are ‘privileged representatives of unrepressed instinctual life’ which the upper classes of Plassans deny in their schemes to participate in the destruction of the Republic and the elevation of Louis Napoleon to the monarchy. Also, the burial of the dead imagery dominating the opening pages of the novel represents a harmful return of the repressed anticipating the death-in-life existence whose possessive dominance will adversely affect the younger generation.10 It is not accidental that both Zola and Romero see the dangerous roots of possessiveness situated within the family. When Fran reacts against the sterile existence she, Stephen and Peter endure after gaining control over their mall kingdom and its possessions, Romero makes the following ironic comment in the script: ‘It is a domestic scene. The group has become a family, with all the disadvantages of comfortable living, including the inability to communicate with one another’ (quoted in Gagne 1987: 89).11 Like Bowlby, Schor also notes the carnivore imagery which Zola often uses to describe crowds in his fiction. Romero’s cannibalistic zombies have important literary precedents. They also embody a particular disease affecting the body politic in a manner similar to Zola’s definition of the social circulus affecting the human constitution: ‘The social circulus is identical with the vital circulus; in society, just as in the human body, there exists a form of solidarity which connects the different members, the different organs, so that if one organ decays, many others are affected, and a very complex disease develops’ (quoted from ‘The Experimental Novel’ by Schor 1978: 127). Romero’s second instalment of his zombie trilogy presents a similar situation to his audience. As in the last of the trilogy, Dawn of the Dead opens with a shot of an unidentified female sleeping against a control booth wall in a Philadelphia television studio. She twitches as if experiencing a nightmare and then suddenly awakens to find herself back in the world of reality she may have sought escape from in dreams. But, as Sarah will discover in Day of the Dead, nightmare and reality are already intermingled. However, Romero’s heroine Fran (Gaylen Ross) exists in an earlier stage of development from her successor in Day of the Dead but in an advanced stage of existence from her predecessor, Barbara in Night of the Living Dead. Unlike Day of the Dead, the audience does not experience the nightmare she awakes from and can easily distinguish reality from fantasy. Like Joan Mitchell, Fran becomes the key focus for audience identification. But unlike her predecessor, Fran will experience a more liberating sense of personal development and eventual freedom no matter how insecure its future may be. knight of the living dead

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Fran awakens. A supportive female colleague tells her, ‘I don’t know how long we can stay on the air.’ Fran then sees an angry television director trying to instill order from his control desk into the increasing chaos of the studio. As in Night, the studio attempts to broadcast a list of rescue stations for humans to escape the zombie assault. But such sanctuaries are now becoming increasingly dangerous and ineffective. Seated next to an assistant director, the studio director (played, significantly, by Christine Forrest and George Romero, respectively) angrily attempts to create some order into an increasingly uncontrollable situation: ‘Watch camera two! Who’s on camera two, a blind man?’ As in Night of the Living Dead, Romero’s Hitchcock-type cameo is by no means accidental since his role represents the director as enunciator or visual signifier for the text’s key meaning. Romero’s director attempts in vain to articulate and put into practice principles of morality and rationality which could save his various cinematic characters facing dangerous situations. His is a lone voice amidst a growling clamour of human irrationality which will destroy any chances of survival. The situation of the besieged humans in Night of the Living Dead occurs once more, but the director’s attempt at mobilising the dysfunctional forces in the studio is futile as he later admits to his assistant. Disturbed voices occur outside the frame. Technicians either leave or disrupt the transmission. A talk-show host performs a verbal inquisition on a guest scientist (portrayed by Richard France replaying his role as the scientist who could have saved the infected Evans City community in The Crazies). France’s character, Dr. Milton Rausch, appears briefly in the opening sequence as another television commentator questions him. While the host later operates in the same condescending and demeaning manner as his predecessors in There’s Always Vanilla and Martin, Dr. Rausch attempts in vain to explain objectively the reasons for the zombie outbreak. But, like Romero’s director, he finds his attempts to bring some form of order and rationality to his disruptive community absolutely futile. Dissension erupts over the list of rescue stations the studio manager insists on filling the screen with even though he (and everyone else in the studio) knows that half are not functioning. Despite the life-threatening situation outside, selfish desires for ratings ironically remain as the studio’s only concern: ‘Without those stations on the screen every minute people won’t watch us. They’ll tune out.’ As in Night of the Living Dead and There’s Always Vanilla, Romero again provides another devastating critique of the television apparatus. He depicts it as dishonest and emotionally unstable. As Fran herself mutters, ‘We’re blowing it ourselves.’ The city of so-called ‘brotherly love’ is now the centre of lies and male dissension suggesting the final bankruptcy of patriarchy and the need for a different form of social organisation. Fran’s boyfriend Steve (David Emge) then arrives. He plans to steal the studio helicopter he flies for traffic reports to escape the chaos. Fran initially objects to Steve’s selfish reasons—‘Somebody has to survive.’ She still idealistically believes in her role of public responsibility in a broadcasting industry that was never beholden to such ideas in the past nor is capable of fulfilling them in the present. However, her objections collapse when a colleague supports Steve’s scheme: ‘Go ahead. We’ll be off the air by midnight anyway. Emergency networks are taking over. Our responsibility is finished I’m afraid.’ He voices definitive words which both counter Fran’s public 94

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sense of communal duty as well as affirming one of the key tenets of Romero’s central concepts in the entire trilogy, namely the moral bankruptcy of the old order and its inability to exercise any real form of responsibility in the face of danger. This feature characterises the entire message of The Crazies. It now remains to be seen whether any survivors can live up to the bankrupt ideals denied by the old order and form a new society uncontaminated by past patterns of behaviour. Before Fran and Steve leave the studio, they hear of the proclamation of a totalitarian martial law ordinance very similar to the one used in The Crazies. It states that ‘citizens may no longer occupy private residences no matter how safely protected or well stocked. Citizens will be moved into central areas of the city.’ This order not only parallels the disastrous type of relocation policies used both in South Vietnam and The Crazies but also reveals that citizens may no longer rely on their government to provide safety and security for them in any major emergency. When circumstances necessitate, they become as much the enemy as the zombies. The next sequence also shows which section of the population is really affected. A SWAT team moves in to expel Puerto Ricans, Hispanics and Afro-Americans from a low-income apartment complex. Despite this action, arising from the inhabitant’s reluctance to surrender dead bodies of family members for destruction, due to now redundant social values concerning people believing that ‘there’s still respect in dying’, the real motivation is much more insidious. Romero represents it as a politically motivated act of class and racial harassment, since any enforcement against affluent whites remains questionable. Before the attack, a bigoted macho trooper named Wooley (Jim Baffico) gleefully relishes the approaching battle: ‘I’ll blow their asses off . . . their little low-life Puerto Rican and nigger asses right off. How the hell come we shift those low-lifes in those big ass fancy hotels anyway? Shit man! This’s better than I got.’ Wooley’s attitudes represent a pathological development of Clank’s aggressive masculinity of The Crazies and anticipates its final psychotic embodiment in the figures of Rickles and Captain Rhodes in Day of the Dead. Wooley then engages in a psychotic killing spree above and beyond the call of duty, venting his murderous racism on any non-white zombie or human until an appalled black trooper (later identified as Peter) kills him to end his indiscrimate slaughter. The SWAT activities in rounding up live humans resembles the actions performed by their counterparts in The Crazies. Roger also knows what is really going on. He advises the rebel leader Martinez not to go out before his fellow troopers fire on him. During these events, the zombies break out of their confines to attack the living. A living wife rushes to embrace her zombie husband only to have him ravenously consume chunks of her body. The SWAT team engage in the immediate termination of all zombies who resemble once-living family members. Now, the old family ties are completely worthless and new forms of social existence need consideration. Not everyone can envisage the necessity of breaking with old patterns of behaviour. A young SWAT member, who witnessed the conspicuous consumption between living dead husband and live wife in their macabre family reunion, decides he has seen enough and commits suicide. His action anticipates one of the choices Peter (Ken Foree) faces at the film’s climax. A black zombie with partially devoured limbs slowly crawls towards him and Peter appears masochistically inclined to accept his fate until knight of the living dead

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Roger (Scott Reininger) saves him. As a member of the besieged community, Peter understands the reasons they left their dead in the basement instead of incinerating them according to government orders. Unlike the attitude exhibited by Johnny in Night of the Living Dead, respect for the dying still has a great priority in their community, but it is now redundant. Like other characters in Romero’s films, Peter struggles between belief in old values and the necessity for moving forward. At this stage of the film, he becomes dangerously contaminated by a masochistic death wish which Roger rescues him from. But he will have to confront it in the film’s climax when no one is around to help him. Like Joan Mitchell, David and Martin, Peter will face personal dilemmas in confronting a dangerous personal and social environment. There is no guarantee that he will survive. However, the words of a one-legged Puerto Rican priest, who is returning from giving the zombies their last rites, move him. Although the priest represents another redundant world linked with the old society, he also suggests the necessity of change due to the different material circumstances: ‘You are stronger than us . . . but soon I think . . . they be stronger than you. When the dead walk, señors . . . we must stop killing . . . or we lose the war.’ The priest articulates the need for a rational strategy to deal with a situation becoming increasingly out of control. He also urges the cessation of violence, an attitude held by David in The Crazies, otherwise the war will be lost to the zombie forces who are already spreading like Trixie in the earlier film. It is tempting to see this figure as embodying another incarnation of the director as enunciator, especially in relation to Romero’s Catholic upbringing. Like Peter, Roger is also affected by what he has seen and retches in disgust at the carnage. After saving Peter from his masochistic desires, he establishes contact with him and reveals his escape plan to ‘run’ (or, really, desert) with Steve and Fran in the helicopter and invites him along. They make contact in another building, witness law enforcement officers engage in looting, and leave Philadelphia. The disparate group of media and law enforcement employees set off on a journey both personal and physical. When they arrive at their destination, they will still have to confront the forces which they believe they have left behind in Philadelphia. As they fly across the country, they see rednecks hunting zombies. This not only reprises the concluding scenes of Night of the Living Dead but also articulates the Marxist axiom of history now repeating itself as farce rather than tragedy. Over satirical images of the rednecks and soldiers, Romero uses a sardonic country‘n’western song, ‘I’m a Man’ (recorded by the British rock group Them and purchased as industrial library music), to reveal further both the absurdity of male indulgent violence and the reinforcement of the priest’s message concerning the cessation of killing. With grotesque male figures such as those living on a diet of beer and violence, humanity will certainly ‘lose the war’. As in There’s Always Vanilla, Jack’s Wife, The Crazies and Martin, the quartet in the helicopter still have to make strong attempts to break away from their former personal identities or they, too, will ‘lose the war’. They have to battle with issues of self-deception which hinder the necessary progress needed to cope with new challenging situations. It is Peter who first expresses his understanding of the realities of their current status when Steve suggests landing at a military airport. Despite their ‘theft’ of 96

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the helicopter, Steve still believes their actions fall within the law. However, as previously seen in the television studio sequences, the rule of law has broken down and the group may find themselves facing the institutional violence of a military system little better than that of The Crazies and Day of the Dead. They are now outsiders and have to develop new perspectives, as the following exchange reveals after Steve’s suggestion: Peter: Steve: Peter:

Oh yeah! You got the papers for this limousine? [Angrily] I got JON ID. So does Fran. Right! And we’re out here doing traffic reports? Wake up sucker. We’re thieves and bad guys is what we are. And we gotta find our own way.

After stopping to refuel at a deserted airport, the group find themselves facing another zombie assault. Like Ben in Night of the Living Dead, Peter faces attack by child zombies which he barely escapes from. However, thrilled by his unexpected membership in a male-uniformed group, Steve becomes fascinated by firepower and violence to the extent of accidentally placing Peter in danger. He picks up one of their rifles and attempts to shoot zombies as Roger expresses amusement at his bad marksmanship. Peter later angrily reacts against the ‘flyboy’, threatening him with a gun, and warning against any further actions as if remembering the actions of Wooley the previous night. The helicopter heads west and eventually lands on the roof of a huge shopping mall deserted except for zombies wandering aimlessly about both outside and inside. Steve intuitively understands the reason for the zombie fascination with an environment which is now really redundant in terms of their new appetites. They are there due to ‘some kind of instinct. Memory . . . of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.’ Steve’s response has more than one relevant association. Although the zombies cannot consume the merchandise for their basic bodily needs, they are still programmed by ‘some kind of instinct’ to engage in conspicuous consumption despite the fact that they do not really need to do so. Zombie attraction to the mall is redundant and unnecessary. But as their human lives were programmed by society, resulting in behavioural patterns becoming ‘instinctive’ or part of ‘human nature’, their dead counterparts continue the same form of behaviour. The living and the dead are united by desire and memory. Despite consumerism’s goal of targeting female shoppers by lavish displays of material goods, Dawn of the Dead ironically reveals that the mall has more fascination for the three males rather than the solitary female who accompanies them on the journey. Leaving Fran alone in an upper room after discovering food in a civil defence storage system, Steve, Roger and Peter decide to explore their new domain. Still desiring entry into an elite male military group, Steve neglects his pregnant girlfriend and joins the others to engage in a free shopping spree. He selfishly takes the weapon Peter leaves for Fran to defend herself and cynically rushes off to join the other ‘boys’. Roger’s comment, ‘Looks like a free lunch’, expresses glee at the opportunity of access to commodities they would otherwise have to pay for in their former world of capitalist exchange. Roger and Peter find the mall’s control room knight of the living dead

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and press devices after gaining ‘the keys of the kingdom’. As the consumerist ploys of muzak, spouting fountains, and moving escalators begin, the men watch in fascination as zombies stumble around in ways little different from their former living selves. The live males are little better than small boys entranced at a new train set. However, while they play around with looting items in shopping carts and dodging zombies, Fran nearly dies at the hands of a Hare Krishna zombie. After they rescue her from a ‘fate worse than death’ she demands equality with the male members of the group after attempting in vain to persuade them to leave their consumerist ‘au bonheur des hommes’. She also sarcastically comments that she is not willing to be regarded as ‘den mother’ and reacts angrily as she overhears the men discussing the possibility of an abortion when she is not present in the room. Fran regards the mall as a ‘prison’ symbolising everything they were trying to escape from. However, Steve cunningly overcomes her objections by appealing to her ideologically programmed female domestic instincts involving materialism and domesticity: ‘Those things are out there, everywhere, and the authorities would give us just as hard a time, maybe worse. We’re in great shape here, Frannie. We got everything we need right here. I’m not just being stubborn. I really think this is better. Hell, you’re the one who’s been wanting to set up shop.’ He cunningly persuades Fran to accept the mall as their private consumerist ‘haven from a heartless world’. The group then co-operate in ethnically cleansing their haven from zombies like a successful religious group purging their sanctuary from heretics. They all engage in a killing spree, block the mall doors with huge tractor-trailer trucks and turn the upstairs storeroom they initially use as their base headquarters into an affluentlooking, penthouse-style apartment worthy of Donald Trump. Although Fran temporarily becomes one of the boys by participating in a shooting spree very similar to the redneck activities of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, she walks away in disgust from Steve, Peter and Roger as they view the bodies of their victims. She intuitively realises the dangerously infectious nature of violent behaviour. The Puerto Rican priest’s warning that any killing must stop also operates as an evocative memory during this brief scene. By contrast, both Roger and Steve become infected in different ways. Roger endangers the group’s safety when they engage in a strategy of blocking the mall doors. Revelling in macho excess and bravado, he becomes little better than the infected and irrational Clank in the later scenes of The Crazies. He treats the exercise as a childish game until a zombie bites his leg. Roger becomes little better than Wooley; while Wooley indulged in the earlier slaughter to vent out his rage against minority groups living in apartment blocks beyond his economic means, Roger regards the zombies as illegal squatters threatening his access to his consumerist sanctuary. His joy at ‘whipping ‘em’ has possessive overtones as his later comment, ‘We got it all’, reveals. He becomes the first of the group to become a zombie while Steve will later follow him. This change in status is neither abrupt nor arbitrary since the two men earlier exhibited signs of possessiveness and violence common to their zombie antagonists. Both Roger and Steve want to hold on to the mall as long as possible and defend it from outsiders. While the zombies remain the ultimate consumers who follow their instincts to the logical conclusion by killing and consuming humans, Fran, 98

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Peter, Steve and Roger kill the living dead so that they can gain access to a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption. However, the actions of living and dead are complementary in different ways. After indulging themselves in the material gains like victors following a colonial conquest, the humans become bored and decadent. They behave in a listless manner paralleling the zombies who once inhabited the mall. Furthermore, their rise in material status also reproduces the typical pattern of the rise and decline of most human civilisations and religions in moving from barbarism to bored decadence. Religious analogies are not inappropriate. Romero has made this comparison himself in the shooting script by speaking of the mall as a temple of consumer greed containing within itself elements of eventual decline. He notes that ‘at either end of the concourse like the main altars at each end of a cathedral, stand the mammoth two-storey department stores, great symbols of a consumer society. The images are all too familiar, but in their present state they appear as an archaeological discovery revealing the gods and customs of a civilisation now gone’ (quoted in Gagne 1987: 87). Mindlessness, the suspension of any form of critically-minded independent thought and passivity, characterises any true believer whether they adhere to the realms of capitalism or religion. Although the quartet live in relative security while the zombies wait outside, the four humans soon become reduced to conditions of mindless passivity like their living dead alter egos. Humans and zombies become equal partners in a goal of conspicuous consumption dominating personal behaviour. While the zombies graphically devour bodies of their living victims in spectacularly gory fashion, their human counterparts inside the mall mechanically indulge in their own form of consumerist consumption. They eventually become little better than mindless automatons. While the quartet initially enjoy their access to a kingdom of plenty, they all soon become bored and lethargic. Eventually, they merely indulge in the motions of consumption and show little signs of independent vitality like their zombie counterparts. The men continue their pattern of endless consuming even when their basic needs are all fulfilled. Fran either skates alone on the ice rink or tediously tries out cosmetics and wigs before a mirror until the futility of her instinctually programmed narcissistic desires become evident. As Fran over-indulges by slapping on heavy make-up, eyelashes and wigs, Romero intercuts images of mall dummies in the sequence. These parallel his other montage juxtapositions involving the same dummies during earlier scenes when the zombies instinctually shuffled along the mall. When Steve photographs Fran as she shops for clothes in the mall, she sarcastically comments, ‘Great! When you finish the roll drop it off at the drug store!’ The former lovers gradually lose the vitality of their emotional relationship and become little better than a stereotypical married couple passively enduring a relationship which is really dead and buried. Romero significantly illustrates this by a slow zoom-out showing Steve awake in bed while Fran stares listlessly into space. They resemble a bored and frustrated couple in an Antonioni film. Ultimately, they both engage in a stereotypical domestic argument over Steve’s desire to keep the television set on despite the fact that nothing is now on. The trio exist in a world of boredom as a result of their access to a world of conspicuous consumption. Romero significantly focuses on Fran’s growing realisation knight of the living dead

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of her state of ennui. In many ways, her behaviour echoes that of her naturalistic predecessor Laura Jadwin in Frank Norris’ final novel The Pit, who ‘found means to occupy her mind with all manner of small activities’ until everything becomes familiar ‘to the point of wearisome contempt’. Laura’s access to immediate consumerist gratification leads to boredom as Norris skilfully narrates: Her desires were gratified with an abruptness that killed the zest of them. She felt none of the joy of possession; the little personal relation between her and her belongings vanished away . . . And hardly a day passed that Laura Jadwin, in the solitude of her own boudoir, did not fling her arms wide in a gesture of lassitude and infinite weariness, crying out: ‘Oh, the ennui and stupidity of all this wretched life!’ (1903: 352–3)

Even before Roger’s death, the quartet already began to resemble a bourgeois family out on a shopping spree with the injured Roger appearing like the baby on a mall shopping cart. After Roger’s death, Peter is now the odd man out (or third party) in the stereotypical romantic pattern of ‘Two’s company. Three’s a crowd’ despite the fact there is no real necessity for this conventional exclusion to operate in a situation where civilisation has collapsed. The increasingly isolated Peter decides to remain in the background. Although he does not need to do so, he also reacts in an ideologically programmed instinctual level of behaviour. The final grotesque parodic nature of Peter’s status appears when he acts as waiter at a romantic dinner for Fran and Steve before disappearing at the crucial moment when she receives a proposal and engagement ring. As if recognising the redundancy of this gesture as well as its overtones of acquisitiveness, she rejects his proposal: ‘We can’t, not now. It wouldn’t be real.’ However, their relationship temporarily resumes when Steve finally agrees to her earlier request to teach her to pilot a helicopter. Both appear equal and happy and at ease with each other for a change, yet the rapprochement is temporary since ominous forces remain outside. As an alienated Peter relieves his frustrations by playing squash on the roof, one of his balls drops down to fall at the feet of the waiting zombies excluded from their consumerist Edenic environment. Both humans and zombies have equal desires towards control of the mall. They both act on an instinctual level of existence, involving consumption, possessiveness and violence, signifiers of an old, dead society which still exercises its hold upon both the living and the living dead. The mall’s earlier zombie inhabitants represent a crosssection of the old society dominated by consumer capitalism affecting everyone— middle-aged, nuns, nurses, insurance salesman, softball players, yuppies and Hare Krishna devotees.12 Intermittent television broadcasts describe them as functioning on a ‘subconscious, instinctual level’ and ‘remembered behaviour from normal life’. When Peter observes the zombies waiting outside, he understands the real reason why they do not go away: Steve: Peter:

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They’re after us. They know we’re in here. They’re after the place. They don’t know why. They just remember . . . remember that they wanna be in here!

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Although Peter earlier repeats his grandfather’s superstitious saying about the dead returning to earth when no more room exists in hell, he is the most self-aware of the whole group despite his masochistic death-wish feelings. His religious reference may also be part of family indoctrination which has become so ingrained into his subconscious that it now forms what he believes is human nature. Peter reveals that his grandfather ‘used to be a priest in Trinidad’. He struggles with his religious upbringing in the same manner as Joan Mitchell in Jack’s Wife and Martin. However, Dawn of the Dead distinctly reveals that these supposedly instinctual reactions really derive from programmed activities installed via the psychic operations of capitalism and the family. Dr. Logan’s scientific experiments in Day of the Dead later make this explicit. Furthermore, as the infrequent television talk-show (now continued in a rudimentary manner) from Fran’s former studio reveals, the zombies have ‘little or no reasoning power’ as Dr. Rausch states. He also suggests ways of controlling the zombies by feeding them dead bodies, an idea affronting the now-redundant civilised sensibilities of the remaining television studio audience. Rausch also makes an important observation relevant to the living dead practices of capitalism: ‘It’s the waste that kills us.’ While human beings consume vast amounts of material that they do not really need, the zombies operate on a much more efficient economic level: ‘They use maybe five per cent of the food available on the human body . . . and then the body is usually intact enough to be mobile when it arrives.’ Zombies are thus the ideal embodiment of Marx’s homo economicus. However, Rausch’s sensibility operates merely on the level of cold rationality. He never draws obvious conclusions concerning the waste within the old society which may have caused this dilemma, yet he does suggest a strategy for future survival by suggesting the survivors consume zombie bodies, an ironic inversion of the present chaotic situation. But, like Dr. Watts in The Crazies, Rausch’s attempts at communication fall on deaf ears. The bickering studio audience and quartet also have ‘little or no reasoning power’, never really communicate and fall victim to programmed methods of behaviour, finally ending in dissension. Fran later realises the implications of these findings and draws the obvious conclusion with her comment ‘What are we doing to ourselves?’ The surviving humans are actually responsible for their dilemmas. They may continue subconsciously to victimise themselves in various aggressive ways, both directly and indirectly, unless alternative modes of behaviour are articulated. Otherwise, the surviving humans will merely continue following programmed instinctual modes of behaviour which will result in either self-destruction or future incorporation in the increasing number of living dead outside, either literally or otherwise. Roger’s insane activities in defending a useless kingdom of waste from the zombies literally kills him. The surviving trio are becoming little better than their counterparts outside by falling into alienated modes of behaviour. Eventually, the survivors face another attack by a marauding group of bikers. Despite merely wishing to loot the place, the assailants condemn the trio for their deadly acquisitiveness—‘Hey, you in the mall. You got fouled up real bad. We don’t like people who don’t share’—and break into the mall allowing the waiting zombies the access to their consumerist paradise. Although Peter logically realises the necessity of avoiding a futile confrontation against overwhelming numbers, Steve knight of the living dead

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immediately falls into the same selfish pattern of behaviour as Roger. He rejects Peter’s advice to ‘Just stay out of sight. They’re after the place. They don’t care about us’, arguing, ‘It’s ours. We took it. It’s ours.’ But this time, Steve will have no hope of ‘whipping ‘em’ like Roger. Before moving into action, he homo-erotically kisses his rifle, subconsciously transferring his affections from Fran to his male symbol of power. He shoots one of the bikers and begins a minor war in which the only victors are the zombies who finish off the surviving bikers. Like Roger, Steve begins a fatal process which will make him a zombie. As with Roger, he actually becomes one after succumbing to fatal zombie bites. He emerges from an elevator to join the army of the living dead. Steve now acts in a manner equivalent to his zombie companions operating on instinct and memory. He leads his followers to break down the fake wall erected to conceal the stairwell leading to the quartet’s hideout. Formerly fascinated by Peter and Roger’s male group associations, Steve now ironically becomes a military commander leading his fellow zombies like a General on a campaign. However, as Gagne notes (1987: 89), Romero now depicts Steve satirically lurching along on bent ankle with an idiotic expression on his face, numbly holding a pistol he once used when he was human. It is a revealing parody of his earlier fascination with weaponry when he nearly shot Peter (accidentally) at a landing zone. As the zombies approach, Peter orders Fran up to the helicopter while he remains behind to supposedly clear the way for their escape. However, at this moment, Peter passively submits to deadly instinctual forces ingrained in his personality from birth. After killing Steve before Fran’s eyes, he clearly intends to commit suicide following the earlier example of the young SWAT team member in the assault on the apartment block. Peter retreats into Roger’s room. It is the very same place where he had killed his friend after complying with his wish about not allowing him to become a new recruit in a zombie army of the dead. Peter squats in his friend’s room, placing a gun to his cheek in the same manner as the young SWAT trooper. However, at the last moment, Peter suddenly decides to live, stop the killing (whether humans or zombies) and join Fran in a helicopter very low on fuel. After shooting one more zombie who blocks his path, he ascends the stepladder and joins Fran in the helicopter. Peter’s decision is highly significant on more than one level. In the original screenplay and novelisation of Dawn of the Dead, Peter committed suicide while Fran stepped out of the helicopter to decapitate herself with its blades. The two human survivors instinctually followed the logical conclusions of deadly masochism and submitted to Freud’s negative realm of Thanatos (or Death Wish) catalogued in his 1929 work appropriately titled Civilization and its Discontents. During his later years, Freud became more pessimistic concerning the human condition and Romero initially reflected this feeling in earlier drafts of the screenplay. However, after shooting the first version of the conclusion, he reflected that ‘I just woke up one day and decided to let them go simply because I liked them too much’ (quoted in Gagne 1987: 91).13 This evokes an unconscious reference to one of Romero’s favourite directors, Howard Hawks, who finally decided on a more positive ending to Red River (1948) simply because he also came to like all the leading characters. But there is 102

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another, more convincing reason. Disgusted with killing and affected by the racial slur made by the leader (Tom Savini) of the bikers, who called him ‘chocolate man’, evoking memories of Wooley’s racist attitudes, Peter falls victim to dark masochistic elements existing within his own personality, elements instinctual in nature and part of civilisation’s life-denying mechanisms. However, Romero’s eventual change of mind reflects a positive alternative both in terms of letting two survivors live and avoiding the reactionary elements inherent within the violent spectacular mechanisms of the horror genre itself. Dawn of the Dead is definitely a violent film. It develops the premises of Night of the Living Dead by using gory, spectacular formal features which often distract audiences from recognising the important messages embedded within the film’s text. Some audience members often act little differently from fictional characters (such as Romero’s rednecks, Wooley, Roger and Steve) in allowing themselves to be carried away by a deadly world of masculine aggressiveness in cheering the visual spectacle of gore and slaughter. But by doing so, they lose sight of Dawn of the Dead ’s more important concepts. The killing has to stop. Humanity has to find another path to survive. This involves rejecting obsolete patterns of behaviour which have caused the zombie phenomenon and link supposedly separate worlds of living and dead. But these deadly realms of sadistic violence and masochistic passivity are not the results of a supposedly instinctual world of ‘human nature’ dominating individuals. They are really programmed forms of human behaviour drilled into civilisation’s victims from early childhood onwards within a family structure indelibly linked to consumer capitalism. In his 1915 essay ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ Freud commented upon the presence and interchangeability of two deadly forms of human behaviour—sadism and masochism. One instinct may change into its opposite; sadistic modes of behaviour may easily become masochistic under certain circumstances. Freud notes that ‘The enjoyment of pain would thus be an aim which was originally masochistic, but which can only become an instinctual aim in someone who was originally sadistic.’14 Furthermore, he recognised that the co-existence of both instincts within the same personality may embody ‘the most important example of ambivalence of feeling’15 especially in relation to the presence of male and female characteristics acting in a fluid and non-binary manner. Peter and Fran represent two characters who intuitively recognise these dangerous mechanisms of human behaviour and attempt to move in different directions. In many ways, Peter resembles the gentle David of The Crazies who has rejected patriarchy and the sadistic world of male control. As a black man, he has probably joined the SWAT team to gain the status he would not otherwise achieve in society. As he tells Fran on the helicopter journey to the mall he has little option. One brother is a football player, the other is in jail. He also tells her of his regret at leaving his ‘brothers’ whom he regards as an important community ideal. But Peter is clearly uncomfortable with his role as officially proscribed killer. He forms a strong bond of male friendship with Roger in a manner suggesting homoerotic associations which can never be openly expressed. Affected by forces within his unconscious and lacking progressive alternatives, he exists uneasily within a world of sadistic violence. Finding no other path for him, he easily succumbs to dark, masochistic factors within knight of the living dead

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his own personality at the climax. Clearly affected by Roger’s death and sickened by the violence, he passively waits for death until he suddenly decides to live. Although Romero selects some mediocre library music to affirm Peter’s decision, it does, at least, mark a significant movement on his part as opposed to the inappropriate Goblin rock music existing in the Dario Argento version. Fran represents a more positive version of Romero’s previous heroines such as Barbara of Night of the Living Dead, Lynn of There’s Always Vanilla, Joan Mitchell of Jack’s Wife, Judy of The Crazies and Christine of Martin. She also anticipates Sarah of Day of the Dead. Fran has the possibility of developing her intuitive potentials or regressing into some negative form of behaviour. By refusing to give in, she decides to move forward. When Peter runs to the helicopter, he allows one of the zombies to take his rifle, following the advice he had earlier given a reluctant Roger in their assault on the mall. The same zombie who took Roger’s weapon now gains another. After acquiring another material item, he drops Roger’s rifle and looks in fascination at his new acquisition. Peter no longer needs any weapon to affirm his new sense of identity. Unlike Ben in Night of the Living Dead who aims his rifle and dies, Peter lives after relinquishing his weapon. His action parallels David’s in the final scenes of The Crazies when he throws away his rifle.16 The pregnant Fran and Peter fly away as the zombies regain their consumer kingdom. No hint is given of any future typical Hollywood romantic relationship for them. Also, since the helicopter is low on fuel, Fran and Peter fly into the darkness to face no assured future. Their survival is tentative, as tentative as that facing certain characters in naturalist fiction such as Etienne Lantier of Germinal or Carrie Meeber of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. Yet the two survivors embody within themselves the potential for a new form of society by ‘moving beyond apocalypse’ as Robin Wood notes; Dawn of the Dead concludes by bringing ‘its two surviving protagonists to the point where the work of creating the norms for a new social order, a new structure of relationships, can begin—a context in which the presence of a third survivor, Fran’s unborn child, points the way to potential change’ (1986: 121). However, as Knightriders will show, within a different context, any tentative possibilities for change will meet with huge obstacles, both personal and social.

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chapter eight

Knightriders

shot after the financial success of Dawn of the Dead on his biggest budget so far, Knightriders represents Romero’s most personal film to date. It is also a creative product of an industrial system often allowing stars and directors to engage in their most cherished projects after box-office success. Seen in this light, Knightriders resembles Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and The Age of Innocence (1993), and Jessica Lange’s Country (1984). These all represent projects in which individual talents attempt to break away from generic and star vehicles to produce creative statements free from economic constraints. Knightriders belongs to this category. But it is also a different George A. Romero film. Discarding previously familiar elements such as naturalistic concepts, zombies, EC Comic-style photography and the formal attributes of the horror genre most reviewers eagerly associate him with, Romero chose another direction to reproduce again the type of personal statement existing in his other films. However, Knightriders failed theatrically on its initial release. It disappointed Romero fans who wanted more gore and zombies as well as certain reviewers such as Pauline Kael and Michael Sragow who attacked the film for its simple-minded idealism.1 Robin Wood soon saw Romero as a casualty of a 1980s decade which destroyed the radical nature of the horror genre with which Romero was associated. He defined Knightriders as having a certain symptomatic interest in relation to the persistent quandary of the American radical who wants to make some kind of positive statement yet is barred from embracing any coherent political alternative: essentially the film is another Alice’s Restaurant, ten years too late and lacking Penn’s sensitivity and complexity. It is the archetypal liberal American movie, with something nice to say about every minority group, some pious platitudes about the corrupting power of commercialism, and a lament for the failure of a counterculture that couldn’t possibly succeed. (1986: 190–1)

Although Knightriders contains several flaws in form and content, it does not really deserve Wood’s criticism. Romero is not an explicitly political director and has

always avoided overt messages. Secondly, both Knightriders and Alice’s Restaurant are different films needing evaluation on their own terms. Finally, it is disputable whether Knightriders represents a lament for something which has failed. The film concludes with Billy’s successor leading the troupe and riding away to face again the same problems that affected the group throughout the narrative. They still survive and live to fight another day. Furthermore, it is not the counterculture itself which has failed; the film focuses upon the problems facing very fallible human characters in maintaining this ideal. Knightriders also deals with issues raised earlier in There’s Always Vanilla but treats them in a different manner. The final scene of Knightriders not only represents the type of open-ended conclusions seen in Romero’s films such as The Crazies, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead but also those associated with Romero’s favourite directors, Howard Hawks and Orson Welles. For example, Rio Bravo (1959) may conclude with John T. Chance beginning a romantic liaison with Feathers and Dude restored to his former self, but, as with Hawks’ work, everything is provisional and never entirely resolved. A successful ending may have overtones of the transitory nature of life embodied in the lines of Slim’s song ‘How Little We Know’ from To Have and Have Not (1944)—‘even if it’s only a day’. The same is true for Knightriders and the tentative utopian conclusions of Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. Several of Romero’s films refuse the inevitability of predetermined closure. It is a feature that Michael Anderegg finds characteristic of Welles’ late Shakespearian films as well as Theodor Adorno’s understanding of an art work as opposed to a manufactured artifact.2 Romero’s fictional characters face different problems involving survival and overcoming external and internal problems. They also attempt moving towards a better world where the odds for finally succeeding may be a little better. Although utopian strains are present, his films realistically never give any easy answers. They also seriously depict the huge obstacles his various characters struggle against whenever they attempt to realise their own destinies. Although Billy (Ed Harris) may exhibit signs of wistful idealism similar to Falstaff and Shallow reminiscing about their youthful activities in Welles’ Chimes at Midnight (1967), the represented worlds in both films are far from Edenic.3 Ironically, if Welles’ Falstaff ‘longs for an Edenic world only because he has long since forfeited it’ (Anderegg 1999: 129), Romero’s Billy has long since lost the knightly prowess that justifies his leadership of the troupe and his current position as king. He has suffered from injuries long before the first combat with Morgan seen in the film. These necessitate Billy’s knights riding to his rescue so he can retain his pre-eminent position. As with Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, Romero also decided to make Knightriders to show people ‘they still had a chance’4 as well as revealing the odds they face in taking up challenges involved with such a chance. In this respect, Knightriders also parallels the utopianism of Zola’s final novels, Fécondité (1899), Travail (1901) and Vérité (1903). But the film avoids the naïve progressiveness contained within those texts. In Zola’s final trilogy, the three Froment brothers eventually succeed and overcome all obstacles in unrealistic ‘happy ever after’ conclusions which never appeared in the earlier Rougon-Macquart series.

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Despite its medieval trappings, Knightriders is also a self-reflexive work about film-making. It resembles Howard Hawks’ Hatari! (1962) which is not solely about an African safari. It is also a work indirectly dealing with the process of making a film on location and having ‘fun’ at the same time.5 Knightriders was an obvious labour of love for all concerned as the acting of all participants testifies. But Knightriders also deals with key Romero concepts such as the problems of leadership, self-control and various attempts towards following an alternative life-style in an increasingly commercialised and commodified era. One major contradiction in Knightriders’ vision is the adoption of a feudal lifestyle based upon hierarchical concepts, a factor certain reviewers recognised. In an otherwise sympathetic review Ed Sikov comments upon the fact that ‘the Knightriders cult is governed strictly by the right of kings, and is an autocracy based on wishfulfilment and the ridiculous subjugation of an entire group to a battle’s victor’.6 But this begs several questions. Undoubtedly, the group engage in a wish-fulfilment fantasy which appears strangely at odds with the surrounding world. But it is a fantasy which is neither as self-deceptive and self-serving as that generated by Joan Mitchell in Jack’s Wife nor as morbid and violent as Martin’s nocturnal activities. The knightriders group have clearly decided to participate in the creation of an Arthurian myth which has more to do with a Hawksian ethos than the dark feudal connotations of the actual era. It is a hierarchical group. But the participants have clearly chosen their roles within this new society and are respected as individuals. The knightriders society is as inclusive as Hawks’ idyllic groups which include not only heroic figures such as John Wayne’s John T. Chance, but females such as Feathers, aged disabled characters such as Stumpy and ethnic non-macho figures such as Carlos who is master in his own hotel and who knows more about women than Chance. Significantly, Chance’s final victory against Nathan Burdette owes more to Stumpy and Carlos than it does to his own individual prowess and strategy. Similarly, the knightriders society is comprehensive rather than rigidly hierarchical. When Billy angrily disrupts the impromptu meeting arranged by Morgan with impresario Bontempi, he asserts that it is not a real council meeting because not everyone is present. That includes non-knights as well as knights. Furthermore, the troupe follow Billy’s leadership in terms of his prowess in being King but they also recognise his vulnerability in the same way in which the non-heroic members of John T. Chance’s group in Rio Bravo look out for his own interests. Despite being leaders, both Chance and Billy actually depend on others. Also, the knightly contests represent Romero’s version of Hawksian professionalism in being ‘good’ at combat as Rocky (Cynthia Adler) states, or following ‘the basics’, as she tells a defeated biker opponent: ‘It looked great for a while, but you don’t have the guts to do what we do. That’s basic number one.’ Rocky represents Romero’s development of the Hawks woman. Rather than being marginalised when the male group engage in their professional goals, she represents the logical culmination of Hildy Johnson from His Girl Friday (1940), the newspaperwoman who is as professional as her male counterparts and obviously wasted in any normal marital relationship. Rocky functions as an accepted member of Romero’s professional male group rather than operating from the sidelines like Angie knight of the living dead

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Dickinson’s Feathers in Rio Bravo where her only active contribution to the group lies in causing a diversion so Chance and Colorado can defeat their enemies. Significantly, her lesbian identity may not be accidental but rather the logical response to those feminist critics who regard the Hawks woman as a male in female costume as well as others such as Robin Wood who note a ‘gay subtext’ in the director’s work. Billy eventually decides to relinquish his leadership to Morgan at the end of the film in a manner resembling Hawksian precedents. Although the knightriders no longer face life-threatening situations like their predecessors in The Dawn Patrol (1930) and Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Morgan now has to take on the burdens of leadership as Douglas Scott does after the heroic death of Captain Courtney in The Dawn Patrol. Like Dude in Rio Bravo, Morgan was formerly a ‘stray sheep’. But he returns to the fold purged of his aggressive narcissistic attitude and fully aware of the dangers lurking within the world outside. He once again becomes a team player and realises the value of community like Winocki (John Garfield) in Air Force (1943). Morgan (Tom Savini) is similarly tempted by a woman who arrived in town (and not on a stagecoach like her predecessor in Rio Bravo), who seduces and abandons him after he performs his pleasurable use-value role. In Knightriders, Billy is a much more flawed leader than Chance. He has to cope with the same type of personal demons affecting characters such as Peter in Dawn of the Dead before he can move on to any form of self-realisation. Although not ageing like the Wayne characters in El Dorado (1966) and Rio Lobo (1970), Billy is fighting a ‘dragon’ which could eventually destroy him and the troupe who have made, as Linet points out, an ‘adult’ decision to follow his ideals. Like Cole Thornton in El Dorado he has to deal with an injury which affects his physical prowess. But, as Knightriders affirms, this ailment is also metaphysical. Billy also resembles Romero’s Martin in so far as he is torn between visions of the past and his present role in contemporary society. But, unlike John Amplas’ tragic figure, Billy reveres a more healthy past world of glory and honour which he attempts to apply to the present rather than Martin’s pathologically regressive behaviour. While Martin’s behaviour has obvious family origins, Billy’s world has divorced itself from the contemporary malaise affecting human beings as seen in its worst examples of Julie Dean’s abusive alcoholic father and Stephen King’s slobbish hoagie man. Whatever the contradictions affecting Billy’s choice of a medieval alternative it is far more preferable to the values followed by the world outside. Billy, Merlin (Brother Blue) and the troupe all seek a certain form of ‘magic’, or spiritual idealism, in a world in which it is noticeably lacking—if their audiences, the media, and corrupt Deputy Sheriffs are anything to go by. But the magic in Knightriders represents a much more positive path than the sterile dead ends followed by both Martin and Cuda in Romero’s earlier film. It does, at least, recognise the presence of the world outside and the necessity for withdrawal to maintain both the group’s pragmatic idealism and the necessary self-respect for continuing existence. Knightriders is also a romantic vision drawn from previous Hollywood models. Originally, influenced by genre films of his youth such as Ivanhoe (1952), Knights of the Round Table (1954) and The Adventures of Quentin Durward (1955), Romero wished to 108

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make a film that realistically shows the knights as they actually were. But fascinated by his discovery of travelling Renaissance fairs and The Society for Creative Anachronisms in particular (the inspiration for Billy’s troupe), he developed the screenplay which later became Knightriders. As Sam Arkoff recognised, a grimly realistic knight movie would have failed at the box office for the same reasons that pessimistic images of other genres like the western depicted in films such as Frank Perry’s Doc (1971) and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1981) have done.7 However, although classical Hollywood directors such as John Ford and Howard Hawks depicted a West which often bore little relationship to its historical dimensions, this did not prevent them from directing significant works which often indirectly comment upon the problematic historical circumstances influencing their formations. Generic precedents also exist for Romero’s creative venture. During the 1950s American stars such as Robert Taylor and Tony Curtis often appeared in historical epics. The latter graced films such as The Prince Who Was a Thief (1951), Son of Ali Baba (1952), The Black Shield of Falworth (1954), The Purple Mask (1955) and The Vikings (1958) with a barely disguised, incongruous Bronx accent derived from his former existence as young Bernard Schwartz. Neither did Robert Taylor engage in a medieval Anglo-Saxon accent for his roles as Ivanhoe and Sir Lancelot. Since a generic knight movie was impossible, Romero developed the anachronistic aspects of the original genre into a creative dimension in line with the ideas appearing in his previous films. Ed Harris’ Billy is no Taylor or Curtis but another of Romero’s tortured male figures struggling with masculine ideas of leadership and the path he has chosen to follow. Finally, although Knightriders lacks the EC style of The Crazies, Dawn of the Dead, Creepshow and Day of the Dead, it does have a different type of comic strip precedent, namely Prince Valiant (1954), a film based on Hal Foster’s well-known newspaper comic strip, and featuring Robert Wagner, Sterling Hayden, Janet Leigh and Victor McLaglen all articulating medieval roles in contemporary movie accents. Similarly, Knightriders contains a mixture of different accents, ethnic groups, and characters from other medieval legends such as Robin Hood. Similarly, Sir Walter Scott’s knightly romance Ivanhoe also incorporated Robin Hood and his Merry Men into his fictional narrative. Like other Arthurian adaptations, such as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, it mixes various elements both medieval and modern in its own special way. While classical Hollywood cinema mixed American, English and Irish-American actors (such as William Bendix in the 1949 film version), Romero introduces Afro-American actors such as Ken Foree and Robert Williams into his version of King Arthur’s court as well as Boston-accented Sir Ban (Marty Schiff) and Newark native Sir Hector (Ronald Carrier) into the team. He also changes gender, making Morgan male rather than female, includes a lesbian knightrider and incorporates figures such as Alan, Friar Tuck and Little John (now black, rather than white) from other heroic legends. Romero also borrows Warner Shook’s Pippin from the legend of Charlemagne (see Harty 1991: 15). These appropriations also evoke the many historically inaccurate borrowings Hollywood genre cinema often uses for specific works in the name of creative license.

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Knightriders begins with lyrical shots of a forest located in a non-discernible timeperiod. A black bird arises in the distance during the second long shot of the forest landscape. A montage juxtaposition of images characteristic of Romero’s editorial techniques in films such as The Crazies then follows. Swiftly edited cuts change from exterior images of the bird in flight to its own point-of-view perspectives of the landscape as it moves in rapid flight. Romero then concludes this introductory sequence with the bird’s call appearing predominantly on the soundtrack. The next shot shows Billy waking up in response to its summons. As in Jack’s Wife and Romero’s other films, sound montage plays a significant role in this opening sequence. On the most basic level, the bird’s cry wakes Billy up, but as in Martin’s opening scene, levels of fantasy and reality intermingle. Knightriders seductively invites the audience to take an objective perspective by viewing the landscape and flight in realistic terms. However, the sound montage suggests that we, like Billy, have merely witnessed a dream. Whereas Martin attempts to persuade Cuda that there is really no magic anymore, the opening images of Knightriders reveal that fantasy and reality are both intertwined. But Knightriders reveals that a crucial difference exists between the tricks Martin employs to awaken Cuda away from his superstition and the fantasies they both adhere to in the earlier film. Like Martin, Billy is caught up in his own personal fantasy but in a less pathological manner than his cinematic predecessors. He is also a Don Quixote figure, yet unlike the original literary character, Billy has attracted an entire group to his vision, not just a solitary Sancho Panza figure, who readily acknowledge the differences between fantasy and everyday reality their leader wishes to avoid. Billy does recognise the differences. But he initially does not want to deal with them and stubbornly adheres to the values he personally holds until denial becomes impossible. Also, these differences are negotiated in several ways by various members of the Knightriders and not just one individual. Like all Romero’s main characters, Billy has to recognise and come to terms with negative features within his own personality before advancing further into self-realisation. After revealing Linet (Amy Ingersoll) at his side, the next shot shows Billy in a lake flagellating himself with a tree branch in a ritualistic manner. He appears like a medieval knight of old engaging in a purification ritual ceremony watched by his lady fair. The still naked Billy performs a ritual vow in the forest as he holds out his version of Excalibur. Billy then puts on his crown and armour and appears to ascend a steed. However, the camera reveals the steed to be a motorcycle and thus abruptly changes the audience’s temporal perspective into modern rather than medieval times. In one sense, the magical illusion is broken. It is not real. However, Billy and Linet create their own form of magic in the twentieth-century world. Unlike Cuda and Martin who are dominated by adherence to old visions no longer relevant to their everyday world, Billy and Linet live their ideals but in a manner fully aware of the different world in which they exist. After the credit sequence showing Billy and Linet riding on their motorcycle, the next scene shows the medieval fair where Billy’s troupe actively prepare for the afternoon’s jousting tournament. While Whiteface (John Amplas) entertains the crowds, other members of the group either sell wares or prepare for the forthcoming combat. Several scenes show troupe members such as Little John (Ken Foree) either working 110

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at an old blacksmith’s forge or using modern Black and Decker tools. The individual group members combine medieval and modern practices in their work. Billy’s group is a multi-ethnic community comprising different races and genders working together in a common cause often performing roles different from everyday social expectations. They represent the utopian ideals of the 1960s existing in a hostile universe threatening to disrupt their chosen life styles. Master of ceremonies Pippin (Warner Shook) is gay and initially uncertain of his sexual identity. Knightrider champion Rocky (Cynthia Adler) is a self-assured lesbian while the group’s spiritual advisor Merlin (Brother Blue) is a middle-aged black man who is also a qualified doctor. Most group members embody opposites within their personalities, but they eventually come to terms with contradictions which might destroy them in everyday life. Others, such as Morgan (Tom Savini), Marhalt (Scott Reiniger) and the rest of his rebellious group will eventually face their personal dragons and overcome them without any outside interference from a leader figure. Like John T. Chance in Rio Bravo, Billy understands that salvation can only come from within after the experience of strong temptation. No friend can help another from dealing with their own personal dragons individually. In contrast to most generic representatives, Little John is black (played by an actor familiar to audiences in his role of Peter from Dawn of the Dead ). He is engaged in an interracial relationship that represents the logical consequences of Fran and Peter’s ‘last romantic-couple’ symbolism which concludes Romero’s previous film. After working on manufacturing jousting lances and other artifacts—‘Go in a little deeper. It’s got to snap easy. We don’t want anyone being killed out there . . . This damn thing’s solid . . . The head’s made out of rubber. This thing’s got its own inertia’—he expresses concern over Morgan’s heavy mace. Alan (Gary Lahti), the Sir Lancelot figure in the group, also feels uneasy about the damage it may inflict: ‘We don’t have to make it rougher than it already is.’ Despite the arrogant and narcissistic attitudes expressed by Morgan, Billy later allows him to use the weapon in the belief that every member of his group must follow their own conscience. In Knightriders, Romero paints a highly unflattering picture of certain audiences passively viewing the tournaments. Cynical, disdainful, often lusting for blood and belittling the efforts of performers, they appear as the director’s depiction of those elements who view his films merely for visceral excitement and nothing else. Julie Dean’s (Patricia Tallman) father, Lester (Jim Baffico) is little better than the ‘fat slob’ she describes him. His paternal role typifies the worst aspects of Romero’s woman’s nightmare which depict the patriarch as wife-batterer or economic cheat. Like Jack Mitchell in Jack’s Wife, he beats up his wife and attempts to do the same to his daughter. Lester also tries to cheat one of the troupe by not paying for an item. Later, a slobbish ‘hoagie man’ and his wife (Stephen and Tabitha King) look on as the knights engage in dangerous combat. Like the popcorn guzzling, coke-swilling member of an average cinema audience, he disdainfully sneers at the knights, ‘Acrobats. That’s all that they are!’ and later dismisses the injuries they suffer. He brags, ‘It’s a fake. It’s all a fake. They have to make it look tough, look dangerous’, after Billy suffers a dangerous neck injury in his conflict with Morgan. Immediately, after this comment Romero cuts to Julie gasping in shock at the real wound on one of the knight of the living dead

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knights. This montage juxtaposition concisely expresses Romero’s knowledge of the injuries stuntmen actually suffer during location shooting. Billy’s world uneasily attempts to juxtapose an idealistic visionary past world with the vulgar realm of the present. Yet it is not one involving the choice of a hopelessly anachronistic utopian retreat to the past by rejecting everything associated with the present. Prior to Pippin’s introduction, heralds with medieval trumpets announce the day’s events. As they blow their horns, Romero cuts to inside the tent, revealing tape players with the appropriate music. This particular act of demystification not only continues Martin’s project of showing that not everything is magic but also selfreflexively reveals elements associated with the cinematic apparatus to the informed viewer. As if imitating an everyday occurrence on location when a knob falls off the sound system rendering the equipment useless, the heralds resort to improvising the sound of trumpets. Billy’s magic is actually physically created, but the real point involves how that technology is used. Similarly, Billy’s knightriders are not merely engaged in a spectacular performance for viewer pleasure but are professionally involved in something they regard as a vocation rather than a day’s entertainment. The knightriders all participate in a philosophy they sincerely believe in. It is designed to promote an idealistic world of a medieval honour missing from contemporary life, but they also utilise modern aspects of technology to further their vision. In many ways, it is akin to Romero’s own ideals; his films add up to much more than zombies, gore and special effects. Romero’s aims may not be those of Billy’s but they contain an affinity of spirit. Referring to T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, Pippin announces the heroic ideals of the day’s events: ‘I, through magic, says who may honour the king . . . a knight’s fighting skills are the symbol of that hero . . . to the future may nobility also reign.’ However, few of the audience feel such noble ideas. Prior to the performance, Deputy Sheriff Cook (Michael Moran) hustles for a bribe and threatens to close the show down in a manner possibly reflecting Romero’s own experience during film locations. While Morgan sees the need to compromise, Billy vehemently refuses and articulates the group’s ideals: ‘We’re not paying. It’s wrong to pay this scum off, Morgan. He’s not going to shut us down. He’s not going to do shit.’ Despite Alan’s reservations concerning Billy’s fitness to engage in combat, he accepts Morgan’s challenge and falls in battle (as he has on previous occasions). This necessitates the knightriders coming to his rescue before the opponent makes him yield. While the combat becomes more dangerous and Billy’s wounds more life-threatening, the hoagie man merely sneers ‘It’s a fake. It’s all a fake . . . ’ after Morgan’s blows just miss piercing Billy’s artery. After the contest, a close-up of an owl introduces the sequence of Billy’s debate with Merlin while his injuries are attended to. It complements the images of the black bird associated with Billy in the film’s opening scenes. Both men appear as complementary soul brothers. In White’s novel, Merlin’s constant companion is an owl named Archimedes. Although both believe in the values of the troupe and their recreated world of Arthurian magic, Merlin is more aligned with the spiritual values of wisdom rather than Billy’s fascination with the dark side of a destiny he appears pathologically driven towards. While Billy is obsessive in his goals, Merlin is more 112

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balanced and omniscient. The two men represent competing tensions within the mind of anyone assuming a leadership position. Balance and objectivity are important concepts in Romero’s films, yet not everyone is capable of reaching this combination and Billy is as mentally divided as other central characters in Romero’s films. He tells Merlin of his dream involving the Black Bird. Merlin attempts to draw Billy away from pessimistic forebodings by suggesting the dreams result from his various wounds. Billy then counters his friend’s balanced counselling by suggesting that he should follow the very solipsistic ideals which contaminate both Martin and Cuda, ‘You’re supposed to believe in those things.’ However, Merlin replies both by affirming his belief in magic and by suggesting that material and mental causes often govern the operation of magical principles rather than arbitrary forces of destiny: If I didn’t believe in magic, I’d still be treating gall bladders, prosthetics, and stuff like that. See magic ain’t got nothing to do with organs and glands and broken necks. Maybe it’s got to do with soul, man. Only the soul’s got destiny, it got wings, it can fly. That’s magic.

Although Billy gravitates towards the arbitrary nature of events and relies too much on supernatural mysticism, Merlin gently attempts to make him see that he is also responsible for his own beliefs, present circumstances and future destiny. This is a lesson various characters in There’s Always Vanilla and Jack’s Wife never learn. Despite Billy and Merlin’s belief in the magical nature of the world they inhabit, it is Merlin who articulates Romero’s key belief in human responsibility and the capacity for making changes rather than submitting to supposedly arbitrary forces of destiny. When Billy comments, ‘You see things before they happen’, Merlin rejects any mystical abilities: ‘That’s probability. Some things are just sure to happen, seeing them coming is nothing.’ Billy still clings to the arbitrary nature of predestination: ‘You taught me too good, magician. You taught me to believe that black bird is going to get me.’ Merlin replies, ‘You’ll make it happen yourself.’ He emphasises factors of ‘probability’ and Billy’s tendencies towards dropping his guard and allowing destiny to get him, something which does happen in the concluding segment of the film. When Billy submissively comments, ‘Maybe, that’s my destiny’, Merlin dismisses it and refers to Malory’s tale of Arthur’s attempt to avoid his destiny. He thus counters Billy’s pessimism and affirms the possibility for individual change. But one arbitrary circumstance does hinder such a possibility. Merlin suggests that there are certain things beyond human control. But he also denies the dubious comforts arising from masochistic submission to these factors. For Merlin, ‘destiny’ is really a ‘big deal!’ ‘Probability’ is the more important factor in both his and Romero’s universe. It is thus highly ‘probable’ that Billy’s self-destructive behaviour will lead to his future ‘destiny’ in much the same way as the actions of characters in the divided environments of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead lead to eventual doom. Similarly, Roger’s refusal to listen to Peter’s admonitions and David’s egotistic desires in the latter film also lead to their downfall. Once Billy recovers, he walks outside Merlin’s tent to the relief of all concerned. But he refuses to autograph a photo of himself on a motorcycle for a little boy significantly named Billy (Chris Jessel) on the grounds of contributing to the media knight of the living dead

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hype he wishes to avoid: ‘I’m sorry. I don’t like this kind of stuff. I can’t. This is Evel Knievel. It’s got nothing to do with what we’re doing.’ Young Billy, sadly but intuitively, understands the reasons. However, as well as neglecting to see the sincerity behind his request, Billy loses sight of the fact that the young boy genuinely needs a seriously heroic role model in a world where such types are now lacking. It would not have cost him anything to compromise his beliefs in view of the nature of the request. However, at this point of time, Billy is both inflexible and rigid. Ironically, Morgan gratuitously seizes the opportunity to donate an autograph ‘from the next king’, an honour he would have gained had Billy’s knights not ridden to their leader’s rescue. Billy’s personal problems also resemble those of Tom Dunson in Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948). Suffering from the decline of his former youthful prowess and affected by physical infirmities, Billy stubbornly adheres to his own rigid principles and ignores the concerns of those around him. When he returns outside, Alan criticises Billy’s unconscious masochistic desires, ‘What were you doing over there, man. It looked like you wanted him to smash you. I mean . . . you didn’t have to do it.’ Linet similarly condemns his behaviour in the following sequence. She notes that Billy is no solitary individual and his actions have consequences for those who decide to follow him. She points out, ‘Everyone has made a conscious adult decision to be here. When you’re crazy, you make them think about that decision. You have to . . .’ Billy fills in her concluding word, ‘. . . compromise’. Like Wayne in Red River, Billy similarly refuses to listen to Linet’s version of ‘You was wrong, Mr Dunson.’ He adheres to his way of doing things while she attempts to make him see reason in the best manner of Romero’s affirmative female characters such as Fran and Sarah: ‘Change doesn’t have to mean compromise. You’re bigger now. Things are different. Publicity helps the overhead by bringing in more crowds.’ However, like a horror film director assailed by producers and audiences for not delivering enough gore, Billy criticises the crowds who attend his spectacles: ‘More suckerheaded American driftwood who can’t tell the difference between me and James Jones . . . or Charles Manson or the Great Wallenda. Even that kid thinks I’m Evel Knievel!’ Although Julie’s father, the hoagie man and the later crowd lusting for blood in Kansas support Billy’s critique, this is not true for everyone as Linet correctly asserts: ‘That kid thinks you’re Billy Davis. Sir William the knight. You’re his hero.’ However, Billy is too caught up in his own personal dilemmas at this point in the film and cannot really discriminate between those who deserve his condemnation and others who really appreciate his ideals. He sticks to a rigid form of leadership and loyally accompanies Bagman (Don Berry) to jail after Deputy Cook plants an incriminating bag of marijuana in his trailer rather than accepting Morgan’s pragmatic advice to pay off the corrupt official. Although Billy’s stand is admirable in one sense, it is also futile. During the jail scene, he has to watch impotently while Cook batters his friend to a bloody pulp. All Billy’s troupe have made a conscious decision to join him in a low income existence. His world offers them the possibility to be themselves whether gay (Pippin), lesbian (Rocky), or harmoniously living in an interracial relationship (Little John) the very nature of which receives no comment whatsoever. Julie Dean decides to join this community with Alan and leave her battered mother (Iva Jean Saraceni) who is 114

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last seen poignantly framed and trapped in the domestic prison of her kitchen like the archetypal victim of a classical Hollywood melodrama. However, Billy’s community is not totally inclusive. It really involves a rigorous form of apprenticeship in which any outsider has to earn the privilege of acceptance as Julie will later discover. After Billy and Bagman’s release from prison, they both debate the nature of compromise with the world outside. Their agent Steve (Ken Hixon), who negotiates their bookings, tells them that their low-budget independent status prevents him from negotiating higher fees. Speaking like a conscientious guerrilla film-maker, Billy is reluctant to contaminate his art by demeaning it to the status of a mere ‘act’ and ‘setting up with fancy new costumes and cycle manufacturers’. His dialogue foreshadows what would happen to most films in the 1980s which became mere conglomerate ‘movies’ linked with concession stands and specially-scripted scenes to feature corporate-sponsored products. However, the dragon Billy fights involves not just his personal demons but also the hard realities facing any independent venture no matter how idealistic its origins. Steve cogently comments about Billy’s business practices which parallel Romero’s organisation before Richard Rubinstein’s involvement:8 ‘You take on any long hair who knows how to make sandals. Do you know the price of hamburgers? Two by fours? So you want to pick up the Blue Cross tabs?’ Although Billy fears the dangers of commercialism, Steve attempts to move Billy away from his idealistic superstructure towards the hard economic realities of the actual base factor determining everyday existence: ‘It’s money, Billy. It’s all got to do with money. Money makes the world go round, even your world.’ However, Billy rejects Steve’s picture of a homo economicus model which would increasingly dominate the world of the 1980s and 1990s and beyond. He affirms an ideal whose spirit dominates most of Romero’s work: No. It’s just getting too tough. It’s tough to live by the code. It’s real hard to live for something you believe in. People try and they get tired of their diets, their exercises, their marriage or their kids or their jobs or themselves. Or they get tired of their God. You can keep all the money you make off this sick world. I don’t want any part of it. Anybody who wants to live for themselves don’t belong with us. Let them go out and buy some pimp psychiatric paperback which says it’s O.K. Don’t ask me to say O.K. It’s not O.K. by me.

Bagman makes a counter-argument from his own experience. He tells Billy of his earlier existence as a Civil Rights agitator in the South. After suffering from a brutal beating in jail and experiencing bad depression associated with that incident, he nearly committed suicide ‘because of what was all around me’. However, he was able to laugh off Moran’s brutal beating because ‘I’m now in Camelot’. Like Steve, he attempts to show Billy an alternative direction pointing out the two paths they all face: Truth and justice and the American way of life. That’s got to take a back seat to staying alive. Man, you can have the most beautiful ideals in the world. [Cut to Billy thinking.] But when you die, your ideals are going to die with you. The important thing is staying together and we’ve got to keep the troupe together and if keeping the troupe together means that we have to take this practical way then I suggest let’s take it and get some sleep.

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Romero gives equal screen time to Steve and Bagman’s arguments. They appear rational in recognising a world of everyday reality which sometimes involves compromise. However, despite the excessive idealism dominating Billy’s character, later events do prove Billy correct. The machinations of sleazy promoter Bontempi (Martin Ferrero) and his contemporary Morgan Le Fay associate Sheila (Amanda Davies) corrupt and nearly destroy the troupe. Finally, Billy’s ideals do live on after his death as the concluding scenes of Knightriders reveal. After contemplating Bagman’s arguments, Billy looks at Bontempi’s Silver Bullet business card, crumples it, and tosses it into the fire. He wakes up Bagman and denies there are two different paths, affirms the fact that ideals do not die with the person who holds them, and rides out to counter the commercial dragon in the person of Bontempi threatening his troupe: ‘The troupe is the code. I can’t let people walk on that idea, I can’t.’ Despite his wounds, Billy rides at night and finally arrives at his troupe’s Kansas location, angrily criticising an undemocratic meeting like a demented and tired Tom Dunson in Red River. He finds Tuck, wearing a revealing horned-devil’s cap, enjoying the pleasures of Sheila’s corpulent photographer Judy (Maureen Sadusk). Billy finally storms away after throwing a take-away pizza (another symbol of a commercial world) at Bontempi’s trendy clothes. Upset at the troupe’s disobeying his order to remain at their previous Pennsylvania location, Billy becomes more moody and angry. He now begins to doubt his cherished ideals. His leadership ability becomes more questionable. Although Linet criticises his attitude and their developing alienation, she does recognise the change he has brought to her life. Once, giving up on fantasy, she became attracted to Billy not his ‘dream’. However, despite speaking affirmatively of their two years together as King and Queen, Linet now sees the importance of his vision: ‘I don’t know if its because of you Billy. But I’m here.’ An ideal certainly lives on after the death of a relationship in her case as the climax of Knightriders will show. The Kansas tournament represents the beginning of the end for Billy’s leadership. It also reveals the initial appearance of a corruption which seriously threatens the entire troupe. Despite the absence of Julie’s father and the hoagie man, the Kansas audience appear more grotesque and bloodthirsty than their Pennsylvanian counterparts. Lacking any awareness of the knightriders’ dedication to their art and the nobility of their ideals, they gaze atavistically at the combat, roar for blood, or bop like mindless zombies when the PA system accidentally plays a crude rock number, ‘Let’s get it up’. Although one member of the troupe speaks positively about ‘that spiritual feeling’ motivating the majority, others are ready to sell out. The narcissistic Morgan decides to form his breakaway group, sign a contract with Bontempi and become king in his own way: ‘I don’t want his crown. It’s a crown of thorns.’ But Billy will soon face another avatar of his destiny. When Morgan rode through a small Kansas town, one shot showed him filling the frame after Sheila tempted him with commercial stardom. When Morgan rides out of the frame, the camera reveals a silent Indian (Albert Amerson) watching the procession. Both figures are instrumental in fulfilling Billy’s destiny. While Morgan is the future king, the Indian represents the death-wish destiny Billy has so eagerly pursued. 116

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The Indian appears melodramatically in a dust storm caused by the motor-cycle. He wears an emblem depicting a black bird. Despite Alan’s reservations and attempts to prevent him fighting, the still-wounded Billy rides out to meet his opponent: ‘If I refuse to fight. I have to yield.’ Despite further injuries, Billy defeats his opponent and forces him to yield. A beautifully composed shot reveals blood dripping from Billy’s body along his blade which falls on the Indian’s bird emblem. It will be Billy’s last heroic moment of glory. But, like his predecessors, Billy is the injured sacred king who will soon lose his authority according to the Arthurian legend and Golden Bough philosophy he espouses. Billy later watches in sadness as Morgan’s associates, Alan, Julie and Bors (Harold Wayne Jones) ride away from the troupe. But he believes they will be back. Although arrogant and one-dimensional in his ideals, Billy also recognises his flaws. In one scene, he attempts to apologise for his neglect of the loyal members of his team due to his focus upon the ‘lost sheep’. However, like Linet’s recognition of Billy’s lasting influence, his musician friend shrugs off the apology and replies, ‘Man, you gave us everything. You gave us a chance.’ The world outside offers no sanctuary for either Morgan’s knightriders or Alan’s group. Despite sampling the affluent life of Washington D.C., Morgan finds himself the degrading object of a sleazy photo shoot with his surplus associates such as Tuck and Judy liable to Bontempi’s ruthless business ‘termination’ policies. Initially attracted by Bontempi’s comparison of his breakaway knightriders to a pop group— ‘The smaller the group, the greater the profits’—he finds this vision realised in a manner he never envisaged when he returns one night to find his associates fighting and trashing a hotel room in a manner similar to the exploits of The Who’s drummer Keith Moon. Alan decides to visit some married friends who have chosen to live out in the country. But he finds their domestic bliss empty in relation to what he has experienced as a member of Billy’s group. As with Julie’s parents, the marital ideal appears deficient in comparison to the democratic life of Billy’s troupe where marriage and domesticity appear conspicuous by their very absence (or, at least, nonmention). Alan appears bored as they sit at a table dominated by a huge fast-food corporate carton. Bors begins an artificial impersonation of Marlon Brando’s acting, the imitative nature of which contrasts sharply with his active prowess as a knightrider. Julie sits lethargically by a pool, her attention focused on earphones, and calling to Alan like a bored housewife, ‘Let’s party!’ The following scene abruptly shows Alan delivering an incomprehensive Julie back to her parents at night. It initially appears callous on Alan’s part. But the action is much more complex and does not deserve Pauline’s Kael’s condescending and inaccurate comments concerning Julie having a ‘legitimate gripe’ since Alan ‘seems to remember that it’s Lancelot’s destiny to love the queen’.9 This remark typifies Kael’s usual inability to read a scene in its appropriate cinematic context; Alan’s action has nothing to do with his supposed destiny as Lancelot. Unlike Linet, Julie has not developed into understanding the significant nature of Billy’s ideals which motivate Alan and others. She, instead, remains on the level of indulging in a relationship which is little better than a ‘fling’. Julie shows no sign of any deeper awareness of the type of society which has allowed her access. She does not knight of the living dead

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understand what the knightriders really represent in terms of their appropriation of Howard Hawks’ professional code. As a result, she is ‘no good’. Ironically, Julie finally realises this as Alan and Bors ride away and the light in her parents home switches on. She mouths ‘oh fuck’, realising that she has blown it. Her position resembles that of Gent in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) whose reluctance to undertake a mission leads to his expulsion from the professional group. The Hawksian associations also apply to Billy’s rival; Morgan’s character parallels that of fallen heroes such as Bat in Only Angels Have Wings, Dude in Rio Bravo and J. P. Harrah in El Dorado. Like the latter two characters, Morgan has temporarily fallen due to the machinations of Sheila’s ‘no good’ woman. Although she never arrives on a stagecoach and promptly leaves like her unseen predecessors in Rio Bravo and El Dorado, she uses and abuses Morgan for commercial purposes. Once Morgan discovers that his bodily presence merely represents a temporary holiday away from her permanent boyfriend, his eyes become open. Like his fallen Hawksian predecessors, Morgan redeems himself by returning to the fold and eventually inheriting his leader’s mantle. Alan reunites with Morgan and the lost sheep all return home. The knightriders then decide to engage in their chosen activities for their eyes only without any intrusive and uncomprehending audience present to demean the nature of their personal ritual battles. Billy enjoys the dedication they all show in their skills and then decides to resign his crown to Morgan. He significantly experiences a final pleasure in seeing his group return without any prompting on his behalf. As with his earlier decision over Morgan’s mace, Billy has left decisions to their own collective conscience. Aware of his mortality, Linet’s feelings for Alan, and the fact that his ideals will outlive him, he leaves after saying poignant farewells, especially to his spiritual mentor Merlin, ‘I love you’. Billy then rides away followed by the Indian he has knighted. Before Billy can die, he has to perform two more heroic deeds. He returns to Pennsylvania, finds Moran gorging himself on junk food in a fast-food establishment and punishes his adversary, gaining the applause of everyone inside. As with the earlier junk food reference in Knightriders, this act seems a self-conscious ironic deed from a director who has commented elsewhere on the ‘McDonaldization of America’.10 Billy defeats another dragon and the applause of the audience suggests some hope for the future. He then makes amends with young Billy, entering his schoolroom, and presenting him with a symbol of a heroic ideal—his own Excalibur. His body increasingly bloodstained, Billy rides away followed by his Indian companion. Both pass a sign marking Gettysburg Park. Like the previous sequence showing Billy riding past the model of a crow’s head as the camera pans left to show a truck with a grille resembling a winged bird passing the camera, this emblem is symbolic in more than one sense. Gettysburg was one of the bloodiest battles in the Civil War in which the South, with its emblems of chivalry and nobility, suffered a crushing defeat. But it was also the site of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address which looked forward to the end of the Civil War and the eventual reunification of North and South. The dying Billy rides to his destiny and finally achieves his cherished ideal of seeing himself in a vision as a medieval knight riding a real horse before a heavy truck kills him. Although Billy’s fate may appear pessimistic, his death finally reunites the Knightriders in a poignant climactic scene in a cemetery. As a gentle rain falls, 118

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the lyrics of a song, ‘I’d Rather Be a Wanderer’, pronounce the knightrider ideal of community, professionalism and chosen exile in an increasingly contaminated and commercial world. The knightriders have experienced their own version of a Civil War. But they become reunited and much stronger in their ideals thanks to Billy’s vision and his symbolic sacrifice on their behalf. Morgan wears the crown. But he will also bear the burden of Billy’s crown of thorns as well as the poignant responsibility of leadership characterising Hawksian heroes in The Dawn Patrol and Only Angels Have Wings. As a black bird symbolising Billy’s spirit watches from a tree, the knightriders led by Morgan now ride away to face new challenges and the world outside which will continually threaten their existence but one which they will attempt to overcome in each new contest. Knightriders is a highly personal and sincere film revealing Romero’s utopian ideals in a cinematically allegorical manner. Although flawed by its long running time and some over-emphatic dialogue scenes, it is nonetheless one of the director’s major achievements which deserves better recognition. The film is somewhat idealistic and sentimental and represents a complete contrast to its more commercially successful predecessor. However, despite its formal problems, Knightriders is as close as any Romero film may be to the articulation of the goals which inspired the director throughout his career. The fictional knightriders represent a type of community composed of individuals who succeed in continuing their different forms of 1960s idealism as opposed to those lost souls in There’s Always Vanilla who have spiritually failed. They also embody the type of attitude seen in Romero’s own ideas of a film-making community who form an alliance, break apart and then recombine to continue practicing the very ideals which brought them together in the first place. Knightriders may not have the visceral appeal of the zombie trilogy, but it is a crucial film in understanding the necessary type of alternative the human survivors actually need.

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chapter nine

Creepshow

scripted by stephen King, Creepshow deliberately attempted to appropriate cinematically the visual style of EC Comics. The film promised to be the beginning of a collaboration between the two authors which would eventually lead to a film version of The Stand.1 Romero and King both knew that the EC comic tradition had been a significant influence on American popular culture both in terms of alternative images of the Cold War era and its satirical and subversive views of a conformist world.2 As Ron Hansen noted, Romero shared EC’s ironic treatment of fantastic situations ever since Night of the Living Dead. Hansen also quoted director of photography Michael Gornick’s observations concerning the similarities: ‘Aside, from the physical differences here, the lighting affectations and so forth, I think much of the way I normally shoot and George’s style of shot selection and cutting pretty much lend themselves to the comic-book format. The overall feel has always been with us.’3 However, although condemned by critics such as Robin Wood (who had no knowledge of the EC Comic tradition) as representing the worst of both King and Romero in ‘a series of nasty anecdotes in which nasty people do nasty things to other nasty people, the nastiness being the entire point and purpose’ (1986: 191), and Michael Sragow as a film indulging in ‘gross-out’,4 Creepshow is much more complicated than its detractors assume. At the same time, it is by no means successful. Ironically, like Knightriders, the emphatic depiction of ideas cherished by the author by no means guarantees the commercial success of the finished product. Explicitness does not necessary guarantee the creative expression of authorial ideals. Both The Crazies and Dawn of the Dead combine selected elements of EC style with allegorical messages. But if style dominates substance, the message may get lost amidst visual excessiveness. Such a danger affects Dawn of the Dead whose significant levels of meaning may be deliberately ignored by an audience wishing to dwell consciously on the gross-out factor and become little better than Stephen King’s slobbish hoagie man from Knightriders. But a key analysis of the text may reveal other elements in operation which counter certain indulgent aspects of audience reception.

However, Creepshow problematically relies too much on knowledge of the important cultural EC traditions which few outside America may be aware of. Like Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, ‘common sense’ associations concerning the supposedly trivial nature of comic strip representations may hinder appropriate understanding of relevant structural operations and drown out other significant levels of meaning. At the same time, it is not an entirely ‘gross-out’ production or a ‘feeble echo of the Amicus omnibus series’.5 On the one hand, Creepshow may represent a cultural indicator of a work appealing to the slob factor where ‘the lowest common denominator isn’t a term of derision but an admirable goal’ (Sragow 1982: 48). If the film is seen entirely in terms of terrifying the viewer by the ‘gross-out’ factor then this interpretation is relevant. However, other meanings are also present within its cinematic structure. The ‘gross-out’ factor also affected EC Comics. These culturally marginalised productions also contained important allegorical messages within their versions of ‘gross-out’. Both EC Comics and Stephen King’s writings put their respective audiences in touch with the ‘nightmare anxieties’ of youth, which are often socially based. The youthful readers of EC comics certainly noticed the differences between perception of real-life injustices and the hypocritical activities of the adult world. Vulnerable before the dominant hold of adults and parents, 1950s children often retreated into a fantasy realm where social justice would prevail in forms different from the realistic level of everyday existence. However adults, as well as children, formed a key component of EC comic readership, a fact the film’s epilogue significantly notes. The work of artists on war comics such as Two Fisted Tales as well as those other comic strips featuring narratives dealing with American outbreaks of lynching and anti-semitism in the pre-Civil Rights era would certainly have offended Cold War censorship forces. Ron Hansen noticed Creepshow’s embodiment of that recovered sense of childhood’s certainties, of what is good and what is evil and of just desserts, and quotes producer Richard Rubinstein: I think George has always regarded fantasy and horror as basically allegorical, and that’s something he has in common even with Grimm’s fairy tales. He says it’s a way of doing morality plays and still remaining commercial. You look at these stories in Creepshow, and it’s sin and retribution in almost every case. (1982: 76)

Romero and King’s publicised desires to ‘just go for scares’ may have hindered audiences recognising other significant ways in which Creepshow operates.6 A close analysis of the film reveals EC’s morality-play discourse as well as other associations appearing in Romero’s films. Although admittedly a minor part of Romero’s work and revealing his lack of fear of competing with the mainstream, Creepshow contains qualities which necessitate a second viewing. Yet they are not enough to furnish claims for regarding it as an unjustly neglected work; Creepshow is certainly far below the level of Romero’s better work. It represents an attempt to play explicitly with a formative cultural tradition revered by the author, but Romero had also achieved significant results elsewhere and really did not need the collaboration of Stephen King. Despite King’s screenplay employing elements common to knight of the living dead

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his horror fiction and film adaptations (see Williams : –), Romero had achieved better results elsewhere. Like the opening scene of The Crazies, the film begins with a long shot of a family home at night. Off-screen sounds of domestic dissension occur on the soundtrack. An angry father (Tom Atkins) screams at his young child: ‘I never saw such rotten crap in my life . . . I told you before I didn’t want you to read this stuff anymore.’ After a mid-shot of the house brings the viewer further into this harmonious world of family values, Romero abruptly changes to an interior shot framed by a low-angle close-up from young Billy’s (Joe King) perspective as his father brutally hits him for reading ‘Creepshow’, a comic book in the EC tradition. As in Night of the Living Dead, Romero intercuts images of animal heads on the walls to emphasise the fearful nature of this family home during certain moments. Mother (Iva Jean Saraceni) attempts to intervene criticising her husband for hiding ‘girlie’ books. Played by the same actress who portrayed the battered wife and mother in Knightriders, this mother’s intervention is also ineffective as her husband continues to chastise Billy: ‘Not only do I find he’s reading this crap but he’s a damn little sneak as well.’ Romero then associates rapid montage cuts of animal heads in his familiar manner of equating the so-called civilised domestic world to the savage natural world human beings have supposedly evolved from. The animal imagery is also an oblique reference to the naturalist tradition appearing throughout Romero’s work. Despite Billy’s denials, the father asserts his patriarchal authority by threatening further violence and throwing his son’s comic into the garbage bin. After he sends Billy up to his room, father brushes off his wife’s concerns: ‘Don’t you think you are a little hard on him?’ He counters by critiquing his son’s fascination with the grotesque imagery of contemporary comic books, ‘Do you want your son to read that?’ However, by depicting the father slouching on a couch and grasping a full whisky glass as he pompously asserts his parental rights, ‘That’s why God made fathers’, Romero brings to viewer attention the contrast between appearance and reality which structures Creepshow’s entire narrative. As well as hypocritically denying his own retreat into fantasy, the father asserts dominance of a patriarchal world of normality within everyday life wherein ‘father knows best’. He also asserts religious authority for his activities which rely both on violence and female domestic subordination for their operation. However, although his pronouncements concerning family life seem to represent the way things appear to be, they are also based in reality upon the savage exercise of patriarchal violence which the father and mother would deny as being an operational control mechanism of everyday life. Furthermore, although his punitive activities now appear to us as untenable, they are a fundamental part of everyday existence, one both based upon denial and the repression of any imaginative alternatives to everyday life. Deprived of any positive outlet for his imagination, Billy curses his father for throwing away his comic book: ‘I hope you rot in hell.’ Billy is alone in his bedroom which is dominated by horror film artefacts such as a poster of Bela Lugosi as Dracula and various monster toys. Living in his world of EC comics, Billy imaginatively evokes a decaying figure who actually typifies the reality of the grotesque world he inhabits as a little boy existing in a family world of supposed normality. The figure also represents his revenge on a hypocritical adult world. 122

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Billy conjures up the Creepshow host outside his window whom he welcomes with great pleasure. When the screen images change from real to comic strip representations, ‘the Creep’ retrieves Billy’s comic book from the trashcan by a camera movement impossible in real life but possible within the imaginative realms of animation and comic strip fantasy. The credits roll before the pages magically turn to the first story which, more than coincidentally, is titled ‘Father’s Day’. Like the old EC comics, Creepshow will present the viewer with five separate stories interspersed with adverts and other matters. They are both stories remembered by Billy and displayed to the audience as well as narratives influenced by the EC ‘moral tales’ tradition concerning the punishment inflicted on representatives of an errant everyday world of normality by avatars of the fantastic. Both Creepshow and the EC comic tradition utilise the horror tradition of the ‘return of the repressed’ whereby signifiers of the injustices perpetuated by the world of normality return in a distorted, corrupted and decaying form to avenge themselves upon the representatives of a normal, but corrupt, world. These horrific signifiers are by no means ‘real’ but they represent the wish-fulfilment victory of a fantastic world whose appearance contradicts a world of everyday appearance whose supposed normality may be more corrupt than anything represented in a horror comic. In Creepshow, the worlds of appearance and reality conflate in the same manner as the introductions and conclusions of each individual tale—by moving from a comic strip style to reality and back again. Veteran EC Comic artist Jack Kamen provided the opening ‘splash page’ for each of the five stories as well as the concluding graphic image when the story dissolves away from live action. ‘Father’s Day’ begins with a clock chiming inside the Grantham mansion with family members gathered reluctantly for their celebration of the day their greataunt Bedelia (Viveca Lindfors) murdered her senile father seven years before. Like Barbara and Johnny’s visit to the graveyard in Night of the Living Dead, it is a ritual they have no real feeling for. But, as Aunt Sylvia (Carrie Nye) explains, it is a ritual dominated by hopes of inheritance, a motivation binding the disparate family members of Richard Grantham (Warner Shook), his sister Cass (Elizabeth Regan) and her husband Hank Blaine (Ed Harris) together despite the evident fact that they hate the sight of each other. The Grantham’s annual Father’s Day family dinner never intends to honour a beloved father figure. It is rather to celebrate the fact that the ‘old bastard’ is dead. Every year since his death, Aunt Bedelia makes an annual pilgrimage to his grave to wallow in guilt. As Silvia comments, ‘You can set your watch by her’, a comment which relates both to the clock introducing the interior sequence as well as the lifeless, mechanical, ritualistic living dead patterns of behaviour they all follow. When introducing Bedelia, Romero employs a visual tradition associated with EC Comics by using two adjacent framed strips lying on top of a rectangular one showing her in freeze frame. Then the image tilts to fill the screen with the rectangular shot which then reveals its occupant in motion smoking an exaggerated, but highly ironic large phallic cigar. It is almost as if Bedelia is little better than a frozen corpse who becomes reanimated to participate in a meaningless ritual pattern of behaviour. The snobbishly British-accented Silvia begins her off-screen voiceover narrative telling both family members and audience about past history. As Silvia relates the family knight of the living dead

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tale, the film moves into flashback visually reproducing the stylistic techniques of EC comics by framing the past events in stylistically askew angles and presenting its characters imitating the grotesque Delsarte-type expressions typical of 1950s comic reproductions and ‘non-realistic’ acting traditions.7 The characters are exaggerated for a particular purpose since the grotesque world presents a dark Gothic reflection of the supposedly clean world of everyday normality. During the quick flashback neither Jon Lormer’s Nathan Grantham nor Viveca Lindfors’ Aunt Bedelia are meant to represent real people, as the distancing nature of the antique gold frame bearing the caption ‘Seven years earlier...’ signifies. As the dislocatingly framed images of the past unfold, Silvia describes Bedelia’s father as being ‘possessively jealous’ of his daughter ‘all her life, a complete Freudian relationship’. This latter remark certainly contradicts Romero’s often-repeated disavowals concerning the psychoanalytic significance of his work. ‘Father’s Day’ is not only a Freudian horror tale but a reworking of ideas previously seen in Night of the Living Dead. Although scripted by King, the film is Romero’s and may bear traces of his involvement in the screenplay. This is particularly so in terms of the symbiotic relationship between the warring family within the house and the external threat existing outside. Although the Granthams do not resort to physical violence like Harry Cooper in Night of the Living Dead, their aggression takes the form of verbal sniping and humiliating remarks against each other, a behaviour pattern metaphorically paralleling cannibalism. The flashback continues to show the death of Bedelia’s 75-year-old suitor Yarbro (Peter Messer) in a hunting accident arranged by Nathan and the incessant verbal aggression practiced by the father against his beleaguered daughter: ‘Where’s my cake, Bedelia? I want my cake you fucking bitch.’ As he angrily repeats his demand for his ‘Father’s Day’ cake, Nathan’s desires parallel Freudian repetition compulsion mechanism symptomatic of unhealthy neurotic patterns of behaviour. After preventing the departure of his daughter by ensuring his continued possession of her in the family’s Gothic mansion, he articulates his incestuous feelings by repeatedly emphasising the need for oral satisfaction that is little better than cannibalism. As in Romero’s zombie trilogy, cannibalism, possession and pathological behaviour of the bourgeois family are all intertwined. Nathan’s further comments also articulate the avaricious nature of a deeply dysfunctional family relationship based upon verbal aggression: ‘Bedelia, you bitch. You’re just like the others, you’re really like that band of vultures.’ Despite the grotesque nature of the visual and acting devices employed in this sequence, ‘Father’s Day’ is much more a Romero morality play than the redundant copying of the EC style Stephen King believes it to be. With no avenue of escape, Bedelia reacts against the possessive hold of her father—‘Where’s my cake? I’m your father. You’re supposed to take care of me’—by murdering him. She stabs her father repeatedly like Norman Bates in the Psycho shower scene, venting her repressed sexual frustrations against the oppressor whose equally thwarted desires take the form of verbal abuse. As family maid Mrs Danvers (Nan Mogg) overhears the deadly event, Romero intercuts the murder scene with his characteristic use of animal head jump cuts.8 They symbolise those dark, primeval features still dormant within the human psyche no matter how ‘civilised’ certain environments 124

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may appear. They may include the Norman Rockwell farmhouse interior of Night of the Living Dead, the consumerist mall paradise of Dawn of the Dead, Billy’s 1950s family home in the prologue or Nathan’s rich Gothic mansion. Bedelia’s comments made during her repeated stabbing of her father are revealing. They link together various associated themes of incestuous desires, possessiveness and the traditional family’s role of transmitting the psychopathological nature of so-called ‘instinctual’ behaviour which civilisation transmits from one generation to the next: ‘You screwed it all up. You screwed-up my mother. You screwed up me. You called me a bitch . . . You taught Silvia. You taught us all.’ The narrative returns to the present showing Bedelia by her father’s grave. Her life is now reduced to bearing the burden of oppressive family guilt and dependence upon civilisation’s narcotic remedies for unhappiness such as smoking and hard liquor. Bedelia now faces the return of her father from the grave. Emerging as a disintegrating corpse in classic EC tradition, Nathan (John Amplas) also follows the pathological nature of repetition-compulsive patterns of behaviour he exhibited in life by once again expressing patriarchal acquisitiveness: ‘Where’s my cake, Bedelia? I want my cake. It’s Father’s Day, Bedelia. I want my cake.’ He then strangles her. The next image shows the clock chiming inside the Grantham mansion. Cass and Hank dance to rock music while Richard and Silvia look on in disdain. Noting Bedelia’s absence, the quartet bicker before Hank decides to go and look for her. Striking his match on a cherub headstone, an action paralleling Johnny’s irreverence in the opening sequence of Night of the Living Dead ), Hank discovers Bedelia’s discarded whiskey bottle, and drinks from it before Nathan’s appearance causes him to fall into the grave. In an act of poetic justice, Nathan’s headstone falls on Hank and crushes him. Inside the house, the remaining family members remark on Hank and Bedelia’s absence and wish to begin their Father’s Day meal of ham. Cass, significantly, wishes to fulfil two appetites. She has married Hank for his stud qualities and wishes to engage in her own form of consumerist pleasure: ‘I want him and I want my dinner. I’m hungry.’ The possessive cannibalism linking the Granthams again returns with a vengeance. Silvia decides to look for Hank. Her dialogue also suggests her wish to fill another type of appetite: ‘I’ll go and get him. He’s such a sweet guy.’ However, when she reaches the kitchen she discovers Mrs Danvers’ dead body, the head of which is framed in a circular window, intimating Silvia’s own fate as the nominal head of the Grantham family. She is also a person whose avaricious nature benefited from Nathan’s earlier education. Bedelia once commented to her father, ‘You taught Silvia.’ Ironically, father now returns from the grave to possess the daughter figure whose avariciousness matches his own. Repeating once more the phrase, ‘I want my cake’, he twists Silvia’s head off. ‘Father’s Day’ concludes in an appropriately grotesque manner. Cass and Richard go in search of Silvia and discover traces of Nate’s gory activities in the kitchen. Nate then triumphantly appears carrying Silvia’s head in the middle of a tray. His final lines are now different: ‘Father’s Day. I got my cake. Happy Father’s Day.’ Romero frames the three characters in a triangular position reminiscent of significant groupings in Hitchcock films such as Rope (1948). Nate is at the apex in the background. knight of the living dead

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Cass and Richard appear left and right of the frame in the foreground. Silvia’s head occupies the centre of the frame. It is gruesomely decorated with frosting and candles, making it resemble the head of the Statue of Liberty. This macabre conclusion associates the typical ironic ending of an EC comic with one of Romero’s cherished themes. Like the American flag seen in the opening of Night of the Living Dead flying over the graveyard, Silvia’s final appearance in ‘Father’s Day’ links a pathological living dead family unit to one of the key signifiers of the American ideal, an ideal now redundant and bankrupt in the twentieth century. ‘Father’s Day’ concludes with the victory of Freud’s ‘Death Instinct’ firmly entrenched inside the American family and literally continuing beyond death as embodied in Nate’s decaying corpse. As played by John Amplas, Nate resembles the later stages of Romero’s zombies in Day of the Dead. All these figures are shuffling bodies in advanced stages of decay but still animated by pathologically possessive desires which motivated them in life. Despite the jocular EC-influenced style employed in this sequence, Romero’s intentions echo those operating in his more serious films. EC humour and exaggerated performance style also dominate ‘The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill’. Despite some amateurish mugging by Stephen King in the title role, the story offers much more than Tom Milne’s dismissive description of its premises as ‘the most drearily predictable of the five tales’ (1982: 216). A deterministic premise worthy of literary naturalism’s bleak premises operates within this narrative. But the deterministic nature of Jordy’s fate is not entirely due to the arbitrary arrival of the meteorite on his farm. Although Jordy’s contact with the object seals his fate, other factors are also involved. Jordy lives alone in a ramshackle farm somewhere in Maine. When the meteorite lands on his property, he talks to it as if it were a living person and regards it solely as an opportunity for making money. Although Jordy sees it as chance to pay off a $200 bank loan, his motivations are really more avaricious. He sees it in terms of making a fast buck. Jordy first comments, ‘I wonder how much they’d pay for it at the college’. As with the flashback in ‘Father’s Day’, Romero uses canted angle shots and frame-within-frame images. But this time his images depict Jordy’s fantasy desires. As he enters the local college’s Department of Meteors, the soundtrack ironically plays a version of a traditional English academic song which sounds as inappropriate as Aunt Silvia’s cultural pretensions in the previous story. As ‘The Crate’ will show, academia is little better than those other corrupt institutional mechanisms of civilisation Romero sees as prejudicial to human development. A grotesque series of images show Jordy and a professor bargaining over the economic aspects of possession. When the scene changes to the present, Jody then announces his desire to ‘Pay off the bank loan. That’s the ticket. Got to cool that son of a bitch off.’ He pours a bucket of water over the hot meteorite to see it crack open and release a gooey liquid which Jordy describes as ‘meteorshit’. Imagining his dreams of economic gain dissipating as the professor comments, ‘You must be joking. I wouldn’t give you two cents’, he walks away hoping, ‘Maybe, I can glue it together in the morning.’ Jordy’s ‘meteorshit’ comment is by no means accidental. It evokes the Freudian motif of wealth as ‘filthy lucre’ in terms of its anal associations developed by Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death. Furthermore, the colour of the vegetation 126

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is green which is also the colour of the American dollar. In view of Romero’s final identification of Aunt Silvia with the Statue of Liberty in the concluding scene of ‘Father’s Day’, such an association is certainly not accidental. Jody then goes to sulk in front of his television set. The 1950s programmes he views contain significant insights into his own personal dilemma. He first watches a wrestling match, a contest not only symbolising his own lack of masculine aggressiveness but an entertainment commonly known for its fabricated manufacture of violent spectacle before a bloodthirsty audience. As Jordy opens his bottle, the frame successively dissolves to the meteorite, Jordy’s head, the bucket he has discarded outside, and again to the television set. These images are arbitrary in nature. But they all equally depict a collective contamination affecting the main character. They range from physical contact with the meteorite to the more subtle civilised elements of passive television consumption and alcoholic oblivion. As the exotic green weeds spread outside, Jordy discovers them sprouting from his blistered fingers. He also undergoes a castration fantasy as he imagines himself visiting a doctor and awaiting the removal of his offending members with a meat cleaver. As Jordy and his environment gradually change to green, the television plays an old black-and-white Hollywood film where a grandmother and granddaughter talk about the old pioneer ideals. Certain lines are significant: ‘There’s a difference between dreaming and doing and more’; ‘We’ve got to make a new country and to see our dreams come true.’ These lines from A Star is Born (1937) function ironically in terms of their juxtaposition with Jordy’s passive figure and the Popov bottle of Vodka he consumes. As the descendant of the old pioneers, Jordy’s figure provides a telling contrast both to the ideologies of the old Jefferson farmer yeoman ideal as well as to Hollywood fantasies. Finally, a religious broadcaster appears to urge his congregation of viewers to ‘begin a good thing’. His message finishes with an offscreen announcer mentioning that the image was pre-recorded and not real. Jordy’s dilemma is not just related to the random appearance of a meteor in his back garden but also to other pertinent social factors conditioning his everyday existence. Jordy Verrill is a solitary figure. We learn nothing about his life other than the information contained in the segment. He dreams rather than acts, lives in a ramshackle farm and passively indulges in the mass-produced narcotic fantasies provided by his culture; Jordy is little better than the vegetation he is on his way to becoming part of. As he attempts to take a bath to curtail the growth affecting him, his father’s image appears in a mirror warning him about the consequences. Like Nathan Grantham, the father’s role is punitive and threatening, embodying patriarchal damage affecting his son’s personal development. His warning also attempts to stop Jordy reversing the contamination. Father (Bingo O’Malley) comments, ‘You get into that water, Jordy. You might as well make up your death warrant.’ He appears to be another agent in the contamination process physically represented by the inhuman vegetation slowly making his son less than human. However, Jordy vainly attempts his final cleansing. As he wakes in the morning, the radio broadcasts a positive forecast of rising grain prices and new high profits. The commentator also ironically remarks that the favourable weather will result in the landscape becoming ‘green in the next few months’ which will be ‘about miraculous’. His remarks also parody knight of the living dead

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the agrarian ideal featured in the old movie Jordy briefly listened to as well as the pre-recorded message of the religious commentator. However, the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer ideal and religious motivations of early American history now become perverted into promoting a contaminating capitalism which will eventually infect everyone in the same way as the meteor vegetation consumes Jordy. Jordy can no longer share in this new American Dream. The ‘meteorshit’ rapidly turns him into a living embodiment of vegetation making him little better than a zombie functioning on basic instinctual patterns of behaviour. Left with the remaining vestiges of the little conscious thought he has, Jordy finally attempts a successful suicide by blowing his head off with his shotgun. Like certain human victims of Romero’s zombies, he makes a last-ditch effort to avoid the final stages of contamination which will take away the remaining features of his humanity. Jordy’s act also parallels Peter’s abandoned plan in the final scenes of Dawn of the Dead. But, unlike Peter, Jordy has no real hope or chance of survival. The sequence concludes with the real-life image of the vegetation slowly creeping towards inhabited town areas in a manner similar to Hitchcock’s final image in The Birds where the winged threats to human survival ominously dominate the landscape. Although Jordy’s death appears both arbitrary and deterministic, enough evidence appears in this episode to suggest the indirect involvement of other culturally relevant factors contributing towards his personal downfall. Both the legacy of America’s historical past and human agency face contamination by a malevolent plague. Despite its jokey imagery, this Creepshow segment contains a message as serious as those in Romero’s other significant films. ‘Something to Tide You Over’ links together the domestic possessive motif of ‘Father’s Day’ as well as Romero’s ironic criticisms of the television apparatus appearing in Night of the Living Dead, There’s Always Vanilla and Dawn of the Dead. Possessive husband and technological fetishist Richard Vickers (Leslie Nielsen) plans a vindictive revenge against his wife Rebecca (Gaylen Ross) and her lover Harry Wentworth (Ted Danson) for violating his patriarchal rights. As with the rest of the Creepshow tales, the key theme involves destructive possessiveness. But while Harry and Rebecca wish to live their lives freely—‘She just wants out. No alimony. No community property rules’—Richard, like Nathan Grantham of ‘Father’s Day’, regards family as his own personal property: ‘I keep what is mine. No exceptions to that rule, Harry. No exceptions, whatever.’ Threatening Harry with his hold over Rebecca, Richard forces his victim to accompany him to the beach and buries him up to his neck in the sand. As the water approaches, Richard provides his own perverse form of live entertainment for Harry. He places before his victim a television monitor showing Rebecca drowning in another part of the beach. Richard also has video cameras recording the deaths of his wife and lover as she drowns before his helpless eyes. Richard’s deadly technological game has definite Hitchcock associations. Like ‘the master of suspense’, Richard is fascinated by technology in pursuing his own form of murderous gaze. While she drowns, Rebecca becomes Romero’s version of Laura Mulvey’s cinematic female dominated by the male gaze. However, Rebecca’s position is not one which the males gain sexual pleasure from. Buried in the sand up to her neck, Rebecca is reduced to the helpless position of a passive fetish object. But her 128

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visual image results from an explicit patriarchal revenge fantasy in which the husband disposes of his property in the manner he thinks most fitting. Richard takes a sadistic voyeuristic pleasure in the proceedings, but Harry gazes in sympathy and masochistic helplessness while his lover drowns. The deaths of Harry and Rebecca occur in the ironically named ‘Comfort Rest’, an environment which is ‘very private’. As Richard comments in his usual proprietorial manner, ‘I own it all.’ When Richard returns home, Romero reveals television monitors showing his car arriving. As a Buddha image appears on the screen symbolising the compassionate and non-avaricious qualities absent from its owner, Richard switches on two television monitors to watch the last moments of Harry and Rebecca. While Richard gazes at this live television entertainment, Harry voices his revenge. When Richard later returns to the scene of his crime, he finds the television monitor and VCR still there but Harry absent. Believing the current has dragged his victim out to sea, he returns home. However, Richard will not live long enough to enjoy any further employment of his murderous gaze. After a monitor showing an old black-and-white movie blacks out, Richard hears the voices of his drowned victims who confront him in his bathroom and reduce him to helpless insanity. ‘Something to Tide Over Me’ concludes in typical EC Comic poetic morality mode. A video camera appears on the beach at night. Two pairs of feet imprinted in the sand lead towards the ocean. The final image shows Richard buried up to his neck while the tide rushes in. He insanely laughs and challenges his executioners to do something he urged them to do before: ‘I can hold my breath . . . a loooonnnggg . . . time.’ As this possessive husband meets his fate on his private beach still affirming anally retentive qualities in his final moments, the image changes to comic strip form. ‘The Crate’ begins with an overhead shot showing janitor Mike (Don Keefer) toss a quarter into the air in a college basement zoology lab to decide which area he will clean. When it falls behind the grille in the stairway, he discovers a crate from an 1834 Arctic Expedition delivered to Horlicks University. Although the fictional name for the location appears trivial in nature, it does relate to the very premises of the plot which involves both the awakening of a creature from slumber as well as the similar awakening of Professor Henry Northrup (Hal Holbrook) to perform in reality one of his most desired wish fulfillment fantasies. The next sequence shows a stuffy faculty party where Henry’s vulgar, lower-class wife Wilma (Adrienne Barbeau) embarrasses her husband and eminent guests by her brash behavior. Attaching herself to a new faculty couple, the Raymonds (the demure faculty wife superbly portrayed by Christine Forrest), Wilma (or ‘Call Me Billie’) vocally disrupts the genteel nature of the proceedings. Although one guest asks, ‘Why do they keep inviting her?’, everyone suffers in polite silence according to unspoken taboos of the academic world whereby hypocritical convention and sterile rituals dominate more rational forms of behaviour. ‘The Crate’ is a story which brings together two opposing realms of academic self-deception and direct activity into conflict via the MacGuffin device of the creature released from its long captivity. It also satirises the world of higher learning which is equally as hypocritical and deceptive as the other institutional realms of government, media, and the knight of the living dead

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military Romero condemns elsewhere. Adrienne Barbeau’s Wilma certainly appears as a human monster throughout the film or a human equivalent of the creature in the crate, as Gagne notes (1987: 130). But beneath the superficial level of laughing at Wilma’s fall and Henry’s revenge, other salient factors operate. Who is the real monster in the film? Wilma? Henry? Or even the average member of the audience who laughs at the episode without considering its wider implications? During the party, Wilma spies Henry’s friend Dexter Stanley (Fritz Weaver) chatting with a young female graduate student. Dexter then receives a message from Mike asking him to investigate the crate. Although regretting his lost opportunity as an authority figure to further ‘converse’ with his willing audience, Dexter is relieved to be away from Wilma’s presence. At the same time, Henry dreams of shooting her in the head with a Magnum to the polite applause of his fellow faculty members. He later fantasises about strangling her with his tie. These two fantasy sequences are important since they numerically correspond to the deaths of Mike and graduate student Charlie (Robert Harper) later in the film. They also contribute to the ‘dreaming and doing’ motif which also occurs in ‘The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill’ as well as the fluid lines dividing reality and fantasy in Romero’s work. The most basic level of audience reaction to the plot would appear to be pleasure at Henry’s eventual disposal of Wilma. However, although she is definitely annoying and irritating, she is also a human being. Furthermore, one may ask why Henry married her in the first place since they are obviously mismatched as a couple. Certain answers are possible. Firstly, although we never learn whether Wilma has an actual job we do know that she is supposedly attending classes later that evening. Despite the fact that she returns drunk after a night on the town, the possibility remains that she was once Henry’s student whom he married under duress. Two instances in the film support this. First, Wilma takes great pleasure in looking at Dexter talking to his female student. Secondly, when Henry later tells her that Dexter has got into trouble with a graduate student who has ‘crawled into a dark corner and won’t come out’, this acts as a sufficient bait to entice her to the basement. Perhaps Henry did get himself into trouble once and extricated himself by a hasty marriage to Wilma? Anyway, certainty on this matter is impossible since everyone exists in an academic environment based on duplicity, hypocrisy and evasion of the realities of everyday life. It is an environment Wilma knows all too well. As she loudly tells the Raymonds, ‘Some of these so-called academics make the shark in Jaws look like fucking Flipper!’ When Dexter arrives at the laboratory, he and Mike open the crate and find an ape-like creature inside who devours the janitor. After the distraught Dexter enlists Charlie to his aid, another victim falls prey to its appetite. Dexter hysterically rushes to Henry’s house and tells him about the incidents on the evening they usually play chess together. When Dexter relates the details, Romero films a chess set in the foreground while Henry tells his colleague, ‘I can’t do anything unless you stop being so damned hysterical!’ The contrast between the rational world of chess and the irrational behaviour of Dexter is visually evident. Two people have already died. However, Henry now sees an ideal opportunity to remove Wilma from his life for good. He feeds his friend a drink mixed with a sleeping potion and phones his wife from the zoology basement to entice her to Amberson Hall.9 130

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Once inside, he pushes her next to the crate, vainly attempting to rouse the creature from its slumber. After looking at her husband in amazement, Wilma then begins attacking his impotence on every conceivable level. Henry is ‘no good at departmental politics, making money . . . anything. When was the last time you made it in bed?’ This last comment finally evokes Henry’s return of the repressed as the creature emerges from its crate to claw her and take her body inside. Henry then tells his wife, ‘Just tell it to call you “Billie”.’ He soon chains up the crate as the creature’s claws extend from the inside before dumping the crate and its contents into a deserted lake. Henry then tells Dexter the events of the previous evening. The two honourable academic gentlemen subsequently decide to remain silent over the whole affair as they sit down to a game of chess. Despite the fact that the activities of both men have resulted in deaths (one accidental, the other intentional), they agree to maintain an institutional silence over a disturbing affair, one based upon academia’s perennial ‘use and abuse’ syndrome. They deny anything has happened. Dexter comments, ‘I hate doing anything to anybody.’ Henry replies, ‘Neither have I’ before realising the possible consequences: ‘What if it gets out, gets out of the crate?’ The final images reveal the creature active within the depths struggling to break out of its confines before a shot ends in a close-up of its eyes. There is no need to show the eventual outcome. The suggestion remains that Henry will be forever haunted by the fear of a future revenge as much as he was haunted by the figure of his deceased wife. As the final image changes to its graphic counterpart, the close-up of the eyes intimate that Henry’s moral punishment is not too far away. ‘They’re Creeping Up on You’ is Creepshow’s final episode. It appropriately unites the EC graphic style with underlying social comment in a manner which remains both true to its original source as well as Romero’s own concerns as director. Like ‘The Crate’, this episode opens with a foreboding overhead shot which changes from comic to ‘real’ style as the narrative begins. It introduces us to financier Upson Pratt (E. G. Marshall), a reclusive Howard Hughes figure who lives in a white antiseptic apartment complex at the top of a Gothic brownstone mansion in New York.10 As he meticulously sprays a roach which has invaded his environment and disposes of the remains down a waste chute, his 1950s Wurlitzer jukebox plays jazz music reminiscent of the Roaring Twenties.11 This incongruity is by no means accidental. Both sound and image link two separate, incongruous, but revealing periods. Despite the glamour of the Roaring Twenties, the era was one of political oppression and racism, a decade which would end in the Wall Street Crash. Pratt is going to face his particular version of a ‘Crash’ in more ways than one. His 1950s jukebox would normally play 1950s rock music rather than the sounds from Pratt’s youthful days. He, quite obviously, chooses what he wants to remember. But the presence of a 1950s artefact in his modern sterile complex evokes the decade of EC comics which contained graphic morality revenge plots against vindictive characters. As Pratt removes the offending roach from his sight, he comments ‘I’m going to get bugs.’ But his later remarks reveal that he regards human beings as little better than insects. Irritated at the fact that his modern white, climate-controlled environment does not protect him from his insect phobia he immediately plans vindictive knight of the living dead

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reprisals against his employees: ‘Heads are going to roll. I promise you that.’ Pratt then harasses executive employee George Gledhill on the intercom, abusively insults black handyman Mr. White (David Early) and threatens building superintendent Reynolds with dismissal unless he return immediately from his family vacation in Orlando, Florida, to deal with the situation. As Pratt examines his latest stock values on a machine, Gledhill informs him that business competitor Katzenmeyer committed suicide after failing to stop Pratt’s corporate takeover. The ruthless tycoon selfishly comments, ‘Wonderful. Now we don’t have to offer that old fart a seat on the board of directors.’ Like the Grantham family and Richard Vickers, Pratt is another of Creepshow’s greedy capitalist figures who will soon face his destiny. Like the others, his downfall will result from a factor symbolising the pathological nature of his possessive qualities. But, in his case, roaches, rather than cake or a television monitor, will cause his downfall. As Pratt reacts against a brown-coloured roach invading his person, he remarks ‘Once they get a foothold in the building, you never get rid of them.’ This also applies to human beings. He separates himself both from the outside world and any form of human contact. He prefers to live in an antiseptic world built upon his ruthless methods of personal acquisition. Pratt demeaningly regards his victims and employees as ‘stupid’ and little better than disposable roaches as the following remarks show: ‘Katzenmeyer! Reynolds! Bugs! That’s all they are!’ However, the roaches represent Pratt’s particular form of the ‘return of the repressed’ as the cake and television apparatus do in ‘Father’s Day’ and ‘Something to Tide You Over’. Pratt receives a phone call from Katzenmeyer’s widow who condemns his vicious selfishness. She ends her message with the curse, ‘I hope you get cancer in the right place’. The bugs not only perform the role of her avenging agents but also represent Pratt’s personal fears equating them with a deadly disease. Pratt comments, ‘I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen. I know what to do with a bug when I see it.’ Like the title character in Budd Schulberg’s novel What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), Pratt is running away from memories of his early deprived environment. He has become an oppressor the more he attempts to distance himself from it. But the bugs will eventually avenge both themselves and the countless human victims who have perished in Pratt’s ruthless rise to the top of the economic ladder. Ironically, his very position at the summit of an apartment complex will not save him. Although the inside environment is antiseptically white, the building’s exterior is brown. The colour significantly parallels Pratt’s New York brownstone mansion and the roaches who will eventually invade his territory as well as his body. It also symbolically evokes the economic anality which has motivated his entire existence. A blackout disrupts the power mechanisms inside Pratt’s apartment. Although he attempts to enlist White’s aid, the black handyman expresses relish at being unable to answer Pratt’s call. White looks at Pratt through the glass porthole of his apartment door. The reclusive magnate resembles a human looking at an animal or a pre-Civil War Southern gentleman viewing a caged slave with bemusement. Since Pratt earlier made racially disdainful comments about White’s race and occupation, this latter interpretation is more appropriate under the circumstances. Pratt then retreats to his sealed bedroom vowing revenge on both humans and insects: ‘You’ll never get in here 132

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and when the blackout is over people are going to pay. I’ve been beating bugs all my life and I’ll beat you too.’ However, after hearing Mrs Katzenmeyer’s last judgement, ‘I hope you die’, Pratt looks in horror as his bedspread vibrates and bugs emerge from it. He collapses in terror. The following morning when the power returns, Romero films the apartment as if nothing has happened apart from an overturned cereal bowl. White calls to Pratt from outside: ‘What’s the matter, Mr Pratt. Bugs got your tongue?’ We then see Pratt’s dead body on his bed. His chest vibrates like John Hurt’s stomach in Alien (1979) prior to the chestburster’s appearance. Swarms of roaches them emerge from Pratt’s mouth. They have feasted on him internally in an inverse manner to Romero’s zombies and cover his bedroom in a brown tide. It is a fitting revenge both in terms of Pratt’s aversion to dirt and the excremental associations of the ‘filthy lucre’ he has devoted his entire life to acquiring. Pratt becomes consumed by the objects he fears most. These objects represent the return of a pathologically repressive possessiveness. It is often denied by the main characters but acts as a motivating characteristic affecting virtually all the Creepshow stories. The film then moves towards its epilogue with young Billy achieving a poetic justice in regard to his abusive father by sticking a voodoo doll he acquired from a Creepshow advert full of pins. Two garbage men find the comic but decide not to throw it away; one (Marty Schiff ) comments, ‘My kids love those things’ and his companion (Tom Savini) adds, ‘I love ‘em too.’ His remark underscores the fascination an adult world has for the subversive nature of the EC comic strip both in the 1950s as well as the early Reaganite era. This latter era saw the 1950s values of rapacious conspicuous consumption capitalism return to America with a vengeance. It was now time to bring the zombies back to centre stage.

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chapter ten

Day of the Dead

until the release of Land of the Dead, the 1980s seemed to suggest that Day of the Dead would have been the last episode in the original, allegorically-inclined unpublished story George A. Romero wrote many decades ago under the title of ‘Anubis’. It was initially composed in three movements which roughly corresponded with the themes contained within his cinematic zombie trilogy. The first movement involved a group of people taking refuge in an isolated farmhouse as the zombie plague begins. They all end up eaten. The second movement begins some six months later with a civilian and military posse moving through the area exterminating zombies. However, the surviving zombies find some weapons accidentally left behind and remember how they used these implements in their former life as human beings. This movement concludes with an army of zombies chasing a solitary wounded human being across the country. The human reaches the farmhouse and dies when the zombies drill him full of holes. ‘Anubis’ then leads towards its conclusion which involves the theme of an army of zombies controlled by human masters. Romero looked upon ‘Anubis’ as an allegory dealing with the consequences of an incoming revolutionary society represented by zombies who replace an existing social order of humans. Ironically, the moral is that nothing really changes at all (Gagne 1987: 24–5).1 It is not hard to see in this treatment certain parallels with the issues raised in his second film, which involved the failure of 1960s ideals and the movement towards conformity on the part of the younger generation. There’s Always Vanilla is a title applicable both to the earlier film as well as several issues raised throughout Romero’s work. In 1978 Romero expanded his vision of ‘Anubis’s’ final movement by writing a forty-page treatment which elaborated on the images of a zombie army chasing a living human being contained in his original treatment. This eventually became the basis of the first and second screenplay drafts which Romero finally altered into the present film version due to a production deal necessitating its theatrical appearance by 1985 (see Gagne 1987: 147–50).2 An outline of the earlier version reveals not only the exciting allegorical nature of Romero’s approach but also the manner in which the film version differs from the director’s earlier ideas. Although Romero regretted

his inability to film his original vision, Day of the Dead is, nevertheless, one of his major achievements as critics such as Robin Wood have recognised (see Wood 1986b: 45–9). It is an extremely remarkable work, one whose premises make it a fascinating production appearing in a Reagan era characterised by a reactionary cinematic focus on conservative ‘mindless entertainment’.3 Despite its emergence in the reactionary 1980s, Day of the Dead is one of the few horror films of that decade which keeps faith with the radical generic traditions of previous decades. The majority of contemporary horror films such as the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series did not live up to the pioneering trends set by their predecessors in the 1970s. The initial screenplay drafts begin with images of a Florida city some five years after the zombie plague. As in the film version, shots of an alligator crawling out of an abandoned bank, useless dollar bills littering the floor and a decaying zombie, lacking a lower jaw bone, appear symbolising the detritus and decay of a vanished civilisation. However, the earlier versions of the screenplay introduce a boatload of disparate human refugees searching for sanctuary as well as showing other humans arriving at the city marina. Sarah, Miguel, Tony, Chico and Maria immediately find themselves fighting other humans as well as zombies before three survivors escape to a tropical island. Like his counterpart in the film, Miguel suffers a zombie bite and Sarah quickly slices off his arm to prevent infection. She also cauterises it with a flaming torch. Tony dies from gunshot wounds but Maria prevents Miguel shooting him in the head to prevent him returning as a zombie. However, like the unfortunate housewife in Dawn of the Dead ’s early housing project sequence, she suffers from her returned lover’s zombie bite. Sarah and Chico finish off Tony while Maria slips over the side of the boat and commits suicide. This character follows the pessimistic path chosen by her two predecessors in the original climax of Dawn of the Dead. On the island, the survivors discover a huge elevator of an underground military installation. A group of soldiers led by Captain Rhodes emerge. They are followed by a band of uniformed zombies wearing red vests. Rhodes supervises their ‘boot camp’ training. His surprising success in controlling a zombie horde which overran human survivors in the early films results in living soldiers feeding their zombie counterparts with human meat from refrigerated cartons. Human trooper Toby and his companion Tricks react in disgust at Rhodes’s enjoyment of this perverse operation. Both Toby and Tricks represent Romero’s development of David’s character in The Crazies. A battle begins leading to the death of the already infected Miguel. The wounded Chico is captured, but Toby later performs a mercy killing to prevent him becoming a zombie. Sarah escapes but is rescued by Caribbean islander, John, and his alcoholic mechanic friend Bill McDermott. They are inhabitants of the island’s lower echelon, the Stalag, and tell her about the nightmare society she has discovered. The island represents a gross parody of capitalism and is divided into three class sectors. Its lower level comprises the island’s ‘lumpenproletariat’. This includes not only humans relishing violence, depraved sex, drugs and disease but also others regarded as disposable units of society such as blacks (John), Irish (McDermott), dissidents (Dr. Logan) and disabled (female deaf-mute Spider). Stalag 17 is made up of what appears to be a cesspool of human dregs whose condition results from knight of the living dead

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the labels applied to them by the upper echelons of the island society. While some individuals—such as Spider—are allowed to perform menial tasks on other levels, the vast majority are regarded as little better than human fodder for the zombies. Rhodes relishes any opportunity given him to exercise military discipline and increase the zombie food supply. John conceals Sarah in the Stalag away from Rhodes and his men. The next level of the island society comprises an underground scientific establishment headed by Mary Henreid and assistants Julie Grant and Fisher. They attempt to find ways to study zombie behaviour. The unit’s star zombie pupils are Bluto, former American Indian Tonto and Bub. Like his later counterpart, Bub is the most advanced of them all. He not only takes on Rhodes in a Clint Eastwood gunfighter manner described later in the screenplay but also has deep feelings for Mary like a son towards a mother. However, like the Los Alamos scientists working on the Atomic Bomb, the island doctors exhibit a warped attitude toward survival since the military establishment headed by Rhodes intend to use the zombies as an army of the living dead. Romero leaves the most grotesque parody of Reagan-era lifestyles for the screenplay’s mid-section. Former Florida Governor Henry Dickerson controls the island society. He lives in affluent luxury parodying the escapist world of popular Reaganite television series such as Dallas, Dynasty, The Colbys and Falcon Crest. Dickerson inhabits a gymnasium which Romero describes as a mixture of Elaine Powers and a harem chamber which also comprises ‘good ol’ boy’ country club cronies and political yes men. Nicknamed ‘Gasparilla’ after a notorious Caribbean pirate, Dickerson lounges in a ‘coffin-shaped’ tanning device in his second appearance within the screenplay surrounded by some conservatively dressed females who are obviously wives left over from the good old days of official monogamy and scantily clad women who represent the mistresses of the old political establishment. Like Rhodes in the film version, Dickerson expresses a sexual interest towards Mary. Furthermore, in the second draft screenplay, Dickerson also expresses relish that the retirement state of Florida (where senior citizens previously migrated to die) is now the stronghold of the living dead. He not only sees his island as a secessionist state in any future union but also envisages extending his domain over America and the rest of the world by recruiting millions of zombies into his army. Dickerson’s fantasies represent a bizarre version of Reaganite militarism and his Star Wars philosophy. Eventually, Sarah joins forces with Mary, Toby, Logan, Spider and others to start a rebellion. While the demented Logan wishes to destroy the entire island like a biblical Jehovah, Toby argues that other innocent people exist in the camp and elsewhere who do not deserve this fate. The zombies also participate in the ensuing chaos in an eager attempt to find their own food. They consume Logan, Julie and Dickerson’s affluent community in the process. Eventually, the island community explodes while the survivors (including a group of children) escape to another island. The screenplay ends with John and Sarah standing vigil over Tricks’s body hoping that, like Miguel’s (which they discover in their flight), it will not reanimate. Since it does not, Romero suggests that the zombie plague is now over and humanity can reconstitute itself along new lines. 136

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Romero’s original vision necessitated a budget of $6.5 million dollars for many of the astounding sequences contained in his first and second draft screenplays. According to Tony Buba, the first draft screenplay contained scenes involving helicopters flying into battle against zombies and playing ‘Amazing Grace’ on the PA system.4 Unfortunately Laurel’s desire to refuse to compromise by agreeing to industry demands for an ‘R’ rating led to the constraints of reduced budget and further screenplay revision (see Gagne 1987: 147–50). Although Romero regretted the loss of his original idea, Day of the Dead certainly stands on its own merits whether one knows about the original concept or not. Many characters are dropped or conflated from the original screenplay drafts resulting in a much more concentrated and dynamic film. The screen version retains much of the original opening scenes but makes Sarah part of the scientific team. It drops the Stalag and Florida condominium characters and lower-class levels of island society but retains the middle-class ones of military and scientific establishments. Sarah is now a composite of her original fugitive character from the first two drafts and the earlier figure of Mary Henreid. Miguel survives into the final scenes but his eventual fate resembles Julie Grant’s in the original. Although Romero suggests a romantic relationship between Sarah and Miguel in the original versions, the Toby and Mary Henreid characters with their love for one another now become conflated into their screen successors. Miguel dies in the same way as Julie Grant while Fisher remains. Captain Rhodes is as odious as his screenplay draft counterparts while Bub remains as the only star zombie pupil on the block. Since Stalag 17 disappears, Dr. Logan now becomes head of the scientific establishment. But he still remains as demented as his original counterpart. Despite Romero’s feelings concerning his revisions, the final product does make the film more concentrated in focus with less characters appearing to confuse the viewer from appreciating the implications of the narrative. Although the final film does lack the explicit tension between the different social classes that were represented in the first two drafts, it does reinforce a key element in the trilogy existing as far back as Night of the Living Dead, namely the real threat to survival being the class-based verbal savagery different characters exhibit towards each other rather than the zombies outside. These outside forces really externally embody internal tensions within the human beings raging within their fragile fortresses. Furthermore, like Fran in Dawn of the Dead, Sarah is the film’s main point of character identification. Penetrating the futile and superficial face of social masculinity, she vainly urges the importance of co-operation during two sequences in the film. Finally, although the explicit political allegory remains absent, it is certainly present in the film on a much more subtle level and available to anyone ‘who has eyes to see and ears to hear’—to quote the biblical references occurring in the screenplay drafts and John’s dialogue in the film. Dickerson and his Reaganite associations may not be as explicitly present as they were in the original screenplay versions but they still spiritually remain in the final film as implicit signifiers.5 Day of the Dead opens in a similar manner to Dawn of the Dead. A woman appears asleep in the opening scene. Shot against the white background of a brick cubicle, Sarah (Lori Cardille) appears in long shot leaning against the wall with her head resting on her knees. As she slowly raises her head, the mid-close-up image cuts to another one revealing her point of view. It shows a knight of the living dead

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calendar hanging on the opposite wall. Sarah walks towards the calendar on which all the October dates are scratched out. She gazes at the autumnal picture of a pumpkin patch with a little girl in the background. As if wishing herself into this wonderland imagery, this somnambulistic Alice in Wonderland figure begins slowly moving her hand down the calendar dates. Suddenly, scores of zombie arms emerge through the wall and claw at her. The next shot shows Sarah abruptly emerging from what appears to have been a dream in the back seat of a private helicopter. The opening image appears redundant to the rest of the film, laying itself open to the ‘It’s only a dream’ type of dismissal for an audience impatient to move on to the world of action, zombies and gore. But this sequence is not so peripheral as it initially appears to be. Unlike Dawn of the Dead, where we do not experience what the sleeping Fran dreams about before she awakes, Day of the Dead’s viewers participate in Sarah’s nightmare. On one level, the sequence appears to resemble the well-known Val Lewton ‘bus’ shock effect where a frightening succession of incidents eventually turns out to be based on nothing at all. However, the protruding zombie arms also resemble that key moment in Val Lewton’s Bedlam (1945) when the arms of mental patients reach out to the hero in an asylum corridor, an image also used by Roman Polanski in Repulsion (1965). Admittedly, this sequence lends itself to this type of formal ‘shock horror’ interpretation. However, other levels of meaning exist in this brief, but pertinent, introduction making it much more than the type of cute cinematic citation overused by lesser talents in 1980s cinema and beyond. First, Sarah looks at a calendar where all the October dates are crossed out. In America, October is the key month leading up to the Presidential and State elections before voting occurs in the first week of November. Secondly, the image above the calendar shows a field full of pumpkins which resemble the pods in the various screen versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the latter film, pods threaten human society with a brave new world removing pain, pleasure and freedom of choice. Romero’s zombies certainly exhibit no freedom of choice and his trilogy depicts a world both as insane as Master Simms’ asylum in Val Lewton’s Bedlam (1946) as well as one whose insanity mirrors the supposed sanity of the civilised world. When she moves, Sarah appears about to exercise some form of freedom of choice. But decaying zombie arms reach out to overpower her before she can do anything else. It is not too coincidental to see this scene as Romero’s bemused anticipation of the probable results of the 1985 Presidential election which would give Ronald Reagan his second term in office. The Reagan era certainly represented the return to life of supposedly dead values and policies with a vengeance. Furthermore, the military build up and escalation of the Cold War threatened to plunge the world into a situation little better than that revealed in Day of the Dead. After Sarah awakes, the next shot shows her emotionally distraught lover Miguel (Antone DiLeo) sitting next to her in a helicopter. He wears a scruffy military uniform and gazes out of the window in terror. The next images show Bill McDermott (Jarlath Conroy), an alcoholic Irish electronics technician, and John (Terry Alexander), the Jamaican helicopter pilot flying over a Florida coastal city in search of human survivors. This group represents the potential nucleus of Romero’s new society. Rather than the one white female and four Hispanics of earlier screenplay drafts, 138

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this group is a much more diverse unit that resembles the utopian community earlier envisaged by Knightriders. They also embody minority groups often denigrated by a racist and patriarchal society, especially in jokes such as ‘Did you hear the one about the woman, the spic, the Jamaican, and the drunken Irishman?’ However, as in all his films, Romero respectfully invests these outsider characters with indisputable qualities of human dignity. Despite John’s reluctance in landing when he says, ‘It’s not in our contract,’ Sarah compassionately insists on reassuring herself that no human survivors exist. As the credits roll, Romero reveals images of a decaying city which was even more derelict in the original script. Day of the Dead ’s audience would naturally see the city’s condition as due to human abandonment, but Romero’s original intention was much more subversive in terms of commenting upon the 1980s era. He envisaged the city in the original screenplay as embodying the type of disintegrating urban structure seen in older American cities. The environment not only parallels Braddock of Martin but also those poorly built newer urban environments which collapse in ten years rather than two hundred. Romero also commented that this social critique existed in the film despite the fact that most critics and the audiences merely looking for exploitation and thrills tended to ignore this feature (see Gagne 1987: 159). Although this meaning is not explicitly present in the actual film, the opening sequences do implicitly exhibit several instances of Romero’s black humour, especially when we think of Florida’s conservative retirement community ethos as the most appropriate American state for the living dead to conquer in the final part of his zombie trilogy. When a bullhorn attempts to summon any human survivors, the credits roll as Romero reveals the city’s condition and its actual inhabitants. An alligator crawls out of a bank while now-useless currency blows in the wind. Consumer debris and garbage juxtapose with money now littering the streets. Insects crawl over a decomposing skeleton while the dead gradually awake to the sound of their expected feast. Romero’s screenplay and director credits appear appropriately over the image of a deserted cinema, peculiarly named ‘The Edison’. The name itself evokes one of the founding fathers of a cinematic mechanism often used by the system to promote conservative ideological illusions and images of conspicuous consumption rather than other more socially relevant concerns such as awakening audience consciousness. Like other capitalist artefacts, cinema has now become redundant. Possibly, Romero’s selection of this telling image parallels Jean-Luc Godard’s final credit at the climax of Weekend (1968), another film about the breakdown of civilisation with its survivors reverting to cannibalism—‘Fin du Cinéma’. A low-angle shot of a zombie lacking its lower jawbone appears against the sun. Another zombie emerges from behind the kiosk of The Edison grasping a now useless set of ticket stubs. Other soldiers in the army of the dead slowly move towards human sounds. They moan in unison like damned souls. The humans then decide to return to their island sanctuary, an underground military installation resembling the claustrophobic confines of Night of the Living Dead ’s farmhouse. It is an environment to which the Washington government has despatched a discordant military and scientific team in the final days of civilisation hoping for a cure to the zombie plague. knight of the living dead

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When they return, Johnson (Gregory Nicotero), a soldier tending a makeshift garden, enquires ‘Did you find anything?’ John sarcastically replies, ‘Real estate at close out prices.’ They see a new graveyard and learn about the death of the installation’s commanding officer, Major Cage. John ironically remarks, ‘And then there were twelve!’ His comment not only echoes the biblical language he will later use to explain the chaos in imagery, evoking Peter’s in Dawn of the Dead, but also exemplifies Romero’s satiric humour within this latest, bleakest, chapter in his trilogy. The twelve survivors echo the twelve disciples of the old Christian era. But rather than being united under the leadership of a saviour figure they all exist in a condition of savage tension stimulated and dominated by the macho megalomaniac figure of Captain Rhodes. Both John and Bill exist separately from the rest of the community and live in underground trailers reminiscent of those reserved for stars on a film location. Although Sarah wishes to gain their active involvement in the precarious situation, John continually attempts to persuade her to move to their own private island, ‘to spend what time we have soaking up some sunshine’. However, like Fran in the opening chaotic scenes of Dawn of the Dead, Sarah remains committed to salvaging what is left of the old society until it is clearly impossible to do so. Deep in the cavern, two aggressive soldiers, Rickles (Ralph Marrero) and Steele (Gary Klar), enlist the already mentally disturbed Miguel into joining them for their continually dangerous assignments—providing zombies as specimens for the scientific establishment. Although Day of the Dead ’s zombies are in a more advanced process of decay than their predecessors, they exhibit more basic patterns of thought, memory and intuition. This development is due to the fact that five years have already passed since the first outbreak. Zombies, like humans, have the ability to learn from their experiences! When Sarah protests in vain against Miguel’s unfitness for duty, she is overruled by Rickles and Steele despite the fact that they all recognise that their opponents are really much more than ‘dumbfucks’. As Steele calls the zombie specimens towards the bull pen area, Rickles and Sarah note a new hesitation in the movements of the living dead. Rickles remarks, ‘They’re scared. They know what’ll happen when Dr. Frankenstein gets them.’ Sarah answers, ‘You’re right Rickles. They’re learning. They’re actually learning.’ This is one of the few remaining references to the zombies advanced abilities occurring in the original screenplay drafts. They are becoming even more dangerous than their deadly predecessors in Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. While the zombies above and below the installation experience frustration in being unable to reach their prey, their human counterparts exhibit no hesitation in displaying verbal aggression towards one another. The military and scientific establishments are constantly at each other’s throats. Although removing themselves from active involvement in institutional activities, both John and Terry exhibit a sullen demeanour and conceal their contempt for all parties except Sarah. The new military leader Captain Rhodes (Joseph Pilato) exhibits verbal aggression towards everyone. His savage warrior nature is illustrated by the excessive two holsters and bandolero he wears under his combat jacket. Like Governor Dickerson in the original screenplay, he threatens Sarah sexually and also nearly shoots her when she disobeys orders. 140

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By contrast, Sarah makes at least two unheeded requests for cooperation during the film: ‘We need each other. Can’t we just get along?’ Like Fran in Dawn of the Dead, she also recognises that their involvement in the now-bankrupt remains of the old civilisation inhibits any forward movement: ‘Maybe, if we tried working together we could achieve something. We’re pulling in different directions.’ Her last remark also applies to the equally brutal and inhuman world of the scientific establishment. Although part of this team, Sarah hopes that science will eventually provide a cure. But she finds that old institutional interests still rule the supposedly disinterested and objective world of scientific discovery. Although Fisher (John Amplas) expresses sympathy towards Sarah and warns her against antagonising Rhodes, he is a weak male unable to prevent his superior Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty) from continuing inhumane experiments. Derived from a minor character in the original screenplay whose insane reactions to his scientific work exiled him to Stalag 17, Dr. Logan is appropriately nicknamed ‘Frankenstein’ by his military antagonists. Rather than wishing to find a cure, Logan really wants to understand how the zombies function so he can control them like an authoritarian parent. He works on specimen after specimen like a vivisectionist gone mad and shares the same pleasure in tearing apart helpless victims like his zombie counterparts. He represents the insanity of a scientific establishment which also mirrors Rhodes’ embodiment of the violently mad military mind. Sarah criticises Logan for his fascination with ‘what’s happening rather than what’s making it happen’. His fascination seems to involve no search for a cure to end the zombie plague and rebuild civilisation once more. Instead Logan exhibits a morbid fascination with the plague’s symptoms. Like a military scientist engaged in investigating deadly germs for use in biological warfare, he really wishes to develop his own form of social control over the zombies, a control having many features with a now defunct old society. While Sarah views his zombie specimens in disgust, Logan gleefully informs her about his findings. As in Dawn of the Dead, the humans recognise that the zombies operate via some form of remembered instinct. Logan shows Sarah a gutted zombie attempting to bite his fingers despite lacking a stomach. Another specimen has its exposed brain wired with electrodes attached to a spinal column. Logan is less interested in any cure or medical reversal; he aims at a more developed totalitarian form of control where zombies may be more compliant and obey orders better than subjugated humans. Despite the danger and uncertainty, Logan believes zombies can be conditioned to behave. His ideal colonised zombie will thus eventually become ‘civilised’ and ‘domesticated the way we want it to be’. As he later tells a disbelieving Rhodes, Logan believes in ‘domestication as control’ and verbally demonstrates his adherence to the values of the old society. While Rhodes believes in the military values of obedience and control, Logan articulates its civilian parallels. Although he never achieves the goals of Dickerson in the original and fails to persuade Rhodes, Logan is a potentially dangerous figure fascinated with the very authoritarian ideology characteristic of the old society. As he tells Rhodes, ‘You’ve lost control unless you make them behave…keep them in check and keep them from eating us.’ Logan’s attitudes thus parallel those of other scientific establishments who ignored their responsibilities to society and eagerly worked with totalitarian regimes. knight of the living dead

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As Sarah observes later, Logan’s prize pupil Bub represents his most successful experiment. Bub has a dim memory of his past life. He becomes fascinated by the objects Logan places before him such as a toothbrush, razor and paperback copy of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. Bub later appreciates classical music on a Walkman such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with its conclusion praising universal, brotherly love. This Symphony (with its male chorus acclaiming ‘all men’ becoming ‘brothers’) functions not only as an ironic cultural signifier of an old patriarchal society (excluding women) but also foreshadows the encroaching zombie world where everyone becomes one and the same in a consumerist and violent manner no matter what their original human forms were originally. The advanced process of decay exhibited by the zombies in this film blurs every distinguishing boundary between male and female, black and white, adult and child. Everyone becomes instinctually consumerist and conformist representing an advertising executive’s desired world. But they, ironically, achieve this goal in death rather than life. Unlike other humans, Bub does not view Logan as a meal. But the audience later learns the reason for this when they discover the master feeding his prize pupil with human flesh. As Logan states, ‘Civility must be rewarded. If it isn’t rewarded . . . why . . . there’s no use for it. There’s no use for it at all.’ It is doubtful whether Bub had any filial feelings towards Logan before this indoctrination process began. Also, despite Bub’s touching puppy love for his teacher, his advanced pupil status may owe more to his former military training where obedience was the norm rather than the exception as we see when he salutes Captain Rhodes. Although Bub later exhibits pain when he discovers Logan’s body in a scene paralleling the creature’s discovery of Ygor’s corpse in The Son of Frankenstein (1939), he is really the successful product of a military-style type of education. Bub’s progress involves the basic stimulus-response training shown in the case of Pavlov’s dog and animals trained to perform tricks. But although Bub represents no zombie future alternative, he appropriately brings down Rhodes later in the film in a manner resembling EC’s poetic justice tradition. When Logan shows Sarah the latest successful results of Bub’s training, he also articulates Dawn of the Dead ’s message of the zombie relationship to human society: ‘They are us. They are the extensions of us’, having ‘the same animal functions’. Logan also stresses the need for a reward system identical to civilised educational techniques so as to trick zombies ‘into being good little girls and boys as we were tricked by the promise of a reward to come. They have to be rewarded.’ These lines also refer to religious doctrines used to control human beings in society in both past and present. However, another one of Christianity’s premises is now coming true. The dead are returning to life. Logan hopes to control them by using the same educational and social techniques applied to human beings in the old order. He sees Bub as exhibiting ‘the bare legacy of social behaviour, civilised behaviour’. Day of the Dead also continues the radical tradition of the American family horror film in revealing psychic darkness existing within the midst of an institution traditionally revered in society and hysterically promoted from the 1980s onwards. Ironically, Logan’s discovery of ‘what’s happening’ to the zombies involves his recognition and utilisation of disciplinary measures used in the traditional family system. When Sarah, John and Bill infiltrate Logan’s laboratory at night they discover the 142

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dead body of an infant zombie and the decapitated head of a soldier ominously illustrating the type of experiments Logan conducts. These involve an educational system of rewards and punishments involving the civilised realms of private property and parental obedience. Logan’s tape recorder reveals the real nature of his experiments. Bill switches the tape on accidentally. They all listen to a grotesque version of family education with Logan playing the parts of both punitive parent and chastised child. The tape begins with the ‘child’ claiming a parent’s possession: ‘It’s not father’s stocking. It’s my stocking!’ The ‘child’ then obeys ‘mother’s’ voice by putting it away. Logan’s actual voice then occurs on the tape as he disciplines a zombie to act like an obedient child: ‘Bastard! Be civilised! Take that!’ The ‘child’ then articulates its obedience: ‘Five minutes mother. Just five minutes. Father’s stocking has a stripe. I wouldn’t wear one of father’s stockings.’ ‘Mother’s’ voice then concludes, ‘Mother is very proud of you, very, very proud. You did quite nicely today.’ The information on the tape supports the thesis of Ethel Spector Person concerning family mechanisms which involve the conditioning of infantile dependence by a fixed system of rewards and punishments.6 It also reveals the patriarchal nature of Logan’s methods. They involve the operation of disciplinary violence in the furtherance of unquestioning obedience towards the status quo. By this point, Sarah and her companions have reached the level of Fran’s perceptions in Dawn of the Dead, namely that the old society is irretrievably doomed and the former patterns of human relationships are now bankrupt. Long before this revelation, which only occupies a brief segment of Day of the Dead, Sarah slowly began to see the end of her delusions. She can no longer attempt to recuperate things which are now lost. Although Sarah offers sympathy towards Miguel, he masochistically chooses to relish in self-pity and refuses any offer of help she gives him. This occurs in the first sequence involving zombie specimen capture. Taunted by Rickles and Steele, Miguel still wants to act like a man although it is clearly evident to himself and others that he can no longer perform a former military role which defined his masculinity. Despite Miguel’s lack of the macho qualities displayed by Rhodes and the other soldiers, he expresses resentment at Sarah’s strong personality especially when it evokes his symbolic fears of male castration. He soon becomes as verbally antagonistic towards his former lover as the other soldiers are. Sarah intuitively recognises this in the second nightmare she experiences in the film. She dreams that Miguel awakes and his guts pour out on the floor like the zombie of the previous sequence in Dr. Logan’s laboratory. After deciding not to tolerate his insults any longer, she throws him out of her room. When Miguel later experiences zombie bites, Sarah immediately attempts to stop the infection by cutting off his arm. But by this time it is too late on all levels. Miguel’s masculine resentment of Sarah already brings him back to the military mentality despite his obvious weakness. He is infected on more than one level and eventually becomes a zombie in all but name. His final act in letting the zombies into the compound and transporting them underground is not beyond criticism; although he may believe he is performing the heroic role of the sacrificial soldier in helping to wipe out Rhodes and his remaining men, his act is also vengeful and selfish. He may believe he is taking revenge on Rhodes knight of the living dead

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and the other soldiers who humiliated him, but he is also placing his former lover and the two men who offered him sanctuary in personal danger. Miguel’s motivations remain ambiguous; he may be in the last stages of an infection which render him as inhumane as the attacking host feeding on his body, but whether his actions are the result of conscious or irrational desires, his climactic sacrificial ‘gung ho’ performance remains questionable. The zombies invade the compound and conquer the last remnants of the old society in very much the same way as the Franco-Prussian War destroys the Second Empire and ushers in a period of violent revolutionary chaos as in Zola’s penultimate contribution to the Rougon-Macquart cycle, Le Débâcle. The older order has perished, yet, unlike the surviving figure of Jean Macquart in the final paragraph of Zola’s novel, the survivors of Day of the Dead have no desire to rebuild anything pertaining to an old order. They will, instead, attempt to start anew. As in his other films, Romero depicts the bankruptcy of the old society, but he does not outline in detail any utopian alternatives. The only conclusion possible is that anything else has to be better than the old order. When Bill rescues Sarah from the fighting soldiers after her breach with Miguel, he takes her to the trailer he shares with John. When John sees her, he greets her warmly as an old friend now that she is on his own personal territory and he is no longer in a subordinate capacity to her. They are now equal individuals inhabiting a common space outside the boundaries of an inhumane institutional status quo. Sarah observes that John has converted his backyard into a fantasy environment; he lounges against a painted backdrop of a tropical beach very much like a film director relaxing on his own personal film set. Both John and Bill welcome Sarah into their fantasy world, but it is a world very different from those morbid dark environments created by Martin and Cuda and very akin in spirit to Billy’s recreation of his own personal dream in Knightriders. Bill and John both know the difference between their own form of magic and the world of outside reality. But, rather than symbolically drowning themselves in irrational fantasies which leave them vulnerable to the onslaughts of a world of powerful reality, they nourish their ideals as utopian values while being fully aware of the dangerous world outside. Fantasy occupies an important role in the work of Romero. But his idea of fantasy never involves pure escapism. As There’s Always Vanilla, Jack’s Wife and Martin all show, some forms of escape can involve negative self-destructive avenues. But, others, as in Knightriders, offer people ‘a chance’ and a dream to make life better despite the many obstacles hindering this achievement. The title character in Martin may lament that magic does not exist any more, but his chosen magic is harmful to himself and others. The climactic tragedy of Martin is that the title character was slowly coming to realise this, yet he never had the opportunity to follow his intuitions to their logical conclusions and break away from his negative illusions to construct other more positive alternatives. Neither the Braddock of Martin nor the Bakersfield of Knightriders offer their inhabitants any form of salvation. But the important goal is to break away, find some positive solution or utopian dream befitting each individual, and not lose this important opportunity as Julie Dean does in Knightriders. 144

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Although alienated from their institutional surroundings, neither John nor Bill become as masochistic as Peter in Dawn of the Dead. John dreams of his desert island and Bill enjoys his flask of whiskey. Ironically, when they later escape up the silo ladder, both men finally throw away their various props which they recognise as now being useless. When Bill rescues John, he throws away his empty whiskey flask while John does likewise with his empty gun. When we last see them in the film, they are both engaged in the productive act of fishing by the beach. John frequently attempts to persuade Sarah to ‘drop out’ and find their island in the sun rather than propping up a corrupt system. As he earlier tells Sarah in the first trailer sequence, ‘What you’re doin’ is a waste of time.’ This time Sarah is more open to the idea as John further defines his feelings for a higher plane of existence, feelings which may not be intended to be taken literally: ‘S’long as there’s you and me and maybe some other people, we could start over, start fresh. Get some babies.’ John’s feelings are vague and utopian. He may not be suggesting a literal plan but suggesting that whatever they do in the future has to be much better than the bureaucratic, institutional, statistical past world whose records and products of dangerous ideological illusions are all stored away safely in the underground bunker. As John looks at a record inventory before him, he lists the various items stored for safety by the government—defence budgets, immigration documents, records of five hundred companies, ‘negatives of your favourite movies’, tax forms, all left in what John describes as a ‘fourteen mile tombstone’. He envisages this new generation as having a different type of education than the one Logan delivers to his obedient zombies. John hopes the new society will teach its children ‘never to go here and dig these records out’. Like Dawn of the Dead ’s Peter, he uses religious imagery to explain their predicament. But he expresses his ideas in a metaphorical and non-doctrinaire way despite comparing the zombie plague to a divinely punitive version of the fall of the Tower of Babel. However, both the biblical story and the now-defunct old civilisation involved the dangerous features of institutional arrogance which led to cataclysmic disaster. When the survivors ascend the ladder and climb up their own utopian tower, John speaks optimistically about ‘flying away to the Promised Land’. They reach the top of the compound and find that the zombies now roaming above ground have somehow not reached the helicopter. As they run towards it, hoping that the soldiers have filled the gas tank during the previous night (another parallel to the tentative conclusion of Dawn of the Dead), Sarah manages to pull open the helicopter’s back door only to encounter a zombie hand reaching out towards her. The image then abruptly changes to reveal Sarah recovering from another nightmare. She awakes near the helicopter and sees John and Bill fishing in a tropical paradise with seagulls flying above them. We also see the calendar which appeared in the very first sequence. But this time, the month is November with the initial three days crossed out. Seen in association with the previous images, the calendar suggests a new beginning on more than one level. Unlike the previous screenplay drafts, Day of the Dead ends on a note of ambiguity. The zombies still remain in control but the three survivors appear to be in a more fortunate position than Fran and Peter in Dawn of the Dead. At least, they have had sufficient fuel in their helicopter enabling them to fly ‘away to the Promised Land’. knight of the living dead

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But have they? Since the audience never saw the soldier filling the tank at night as earlier requested, no guarantee exists that sufficient fuel is there. Furthermore, the final zombie assault on Sarah appears real. A possibility exists that the epilogue may represent the dying visions of all three survivors before their eventual annihilation. However, throughout the entire film the worlds of illusion and reality clash frequently whether in terms of personal ideologies (Rhodes, Logan, John, Sarah) or the conflicting worlds of hope and despair. Day of the Dead is a film structured upon duality: Sarah experiences two nightmares; Miguel undergoes two tours of duty in the bull pen; the audience sees Logan training Bub on two occasions; Logan verbally debates with Rhodes twice; Bub demonstrates his knowledge of firepower twice throughout the film. Duality is often a key mainstay of the horror genre with its contrasts between the worlds of normality and abnormality. However, if Sarah has lived and experienced three nightmares then this tentatively breaks the dualistic pattern structuring the entire narrative of Day of the Dead. As in Dawn’s climax, Romero allows his human survivors to live on and struggle for another day. They have that chance which the musician thanks Billy for in Knightriders: ‘Man, you gave us everything. You gave us a chance.’ As Dave Kehr noted, their escape is little short of miraculous, an event revealing ‘an inexplicable touch of grace’ (quoted in Gagne 1987: 155), in terms reminiscent of John’s religious use of imagery. As with Peter in Dawn of the Dead, religion contains metaphorical associations involving both hope and warning as long as they remain on the spiritual plane and not the institutional levels of the old society. Somehow, as if by magic, Sarah and her fellow survivors have escaped death and miraculously arrived on a peaceful island. Like the opening nightmare sequence of the film, Sarah appears to have abruptly awoken from a dream. But, whereas the initial sequence moved from a horrific fantasy to a deadly world of everyday reality, the climactic sequences of Day of the Dead move from another life-threatening situation affecting the heroine through her awakening to a tranquil world in which everyone lives in harmony with their environment. According to the usual operations of the classical Hollywood editing system, the abrupt cut from the zombie hand threatening Sarah to her awakening on the island appears both arbitrary and disruptive. Something is missing in-between both sequences. However, this violation of the norms of the classical Hollywood editing system, norms which became more predominant during the 1980s and beyond, also represents Romero’s homage to a radical montage system which Hollywood employed during the 1960s and early 1970s under the influence of the European art movie. Originally, within the modernist realms employed by 1920s Soviet cinema, this type of editing practice involved an attack upon the conventional mode of audience spectatorship and an attempt to move towards different forms of intellectually alternative practices. Although Day of the Dead operates in different ways, its use of this abrupt editing device not only represents a brief return to the practices Romero employed in The Crazies but also involves a challenge to the audience. How may characters suddenly move from a situation of extreme danger towards a utopian realm of harmony and peace?

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chapter eleven

Monkey Shines

partly due to financial and industrial problems that resulted in compromises affecting the final version of Day of the Dead, Romero officially ended his involvement with Laurel Entertainment (see Gagne 1987: 147–70). He now wanted freedom to pursue other projects. Although Romero maintained his base in Pittsburgh, he still hoped for that optimistic union between his mode of independent film-making and Hollywood industrial support. Monkey Shines is the product of this ideal. Financed by a major studio (Orion) but shot in Pittsburgh with the involvement of as many of his creative team as possible, the film also represents his first major literary adaptation. Michael Stewart’s original novel was set in Oxford, England, but Romero transfers the setting to Pittsburgh. The film appears to represent a radical change for the director both stylistically and thematically. On a first viewing, it initially appears to be the unfortunate product of compromise and seems to lack the type of visual style and thematic concerns present in Romero’s other films. During pre- and post-production phases, Romero experienced several examples of creative frustration. Despite Christine Forrest’s abilities as an actress, the studio insisted that she test for the role of Nurse Maryanne Hodges before they would accept her. Also, after previews, Orion added a last-minute gratuitous shock ending combining the already shopworn audience scare tactics seen in Carrie (1976) and Alien (1979) which jarred with the director’s type of more subtle climax. The studio also insisted on a traditional happy ending to replace Romero’s more ambiguous and ironic conclusion. Naturally, Monkey Shines did not attract the same degree of critical and popular acclaim surrounding other Romero films. With these factors in mind, it would be natural to dismiss Monkey Shines as one of Romero’s failed works deserving little attention. However, although it fails to reach the creative levels of Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, it is by no means a total failure. Despite the compromises affecting its production, the film has several points of interest both in terms of the cultural concepts influencing Romero as well as parallels to his authorship concerns elsewhere. In many ways, Monkey Shines resembles There’s Always Vanilla as a compromised work. While the latter film represented Latent Image’s attempt to ‘go Hollywood’, it also

exhibited many traces of the director’s future concerns. Stylistically, Monkey Shines lacks the exciting rawness and dynamism of Romero’s brand of low-budget filmmaking and superficially appears to resemble an average Hollywood production. Yet it contains many key Romero themes and its more intuitive employment of acting and direction deserves further investigation. Like many other Romero films, the important elements appear indirectly within the text awaiting excavation by discerning viewers who move beyond the superficial mechanisms of gore and thrills to penetrate the real causes motivating such excessive displays. In an era dominated by the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series, Monkey Shines was doomed to failure if Orion regarded it as a rival to such gratuitously popular competitors. But, based on an understated, underrated novel,1 Monkey Shines actually operates on much more subtle levels which would appeal to a director hailed for introducing new, explicit forms into the horror genre but also interested in other more mature and subtle avenues of exploration. Careful attention to the film reveals an extremely ambiguous and complex work, both in terms of the creative screenwriting Romero employs as well as his masterful direction of acting performances. Monkey Shines is a film containing much more than meets the eye; it is a work in which the plot operates as a mere device for the director to engage in further explorations of the human condition. As with gore and zombies in Romero’s other films, the device of a murderous monkey is really equivalent to Hitchcock’s ‘MacGuffin’. Other important things are going on in Monkey Shines. Although lacking naturalism’s stylistic features, Monkey Shines does have several parallels to one of the genre’s major premises, namely the thin division between savagery and civilisation characteristic of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. Like Jacques Lantier in Zola’s La Bête Humaine and Frank Norris’ McTeague, Allan Mann (Jason Beghe) has to struggle with atavistic feelings. His subconscious feelings of resentment emerge in anger against his betrayers and a mother who wishes to keep him in a state of infantile dependence. Although many of Zola’s unfortunate Lantier family often succumb to the curse of hereditary degeneracy exacerbated by malign environmental influences, Allan Mann’s dilemma is more the result of those conditioned civilised instinctual patterns of behaviour motivating Romero’s zombies and human characters. For most of Monkey Shines, the audience believes the collision with a truck ‘explains’ Allan’s quadriplegic condition. However, halfway through the film, Dr. Williams (William Newman) suggests that a ‘congenital problem’ may really have caused his condition: ‘The accident could have been just a tragic coincidence.’ This scene follows two significant associated movements in the screenplay. When Allan’s mother Dorothy (Joyce Van Pattern) announces her intention of giving up her independent existence to move in and ‘mother’ him as before, her son’s hand briefly moves. When Allan excitedly points out to her this sign of his possible improvement, Dorothy denies it and complains instead about his behaviour towards her. She refuses to recognise that her son’s irritation results from his resentment at her wish to dominate and make him dependent upon her as in infancy. In the next scene, Allan expresses his fear of capuchin monkey Ella whom he will later blame for subsequent murderous events. Like his mother, he denies several unpleasant facts in his life and 148

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conveniently places the blame elsewhere upon a scapegoat in a manner paralleling the denial mechanisms employed by the main characters of There’s Always Vanilla and Jack’s Wife. As with other figures in Romero’s films, Allan of Monkey Shines is not totally admirable. He is a complex individual with several negative features buried within his own personality which he refuses to come to terms with. As a result, Monkey Shines is a much more ambiguous film beneath the surface. Romero directs Jason Beghe’s Allan so that he depicts several complex layers of human behaviour ranging from a character attracting audience sympathy due to his condition to an angry profane white male who manipulates others emotionally. Despite the studio’s attempt to find an easy explanation by blaming Ella, Romero’s screenplay and direction suggests other more ambiguous levels of meaning. Although the visual style of Monkey Shines appears to differ from Romero’s more independently conceived works, its characters and content are not entirely divorced from previous concerns. Like many characters in Romero’s other films, the leading players in Monkey Shines are complex figures exhibiting contradictory tendencies who often engage in aspects of duplicity and self-deception threatening their entire personalities. After a studio disclaimer concerning the treatment of capuchin monkeys used in Boston University’s programme to help the disabled, Monkey Shines opens with a tranquil image of Allan’s house. As the credits roll, the camera slowly moves right to zoom towards the upper window in a manner resembling the opening sequence of Psycho. Like Hitchcock’s film, this opening shot suggests that the future horrific events of Romero’s film are somehow connected with a character we will soon see. The scene changes to an interior view as Allan moves into the frame from below appearing in a mid close-up as he awakens. Next, the camera moves slowly right to show his sleeping girlfriend Linda Aikman (Janine Turner) at his side before zooming out to frame them both in mid-shot. As he demurely covers her nude body with the sheet, he whispers his intention of going for a morning run. The next show shows him exercising nude in another room before he raises the outside blinds and looks outside. Before the beginning of David Shire’s lyrical music, Romero shows Allan’s hands putting bricks into his backpack prior to his morning run. These opening shots are not superfluous to the following narrative. They suggest several things about Allan and his relationship to Billy of Knightriders. Like Billy, Allan is a perfectionist and takes pleasure in his physical prowess. However, Romero subtly suggests that his hero has certain unwholesome features in his personality that he is unaware of. Although Allan is not living in a medieval fantasy outside society like Billy, he is wholeheartedly committed to a pursuit of perfection into which he channels his whole energies. He follows two demanding paths of being a law student as well as a college athlete, either of which would ordinarily tax the energies of any individual. Rather than remaining in bed with Linda, he decides to go out for an early morning run. His desires have masochistic undertones; while Billy exhibits these features by flagellating himself ritually every morning, Allan puts heavy bricks into his backpack thus making a run which ought to be a pleasurable exercise more of a punishing ritual. Although the audience gains little explicit information about Allan’s real motivations in these opening scenes, it does receive certain suggestive knight of the living dead

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information warning them not to identify with Monkey Shines’ nominal hero but rather to engage in objective observation and analyse particular features motivating his character. As Allan runs through the peaceful streets, a series of shots alternate between objective views of him running before the camera and his subjective perceptions of the people he sees. Romero also films his running feet making him appear like a Pegasus figure following the novel’s description of its nominal hero. However, as Allan runs further, a sudden subjective shot shows the presence of a large dog looming before a gate, its restraining leash hidden by the bushes. It lunges forward, causing Allan to collide with a truck. A slow-motion low-angle shot shows Allan flying through the air, ironically attaining his Pegasus ideal, before the succeeding image reveals bricks from his backpack disintegrating on the ground—an apt metaphor for his disabling injuries. Again, these images foreshadow others which will occur later in the film involving alternation between objective and subjective perception as well as the atavistic motifs contained in the screenplay. Significantly, the dog appears to be running wild. However, both the audience and Allan see that it is restrained by a leash similar to the leash binding Ella’s body in certain scenes of the film. The next sequence shows the hospital operating room. Individual shots reveal a monitor and respirator before showing Allan on the operating table. Then, the camera pans left to show the operating theatre staff. Allan’s body is now regarded as little more than a piece of human machinery which Dr. John Wiseman (Stanley Tucci) crudely rejoices over as something he can exhibit his egotistic sense of authority. His repugnant manner reveals itself in the opening lines following a nurse’s affirmative comment concerning Allan’s unconscious position on the operating table once the anaesthetic takes effect: ‘Good. Then we can talk about him. Martha. His ass is even hairier than yours.’ After ending the sequence with the surgeon’s knife beginning the operation, the next scene silently and poignantly reveals the tragic circumstances surrounding Allan’s new position in life. Like the silent but meaningful introductory sequence in Hawks’ Rio Bravo, Romero opens with a close-up of a black-and-white photo of Allan in his athletic prime winning a race. The camera then pans slowly right to reveal a Roadrunner cartoon ‘get well’ card, a colour photo of Allan, Geoff, Linda and Coach Charlie Cunningham, a single photo of Linda and other ‘get well’ cards. Then the camera passes a table containing Allan’s medication, and finally halts at a close-up of a now bearded Allan immobile in bed fully conscious of his new situation. Romero visually conveys Allan’s feelings in a camera movement also reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic examples of montage in mise-en-scène.2 He then lap-dissolves from Allan’s face to show Wiseman’s car arriving outside Allan’s house. Although this appears to be a natural cinematic transition from one scene to another, Romero’s rare use of this technique in Monkey Shines (as well as most of his other films) suggests some implicit connection between Allan’s condition and the responsibility of the surgeon, a connection which later events will affirm. A lap-dissolve also significantly occurs later in the film after Allan has phoned Linda’s house and discovered Wiseman’s presence there. The lap-dissolve changes from the embrace of Linda and Wiseman to a close-up of Allan’s angry face. 150

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Dorothy sees Wiseman arrive and rushes to greet him at the door. She appears overjoyed at his arrival as if expressing pleasure at the presence of a man who has put her son in a dependent condition. She eagerly introduces him to everyone at the welcome party as ‘Dr. John Wiseman, the genius who saved my Allan’s life.’ However, Allan’s law professor, Dr. Esther Fry (Tudi Wiggins), rejects Dorothy’s fascination with institutional titles and insists on being addressed by her first name only. Unlike Dorothy, she is also concerned about Allan’s progress towards some form of independence and asks Wiseman whether he will be able to continue his studies. Wiseman replies, ‘Physically yes. The question is will he want to.’ His answer also emphasises the main concentration of Monkey Shines, namely its focus on human consciousness and related responsibility. After meeting Charley Cunningham (Tom Quinn) whose hesitation (‘I’m . . . I was Allan’s coach’) he does nothing to contradict, Wiseman asks Linda ‘How’re you holding up?’ Her guilt-ridden reticence together with the penetrating nature of his question leads her to go to Allan’s bathroom and clear away her personal things. Tensions are clearly in the air prior to Allan’s arrival. They are evident in the meaningful, but understated, performances directed by Romero and professionally delivered by his actors. When Allan arrives, Dorothy overenthusiastically utters the toast, ‘To Allan, to the start of his new life.’ Linda belatedly arrives and places her night bag containing personal possessions unobtrusively in the corner before guiltily rushing up and kissing him: ‘I should have come to visit you more often at the hospital. I’m sorry.’ Recognising the strain on Linda, Wiseman complicity removes her from the scene by asking her to get him a large whiskey for Allan which he has medically ‘prescribed’. Wiseman manipulates this tense situation in several ways. He wishes to deflect Allan’s attention from losing his girlfriend by getting him intoxicated. Wiseman also dominates Linda in the same supercilious manner he used towards a conscientious nurse in the earlier operating room sequence. When Linda goes to the kitchen, she drinks some of Allan’s whiskey before hired nurse Maryanne Hodges (Christine Forrest) appears on the scene to take control of the situation. She removes the glass from Linda’s hand, pours the contents into a plastic container, refuses the use of ice cubes and dilutes the whiskey with tap water. Wishing to remove herself from an embarrassing situation, the distraught Linda tries to phone Allan’s friend, Geoffrey Fisher (John Pankow), a researcher in craniology, who is absent from his office. These masterfully underplayed performances in the film’s third sequence aptly suggest tensions which will explicitly emerge into violent manifestations later. They also reveal Romero’s competent and intuitive control of acting performances which are often neglected by audiences who prefer more ‘gory’ effects rather than complex acting. Without explicitly spelling out meanings, the various characters in this welcome-home sequence reveal many hidden sides of their motivations. Dorothy seems to relish the celebration much more than any grieving mother should. Wiseman appears uneasy at his requested presence; so does Linda in her role as obligatory grieving girlfriend. When Allan arrives, he puts on a brave face for his new role as quadriplegic but it is unnatural, suggesting deep frustration and unhappiness. Wiseman ‘prescribes’ a large whiskey for Allan which Maryanne immediately knight of the living dead

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modifies (‘and if we use alcohol we water it down’). Maryanne’s character immediately exercises the type of control that Allan soon negatively reacts against. Most of the characters take advantage of his vulnerable position to dominate him in one way or another. Despite the superficial veneer of a homecoming party, Romero suggests that the actual event is not really positive and that dark repressed tensions exist below the surface. The next sequence shows Geoff arriving at his laboratory with a container holding a human brain from a Jane Doe donator who died on the operating table. As he enters his laboratory containing capuchin monkeys, he switches from the red light to normal fluorescent illumination as he shows his prize to his favourite female monkey, ‘Number Six’. After injecting himself with a drug to ward off sleep, he slices off portions of the brain before boiling it in a solution and eventually injecting a dose into ‘Number Six’. Geoff aims to increase her intelligence in his experiments. The sequence appears straightforward in nature, but, like the previous party scenes, many disturbing factors appear here. Despite his seemingly harmless appearance, Geoff has much in common with Dr. Logan of Day of the Dead. Both men are exclusively devoted to their work and show no real understanding of the broader consequences of their experiments in terms of the effect on others. Secondly, while Rhodes nicknamed Logan ‘Frankenstein’, Geoff is also a similar figure. Rather than the Gothic laboratory of the Universal films, Geoff inhabits an antiseptic laboratory flooded by white fluorescent light. However, his clinical environment is by no means devoid of the satanic associations connected with scientific experiments in earlier films such as Metropolis (1926) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Before Geoff switches the fluorescent lights on, his laboratory is immersed in sombre red safety lighting making it more reminiscent of a hellish environment than a modern clinical area. Also, when Geoff mixes the brain in his chemical solution, he utters the witch chorus from Macbeth—‘Double, double, toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble.’ Unlike the witches who stimulate Macbeth’s ambitious desires by acting as outside agents who, nevertheless, know their victim better than he knows himself in the earlier part of the play, Geoff knowingly nurtures his own ambitions for scientific achievement. But his objective scientific activities are as deadly as the witches’ brew in Macbeth. He is also a Dr. Frankenstein who will create a bride of Frankenstein for a friend who will use the ‘bride’ as an agent to activate his own unrepressed desires in the same way as Colin Clive uses Boris Karloff in James Whale’s film. Also, another reference to The Bride of Frankenstein appears in Romero’s reference to the human brain. Like the brain in the original film, Geoff’s specimen has ‘no apparent abnormality’. However, unlike the hunchback (Dwight Frye) in The Bride of Frankenstein, Geoff does not damage it. Romero thus avoids the flawed rational scientific explanation which mars Whale’s film. He intends to show that Ella’s activities really emerge from Allan’s ‘dark half ’. Unlike Karloff’s creature, Ella is the result of a successful, not an accidental, experiment. When Geoff plays his answer machine he belatedly receives Linda’s message and arrives later in the evening when Allan is in bed. Announcing his presence by tapping on the window and using the key he had when he lodged with Allan, Geoff walks 152

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through the house which contains poignant reminders of his friend’s past and present condition. On the wall are travel posters of places Allan will never visit again such as Jamaica and Barbados. A point of view shot reveals Geoff’s perspective of the winch in his friend’s bathroom. During the following dialogue, Allan reveals two items which suggest his deep resentment. He feels economically dependent on Dorothy who has provided money for the home facilities. Despite knowing the real facts concerning his friend’s inability to ever pay off the debts, Geoff remarks, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll pay her back. Lawyers get rich’, without dwelling on the fact that there are very few rich successful quadriplegic lawyers. Allan also reveals his knowledge of Linda’s alienation from him despite the fact that ‘She didn’t say anything.’ When Geoff responds, ‘If she walks out on you now, fuck her’, Allan replies poignantly, ‘I can’t.’ His feelings of impotence, sexual jealousy and revenge will later emerge when he has both the relevant will and means at his disposal to achieve his goals. Allan also harbours deep feelings of resentment against his mother since early childhood. During the next scene, Dorothy runs a home movie despite Allan’s lack of interest. It shows him playing in a back yard with other children. However, an ominous note sounds when Dorothy reminds Allan that the Patterson family who rented their Chicago Lake Side adjoining property moved away and that Allan blamed her for their departure. Allan obviously missed the only companions he had in his youth. When Dorothy mentions Allan blaming her for the Patterson family’s departure, Maryanne’s budgie, Bogie, suddenly flies into the room and flaps over him in a manner reminiscent of the winged representatives of repressed violent desires in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). Although Bogie does not have the same associations that Ella will later have for him, the bird’s appearance at that particular moment suggestively represent Allan’s repressed embodiment of aggressive feelings towards Dorothy in the same way as Hitchcock’s winged avatars represent Lydia Brenner’s resentment towards Melanie Daniels. This will not be the first time in Monkey Shines that a human being will use an animal to express feelings of resentment and deny that very form of manipulation. The next scene in the home movie shows young Allan refusing to wear the Halloween costume Dorothy has purchased for him. He looks resentfully towards the camera expressing his irritation. Allan comments, ‘I always wanted to be Robbie the Robot. Guess, I finally got my wish.’ Romero’s reference to Forbidden Planet (1956) and its ‘monster from the id’ theme is not accidental as succeeding events reveal. Geoff also faces his own form of pressure. After chasing away animal rights activists spray-painting the outside walls, he faces his departmental head, Dean Burbage (Stephen Root), a threatening administrator who relishes appearing on talk-shows (Romero’s favourite media bogey) to promote vivisection. Burbage also regards medical science in the university as another institutional arm of capitalism. Burbage wishes his subordinate to provide ‘results’. When Geoff attempts to argue with Burbage on his own ideological terms, ‘It’s not costing anything’, his tormenter beats him at a game he knows only too well. Burbage replies, ‘It’s costing time, Geoffrey. I don’t want to fire you. I just want you to produce.’ Burbage also snoops into Geoff’s lab, wishing to discover his results and claim it as his own work similar knight of the living dead

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to the activities of certain senior academics who exploit their graduate students. As in ‘The Crate’ episode of Creepshow, the world of higher education is a negative institutional environment. Later, Burbage describes himself as a ‘realist’, rather than Geoff ’s more accurate description of ‘sadist’. As Geoff views in horror Burbage’s malignant experiment with a drowning rat, the latter comments, ‘By the carrot or by the stick. I prefer the stick. It’s close to what we experience in real life.’ Little difference exists between Burbage and Logan of Day of the Dead. Although the latter believes in rewarding his zombies who show ‘civility’, his tape recording reveals that punitive methods are also involved in his methods. These encounters set in force a chain of circumstances which will eventually lead to disaster. Geoff feels pressured to increase Number Six’s dosage: ‘You should be playing chess with the dosage you get. My ass is on the line. So is yours. It has to work. You’re half human. Why don’t you show something for Christ’s sake?’ Allan’s later attempt at suicide leads him to remove the monkey from its other less-developed companions and give it the human stimulus it needs, one which is beneficial neither to animal or human. Despite his supposedly offering Number Six the ‘carrot’ of Allan’s human contact, Burbage’s ‘stick’ philosophy also motivates his actions. Geoff injects the monkey with serum attempting to make it more human. Ironically, he believes that it will benefit all concerned. Unfortunately, like the scientists in The Crazies and Day of the Dead, he is so closely bound up in his work that he does not realise that human civilisation is really a mixed blessing and not something to be emulated in its present form. Even the unscrupulous Wiseman (who has by now appropriated Linda) recognises that civilised human family life has its dangers when he argues against Dorothy’s postponing her return to Illinois. He sees it as harmful for both herself and her son: ‘I think you might be aggravating the situation. Go back home. Go back to your business.’ But he also dismisses Geoff’s concern over Allan by brusquely commenting that ‘six out of ten quadriplegics attempt suicide at one point or another’, before walking away with Linda and leaving Allan to his fate. Geoff then decides to enlist the aid of animal trainer, Melanie Parker (Kate McNeil) ostensibly to help his friend as a household friend for the disabled but also to continue his experiments unethically from afar. Like many characters in Monkey Shines, Geoff’s motivations appear ambivalent. It is extremely difficult to decide which one really dominates his mind. Does he really want to help his friend? Or use him for a scientific experiment? Both factors may compete with one another so that any certainty is difficult. Dorothy definitely wants to look after her son, but she also desires to dominate him. Allan later becomes a human battleground torn by conscious attempts to control dark desires. However, he also unconsciously enjoys the release of unrepressed violent energies channelled against whom those he hates. Monkey Shines is thus really a complex film dealing with the ambiguous nature of human motivations. Such motivations exist within the personalities of people unable to deal directly with the consequences and responsibilities of human desires and energies. It is a feature common to There’s Always Vanilla, The Crazies, Jack’s Wife, Martin and the zombie trilogy. Despite Maryanne’s irritation, Geoff and Melanie introduce Number Six (now named Ella) to Allan’s home. Ella and her human master eventually form a close 154

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bond, so much so that Allan comments, ‘She does so much for me. She seems to want to do things for me.’ However, this is Allan’s perception. Although the audience may fall into the trap of reading the Frankenstein ‘damaged brain’ explanation into Monkey Shines like the scientific explanation in Night of the Living Dead, other explanations are equally possible. Despite her booster shots, Ella may not be acting independently but really serving Allan’s desires to the same extent as the zombies in Romero’s trilogy enact basic human instincts their supposedly deceased status appears to deny. Later, Allan significantly recognises that Ella is also ‘part’ of him. During the opening scenes of Monkey Shines, Allan engaged in a masochistically punitive system of training. Now no longer able to channel his negative energies into athletic pursuits, he transmits them against his nurse Maryanne. Although Maryanne resembles Wilma of Creepshow with her non-appealing personality, the audience has no evidence to believe that she is as culpable as Allan believes her to be. With the exception of figures such as Captain Rhodes of Day of the Dead, Romero’s fictional characters are very rarely one-dimensional. Naturally, Maryanne does not like her job. She sits around most of the time due to Ella now taking over most of her duties and becomes irritated at her client’s negative behaviour resulting from his resented immobility: ‘I’m sick and tired of your insults.’ But these factors do not really justify the way Allan treats her. He blames Maryanne for the lack of hygiene and dismisses her complaint that Ella is really responsible for the state of his house. However, when Allan shouts ‘We get pissed off ’, Maryanne immediately suspects some negative intonations concerning his use of the plural tense. She intuitively responds, ‘It’s unnatural! You and that monkey.’ After Bogie flaps over Allan’s face and appears to nearly peck out his eye (an action foreshadowing Ella’s later use of the syringe over Melanie’s immobile body), Ella later disposes of the offending object at night. Undoubtedly, she performs Allan’s desired wish as Maryanne recognises when she blames him in front of Dorothy for Bogie’s demise: ‘You killed my Bogie. Not with his hands. He had his little demon do it. You did it. The two of you together.’ Maryanne significantly terms Ella a ‘demon’. It is almost as if she intuitively understands that the monkey resembles a familiar spirit of one of the witches in Macbeth. When Allan sarcastically rages against Maryanne concerning the reasons for her beloved pet’s death—‘Who gives a shit? It deserved to die’—his unrepressed anger both certainly affirms Maryanne’s suspicions as well as suggesting to the audience that Ella may not have acted on her own. At the same time, Dorothy returns after deciding to sell her home and business to move in with Allan. Already feeling embarrassed at Dorothy taking over Maryanne’s task by bathing him as if he were still a little child, Allan learns about a female conspiracy. This revelation further fuels his angry feelings concerning his resented dependence upon others. Dorothy informs him that Maryanne gave notice of quitting a week before; Mother immediately decided to devote herself exclusively to Allan without informing him of this change and allowing him the possibility of making other plans. When Dorothy puts Allan to bed she exhibits pleasure at dominating her son once again by commenting, ‘I’ll be here when you need me.’ However, his hand suddenly moves in reaction to his feelings of angry dependency. Although she never sees the movement, Dorothy perversely refuses to acknowledge knight of the living dead

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any sign of her son’s recovery and encourage him to leave his dependent condition: ‘Your hand did not move. It cannot move.’ She then provokes Allan’s angry outburst and refuses to acknowledge its real causes by retreating into her closed world of genteel civility: ‘I don’t like how you’re behaving. I don’t like it at all.’ Significantly, Allan experiences his first vision of moving outside the house in Ella’s body that very same night. Romero conveys this to the audience by using a low-angle, Steadicam subjective shot from the perspective of a monkey. This shot complements the earlier credit Steadicam objective shot of Allan’s feet running before the camera. It suggests a deep symbiotic relationship between master and animal servant parallel to that existing in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Like many Romero characters, Allan is torn by conflicting desires which he can never really overcome. When Geoff examines the attic and finds evidence of Ella’s nightly excursions, he denies this in his desire to continue using his friend for his own ends. Allan now becomes afraid of Ella and wishes her removal. However, he conveniently projects his fears on to a surrogate object and blames Ella. This resembles the very same manner that Colin Clive’s Dr. Frankenstein abandons and blames a creature whose creation he was directly responsible for in The Bride of Frankenstein. Allan expresses his fears to Geoff and Melanie: ‘It’s like I was in Ella’s body, running with her strength, seeing through her eyes. I’m part of her and she’s part of me.’ The following sequence strengthens the screenplay’s suggestion of a deep symbiotic relationship existing between Allan and Ella in which the human factor is really the dominant factor motivating the animal’s actions. After consulting Dr. Williams for a second opinion, Allan and Melanie learn that his quadriplegic condition is much more complex. Indirectly criticising ‘the brilliant Dr. Wiseman’, Dr. Williams informs Allan that his condition may be actually ‘part of a congenital problem, an abnormality that doesn’t look like it was caused by a truck. The accident could have been part of a tragic coincidence.’ Allan’s condition is thus psychosomatic rather than material. The film does not choose to explore what exactly this ‘congenital problem’ actually is. However, Romero’s screenplay and the excellent acting performances by Jason Beghe and Joyce Van Patten suggest that Allan’s condition really results from a dysfunctional family situation affecting them both. Dorothy has always attempted to dominate her son since he was little as the revealing home movie showed. Allan thus resented her controlling manner from an early age. His masochistic training techniques appear more related to his psychological condition rather than being a part of a normal training exercise. Allan appears to have channelled his violently sadistic feelings against his family upbringing into masochistic channels. He desired to achieve in the solitary goal of winning, both as an athlete and as a law student, as a means to exert independence from a constraining situation. Ironically, he had ended up in the situation of family dependency he attempted to escape from. As Dr. Williams suggests, Allan’s ‘accident’ has deeper causes than the ‘tragic coincidence’ of his random collision with a truck. The symbolic appearance of the savage dog attempting to escape from its leash in the credit sequence has already intimated such a possibility. Dr. Williams maintains an institutional dimension of professional silence when Allan asks him about Wiseman’s operation: ‘So if he had looked harder and found 156

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what caused it, he could have fixed it?’ Allan then forms the logical conclusion. Ella immediately jumps on Allan’s shoulder as Romero uses a voice-over to articulate the injured party’s angry thoughts: ‘Wiseman! That motherfucker. That smarmy selfsatisfied son of a bitch.’ This technique only appears once in this sequence. Its very arbitrary appearance suggests that the director intends that his audience arrive at a significant meaning. The next shot shows Melanie’s eyes through the front window of her van as she listens to Allan’s anger: ‘He put me through this whole fucking thing due to his own incompetence.’ The thought mediated in a previous scene through a voice-over making the audience knowledgeable about Allan’s feelings now becomes explicit for another character in this scene. As Allan rages, Romero cuts from a close-up of Ella to her angry master, suggesting a deep bond between them. Melanie also discerns certain unhealthy feelings: ‘I don’t like this change in you, Allan.’ As the next sequence reveals, thought becomes translated into action. This intimates that, like Karloff’s Frankenstein’s monster, a creature is not entirely guilty since it merely performs its master’s desires. When Allan gets Ella to contact the phone numbers of Wiseman and Linda, he finally learns the double nature of his betrayal. Romero pertinently concludes the scene of Wiseman and Linda embracing with a lap-dissolve to Allan’s hurt expression. Juxtaposed matching close-ups of the eyes and teeth of Allan and Ella then follow. When Allan bites his lip in emotional pain, blood trickles down his cheek. Ella immediately leaps to comfort her master by licking the blood away. The next sequence reveals Ella as a ‘blood sister’ in both thought and action. Point of view shots then follow in rapid succession revealing Ella’s progress to Linda’s house, Wiseman and Linda coupling in the bedroom and a shot of fire filling the screen. The next morning Allan exhibits his knowledge of the deaths of Linda and Wiseman before Dorothy actually tells him. He informs Geoff about his desire for Ella’s removal and blames her for the deaths. However, as the dialogue reveals, the issue is really ambiguous. While Geoff asserts, ‘Ella would never have done it’, Allan replies, ‘I wanted it done . . . I thought about ways of doing it. I knew that old cabin. I knew it would burn fast.’ However, when Melanie confronts Allan with the revealing question, ‘Did you do it, or did she?’ he chooses to absolve himself of any responsibility for his actions in a manner resembling Joan Mitchell in Jack’s Wife—‘She did it. She acted on her own.’ Allan’s explanations are also contradictory as the following lines reveal: ‘Geoff, I’ve been so full of anger. I’ve had the most horrible thoughts lately, vomiting up every resentful thought I’ve had, everything ugly, vicious, and sinful. That’s what it is—it’s sin. It’s the desire to sin, Geoff. Ella’s played into that.’ Allan’s refusal to take the full consequences for his actions by deciding to blame supposedly supernatural forces places him in the same culpable category as Joan Mitchell. Significantly, after appearing to take responsibility for his actions, Allan retreats into an anachronistic and implausible explanation which bares no relationship to any of the film’s events. He is eager to blame his servant for executing the master’s desires. When Ella instinctively retreats before a match, thus disproving Allan’s contention that she set Linda’s home on fire, Allan remarks, ‘Is that an instinctive reaction? Or does she know what fire can do?’ He is clearly putting his legal training into action knight of the living dead

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to absolve himself of any responsibility for his role in the murder of Wiseman and Linda. Geoff decides to take Ella back to the laboratory to perform tests even though he sees through Allan’s religious excuses: ‘But I don’t expect to find sin in a urine sample.’ Ella also reacts to her removal and poignantly appeals to her master when Geoff drags her away. However, Allan ignores her pleas and tells Geoff, ‘Don’t bring her back’, rejecting her in the same way Colin Clive’s Frankenstein ignored responsibility for his creation in Whale’s film. Melanie then decides to take Allan away to a different environment which turns out to be her country home. Despite his angry reaction against Dorothy’s manipulated attempts to return him to a state of infantile dependence, Allan weeps in Melanie’s arms like a little boy expressing his desire to ‘try to’ get better. This action certainly reveals both Allan’s own form of manipulative tendencies and the type of cunning tactic he will later use against Ella at the climax of the film when he deceives her about his real intentions. Although Allan expresses his indebtedness concerning the supposed benefits of tranquil surroundings—‘I can feel myself coming back to normal’—Melanie humorously, but significantly, questions his motives, ‘Every minute you’re away from me, or Ella?’ Allan replies, ‘Both.’ He then nuzzles up to Melanie in the same manner Ella did to him and initiates love-making. Allan’s movements again appear manipulative rather than spontaneous, suggesting that he is the real puppet-master and not Ella. When Allan apologises to Melanie, he has a knowing expression on his face like an actor delivering a prepared performance rather than a spontaneous response. In the meantime, Geoff attends to Ella in his laboratory noticing the difference she has from the rest of the capuchin monkeys. His remarks are extremely significant in suggesting not only Allan’s undeniable role in Ella’s activities but also the fact that he may be manipulating her: ‘They’re all getting the same dosage. The missing ingredient must be Allan.’ After noting Ella’s lack of pain during her next injection, Geoff remarks to her, ‘You didn’t do all that stuff Allan’s been blaming you for . . . you couldn’t have committed murder.’ If Allan is the ‘missing ingredient’ in Ella’s case, the same is also true of the brain serum Geoff injects her with. When he notes Ella’s lack of pain afterwards he comments, ‘I’ve turned you into a fucking junkie.’ Geoff, of course, has performed similar actions to Dr. Logan in Day of the Dead by making his subject all too human and deadlier than a mere animal. Furthermore, the animals respond to human anger and do not act on their own initiative as two later scenes reveal. When Geoff returns to find Burbage has stolen his experiments, the caged monkeys reproduce his anger by jumping around in their cages. They enact Geoff’s frustration in the same way as Ella responds to Allan’s dark desires. Secondly, after Geoff injects himself with the serum and experiences Ella’s perception, the monkeys escape from their cages and destroy his laboratory as a way of responding to his murderous intention of killing Ella. They certainly wish to protect one of their own species who has undergone a devious form of human experimentation. Geoff also switches off the florescent lighting and undergoes the experiment while infernoesque red light bathes his laboratory. Although he begins the experiment by saying to Ella, ‘If this shot can plug you into Allan’s head then maybe it can plug me into yours’, like Allan he denies the fact that he may also be using Ella in the same way that Allan does. 158

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While Geoff performs the experiment, Allan and Dorothy engage in another domestic conflict. Already angry at his weekend tryst with Melanie, Dorothy bathes Allan. Unlike the costumes she wore earlier in the film, she is now dressed as a traditional mother with pinafore and unattractive gown. Romero intercuts the scenes showing the development of the explosive resentment between mother and son with subjective shots of Ella’s journey to the house and Geoff immobile in the laboratory. Humans and animal are equally involved in experiencing dangerous conflicts and tensions. Boundaries between the supposedly rational world of humans and the more violent animal world dissolve. Romero’s screenplay deserves careful attention since it develops important levels of meaning during this sequence. Although Allan attempts to ‘bury the hatchet’ twice, Dorothy’s resentment against Melanie and the refusal of her son to return to a desired state of infantile dependency finally leads to verbal and physical violence. In many ways, the scene is highly reminiscent of Night of the Living Dead ’s interior farmhouse conflict where humans war against each other while dangerous inhuman enemies wait outside to overpower them. Despite Allan’s realisation of the dangerous effects of his emotional behaviour, he immediately regresses to abusing Dorothy verbally and blaming Ella for actions he has initiated himself. After ‘sensing’ Ella’s presence in the house, he pleads with Dorothy: ‘These rages. Ella pulls them out of me. Ella pulls them to the surface.’ Despite attempting to warn his mother, Allan also denies his real responsibility. She also engages in denial and expresses her resentment for domestic slavery against her son, blaming Allan for a decision she made in the first place: ‘I’ve given up everything for you.’ Allan angrily responds, ‘Who asked you to give up anything?’ He also vehemently unleashes all his repressed anger against her: ‘You’re nothing but an empty, greedy black hole. You’ve been trying to suck me into it for as long as I can remember. I cannot stand it anymore. I cannot stand your bullshit. You conniving, clinging, bloodthirsty, bitch!’ Allan’s verbal assault leads to Dorothy’s physical attack on him before she leaves the room. Allan’s anger against Dorothy appears initially justifiable under the circumstances. However, he is not entirely innocent. Some of the things he accuses Dorothy of also apply to himself. In his later strategy against Ella, Allan reveals himself as equally ‘conniving’ and ‘bloodthirsty’. His tendency to blame Ella for carrying out his own repressed desires is also ‘bullshit’. Like many Romero characters, Allan struggles between rational control and succumbing to dark, self-destructive tendencies buried deeply within the human personality. Realising the presence of his ‘familiar spirit’ in the house, he attempts in vain to warn Dorothy before Ella electrocutes her. Also, when Geoff arrives at the house, he asks Allan, ‘Ella’s not in here with you?’ When Allan replies, ‘No, I don’t think so’, Romero zooms out from Allan on the bed. He finishes the movement at an angle equivalent to Ella’s perspective seen in a previous shot which revealed her perched on top of his bedroom cabinet in the very same position. Allan still vacillates between admitting his responsibility for Ella’s action and denying it. When Allan finally admits, ‘It’s me. I’ve killed them, all of them’, Geoff replies, ‘You couldn’t kill anything, Allan.’ However, at this moment, Allan knows himself much better than his friend: ‘I’ve had five thousand years of civilisation in me. knight of the living dead

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But what if I wasn’t civilised anymore? What if I was an animal? Then, I follow my instincts. That’s what this all is, instinct. Animal instinct. It lives in us all, lives by it’s own set of laws, laws of the jungle.’ However, when Geoff admits his own responsibility, Allan sees an escape route so he can now avoid blaming himself and engage in denial. Geoff gives the ‘scientific’ explanation which most audiences would readily accept. Unlike Allan, he also blames himself and sees his culpability in the affair. Geoff thus arrives at a state of understanding far exceeding Dr. Logan in Day of the Dead: ‘You didn’t do it, Allan. I did. Ella has been genetically altered. I’ve had her on a new drug all this time. I lost track, Allan. I lost track of everything but my work.’ However, the human factor is still important since the ‘new drug’ enabled Ella to reach a higher stage of development not entirely advanced or ethical. Both scientist and patient bear equal responsibility for programming an animal to enact violent desires which are really part of an instinctually violent human condition. Allan immediately seizes on Geoff ’s admission and angrily reacts against him in a manner recalling his earlier attitude against Wiseman: ‘I was just part of an experiment? A guinea pig? What did you do to Ella? What did you do to me?’ Interestingly enough, these last two sentences reveal again that he intuitively still regards Ella as inseparable from himself. Ella then attacks Geoff and proves herself more intelligent than her human adversary by using his deadly syringe on him. Although Geoff still has some final moments of consciousness, he refuses Allan’s request to use the phone to enlist help choosing instead to go for medical treatment and save his already discredited scientific reputation. His final stubborn desire to keep Ella’s activities secret lead to his demise. Allan then realises that his Frankenstein monster now wishes to control him as she begins to feed him like a child. However, Allan also realises their deep bond: ‘You can’t hurt me. I’m part of you.’ When Melanie later arrives inside the house and sees Geoff’s body, her lines reveal a much more accurate understanding of the real situation. She asks, ‘Did you do that or did she?’ Allan again engages in denial, ‘She did it.’ But, before Ella attacks her, Melanie knowingly responds, ‘That’s right, Allan. You had nothing to do with it.’ At this point in the film, Ella is really kin to Bub of Day of the Dead rather than being an external threat. Allan now faces a threat to himself as well as Melanie. He turns against his creation, verbally abusing her in a more aggressive manner than his now deceased mother. The very nature of his language suggestively denotes his repressed anger not only at his infantile condition but also one paralleling the traditional role of the female confined to the home. Fearing and resenting the female side of his own nature, he aggressively channels his anger against Ella who then exercises her own form of poetic justice and urinates on him. Seeing Ella attempting to kill Melanie with Geoff’s deadly syringe, Allan manages to turn on his cassette to attract Ella by the romantic music which then plays. On one level, Allan rises to the situation by seeing Melanie’s danger. But, alternatively, he may be motivated by aggressive desires towards a former pet who now treats him like an infant in the very same way his mother did. Both motivations may be present in Allan’s mind and it is impossible to suggest which one is really dominant. However, Allan then uses the very ‘conniving’ qualities he earlier condemned in Dorothy by coaxing Ella to approach him for an act of loving intimacy so he can bury his teeth in her neck and kill her. Allan’s act 160

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is one of bloodthirsty savagery illustrating his kinship with ‘animal instincts’ lying dormant beneath his ‘five thousand years of civilisation’. On one hand, his action is the result of a human being defending himself against a murderous primate, but it also denotes the final deadly bond he has with Ella when he now kills without using a convenient surrogate sacrificial victim. The sequence ends on a note of deep ambiguity. Allan has overcome his monster. But he will have to live with the consequences. Unfortunately, studio politics dictated that Romero shoot two different endings rather than the ambiguous and ironic conclusion he originally intended. One ending reveals Dr. Williams about to operate on Allan and Ella emerging from his back like the ‘chestbuster’ in Alien. The other shows Allan leaving hospital, getting out of his wheelchair and using crutches to join Melanie in her van to depart for a romantic weekend. Neither ending does justice to the complexity of Monkey Shines; Romero originally wanted the film’s climax to follow Michael Stewart’s original novel where Allan never recovers from his accident. The final sequence of the film depicted Dean Burbage breaking into Geoff ’s laboratory to steal his research findings. However, before he can do this, the final shot showed a monkey suddenly appearing in the frame to condemn another human manipulation of the animal world. But, despite studio interference, Monkey Shines is another significant chapter in Romero’s examination of a human condition necessitating neither zombies nor deadly monkeys for relevant levels of meaning.

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chapter t welve

One Evil Eye and The Dark Half

after the release of Monkey Shines, Romero virtually lapsed into silence with the exception of his contribution to the Dario Argento-produced two-part film, Two Evil Eyes and The Dark Half. The creative era of the American horror film to which he contributed much had now declined into insubstantial slasher films such as the Friday the 13th series and the trivial Nightmare on Elm Street saga. Like Romero’s zombie trilogy these films promised and delivered gore in abundance. But, unlike the director’s more challenging films, they contained little narrative meanings other than sheer exploitation. Supposedly, Romero’s association with a stimulating era in American history was exclusively responsible for his best works. However, like Larry Cohen, Romero is not really a director of horror films. Although he is popularly associated with the genre, his significance lies in other areas contained within his films, but the dominant conservatism of the Reagan-Bush and Clinton eras and industrial problems concerning distribution did affect his work. Rather than capitulating to the system Romero retreated and remained in Pittsburgh instead of following the disastrous trail to Hollywood chosen by directors such as Wes Craven and Brian De Palma. Although Romero’s next two films lacked the excitement and innovation of his previous work, they were not entirely devoid of merit. Both ‘The Facts in the Case of Mr Valdemar’ and The Dark Half share a Gothic heritage, a feature also common to the novels of Stephen King. During this period, Romero unsuccessfully attempted to direct film versions of King novels such as Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary and The Stand, which fell by the wayside for one reason or another. However, although the Gothic aura of the supernatural appears ideal territory for Romero, the director’s concerns lie elsewhere as Kim Newman has shrewdly noticed. Expressing disappointment in his review of The Dark Half, Newman commented that although Romero works in the horror genre his ‘films prefer science fiction to the supernatural’.1 As already noted, the supposedly redundant radiation explanation in Night of the Living Dead is far more pertinent to the film than any supernatural associations. Furthermore, although supernatural and scientific explanations clash in most of Romero’s films, their intuitive intelligence and emotional weight firmly supports the latter’s rational dimensions. However,

the Gothic associations surrounding ‘Facts’ and The Dark Half tend to suffocate, rather than develop, the ideas Romero attempts. The first film attempts to avoid the Gothic style entirely and aims (apart from the unfortunate presence of the ghostly ‘They’ towards the climax) at naturalistic levels of meaning while the second cannot discard the trappings entirely. As Andrew Britton significantly pointed out, the Gothic is more of a hindrance than a help in developing radical implications inherent within the horror genre, implications which Romero had previously successfully transmitted in his other films. Speaking of contemporary horror films, Britton noted the problem with this formula: The Gothic no longer registers a hesitation at the surface of the text, but produces an esoteric sub-text which is directly at odds with the offered significance. Metaphor, in this instance, engenders and is engendered by misrecognition: the return of the repressed isn’t cleanly distinguished by the return of repression, the very image which dramatizes the one enforcing the other.2

Romero’s earlier films oppose the redundancy of this imagery. The acting performances and screenplay of Monkey Shines stimulate any alert viewer to pause before ascribing blame to Ella rather than its manipulative hero Allan. However, ‘Facts’ concludes by featuring certain supernatural tendencies which gradually creep into the Romero text until it finally contaminates the structure of The Dark Half. Romero’s version of Poe’s story deliberately avoids the Gothic trappings adopted by Roger Corman in his Tales of Terror (1962) anthology. While Corman’s version of ‘Facts’ stresses the Gothic style of colour expressionism and a gory climax emphasising Valdemar’s disintegrated body (a scene censored from the British version), Romero stylistically adopts a different approach and emphasises a message not entirely dependent upon the literary source. Despite the fact that Romero delivers his message too blatantly (perhaps in frustration at society and Hollywood distribution patterns), his version of ‘Facts’ is not entirely devoid of interest. Despite its mood of despair and exhaustion, Romero’s version of Poe’s tale has many connections to his vision as a director. In the first place, Romero’s deliberately chosen muted style for ‘Facts’ reflects another of his cinematic adoptions of literary naturalism. In many ways, his direction in this film often resembles the type of naturalistic techniques common to many uninspired examples from American and British television drama. However, Romero here chooses to emphasise the domestic chamber-drama aspects contained in the narrative of ‘Facts’ rather than its Gothic horror trappings. Valdemar’s resuscitation and the climactic supernatural appearance of the borderland spirits are actually more irrelevant than necessary in this production. Although Poe’s influence demands some Gothic appropriations, Romero makes this aspect a subordinate part of the production. Romero also employs several naturalist associations derived from Zola’s Thérèse Raquin in an adaptation which emphasises the guilty feelings and personal dissensions between his loving couple who undergo similar torments to their literary knight of the living dead

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predecessors. Like Thérèse and Laurent, Jessica Valdemar and Dr. Hoffman conspire against her husband aiming at a future life based upon economic security. However, Jessica and Hoffman are not Zola’s petit-bourgeois couple but people living on a higher socio-economic scale. Furthermore, they do not collaborate in murdering the husband but conspire in robbing his assets, leaving death to perform the final act. Also, like Thérèse Raquin’s Camille, Ernest Valdemar returns from the dead to haunt them. But his manifestation is physical rather than having the symbolic return of the repressed associations in Zola’s original text. Also, unlike Corman’s earlier adaptation, Valdemar’s return is not the actual climax of Romero’s version. Zola and Poe appear worlds apart in literature. But Romero cinematically unites them by making the latter’s Gothic associations subordinate to his naturalist concerns. Also, as noted in the introduction, certain examples of literary naturalism often contain elements of horror and grotesque. Zola’s naturalistic plot of Thérèse Raquin underwent many borrowings and stylistic changes over the past hundred years ranging from French poetic realism, Italian neo-realism, American film noir, French film noir, and American neo-noir in diverse works such as Pierre Chenal’s Le Dernier Tournant (1939), Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1942), Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1945), Marcel Carne’s Thérèse Raquin (1953) and Bob Rafelson’s David Mametscripted The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981).3 Since film noir borrowed from both French poetic realism and German expressionism (which also contributed to the classical American sound horror film), there is no compelling reason why Romero should not return to the original style of a text which influenced all these diverse adaptations. Romero’s contribution to Two Evil Eyes begins with an opening shot showing a taxi driving past a graveyard, an introduction deliberately echoing the opening scenes of Night of the Living Dead. As the viewer will soon realise, associations between bodily decay and social contamination also appear in Romero’s particular version of ‘Facts’. The next shot shows Jessica Valdemar (Adrienne Barbeau) rehearsing her lines for the forthcoming meeting with her husband’s lawyer Pike (E. G. Marshall). This brief introduction has more than one significant association. First, a greedy wife rehearses her imminent performance. Secondly, the scene self-reflexively evokes the performative strategies employed by the actress Adrienne Barbeau rehearsing her lines for the film in which she will appear. Actress and character both perform a role. Romero’s fictional characters also perform roles based upon their social conditioning. Very few of them ever escape from this particular form of personal entrapment. Thirdly, her thrice delivered lines—‘Is that an accusation, Mr Pike? Is that some sort of accusation? Is that some sort of accusation, Mr Pike?’—contain the aura of a ritual performance that both she and her audience understand as being necessitated by their imminent meeting. Both Jessica and Pike intuitively understand the real reasons involved in terms of their social confrontation. But like other Romero characters they deny the actual realities governing their respective performances. Here, denial is by deliberate design rather than governed by the operation of irrational or unconscious forces. This type of procedure parallels Renoir’s recognition of ‘The Rules of the Game’ governing any upper-class social situation or the academic role-playing of ‘The Crate’ 164

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where denial, rather than honesty, echoes the title of George Stevens’ final film, The Only Game in Town (1970). When Romero cuts to Pike’s office, the opening shot reveals that both players are united in a game they know all too well. The director begins with a mid-close-up of Pike as he sceptically examines Valdemar’s written instructions concerning the liquidation of assets. Then the camera dollies round to include Jessica in the frame. As Jessica and Pike parry their words like actors in a play trying to grandstand each other, Romero then adopts the classical Hollywood editing pattern of shot/reverse-shot. This feature emphasises both their performances and the dialogue. Despite their personal antagonism, Jessica and Pike operate as experienced role players fully cognisant of their expected patterns of behaviour in a socially sanctioned economic game. The following dialogue emphasises the contaminating nature of survival within a capitalist system leading people to perform social patterns of behaviour clearly detrimental to their humanity. Both Jessica and Pike are complicit victims of a familiar system seen in Romero’s films which dominates individuals. Pike comments that Valdemar’s desire for liquidation represents ‘bad timing’ in terms of the stock market. He asks why her husband did not give her ‘assets’ on paper. Jessica coolly replies, ‘I don’t need assets, Mr Pike. I need dollars to live on.’ She also emphasises her need for economic security during the two-year period when her dying husband’s will becomes free of all legal technicalities: ‘What do I live on while I’m waiting? Take a job as a waitress? I’m not society, Mr Pike. I have nothing of my own. I was a flight attendant when Ernie brought me home from the “red eye” to the shock and horror of you and everyone else in this town. I married a rich, old man. I let him use me for pleasure and for show. Now, I’m going to let him pay me for my services.’ Jessica’s speech not only echoes radical feminist criticisms of marriage as a form of legal prostitution but also emphasises the socially denied (but actual) fact of everyone’s recognition of her role as a performer in a masquerade which is both private and public. Jessica has performed sexually for her husband in private and displayed herself as a commodity in public. She now naturally demands payment for her services. Pike then compares Valdemar’s signature on the liquidation document with an earlier one. When he finds a difference between them, Jessica then launches into her curtain-closing line, ‘Is that some sort of accusation, Mr Pike?’ She begins to phone her husband. Pike hears both the dying Valdemar (Bingo O’Malley) and his physician Dr. Robert Hoffman4 (Ramy Zada) who reassure him concerning the request. She wins the game and announces her intention of returning the next day to pick up the ‘necessary forms’. When she returns home, she finds Hoffman hypnotising her dying husband and reading him a script which he will perform for any future calls to his lawyer: ‘I want to do it. I owe it to Jessica.’ These lines are similar to the ones Pike heard on the phone. Furthermore, Valdemar’s rehearsal ironically parallels Jessica testing her lines in the opening scene. When Jessica enters the house, she is about to pour herself a drink. But the camera tilts up to reveal Hoffman watching her from above holding two drinks. The shot itself appears merely perfunctory by introducing to the viewer Jessica’s partnerin-crime. However, Valdemar later appears in this very same area after he revives to knight of the living dead

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kill his deceitful wife. By this use of mise-en-scène in two separate scenes in the film, Romero suggests the manipulative role of patriarchy as bearing full responsibility for Jessica’s social contamination. She is viewed from an area from which two manipulative males look down on her. Although Jessica is far from being an ideal Romero heroine like Fran in Dawn of the Dead and Sarah in Day of the Dead, the director suggests that her negative qualities may arise from her complicit involvement in a corrupt social structure which demeans both her individuality and alternative potential as a human being. In this light, her nearest counterparts are Dorothy and Linda in Monkey Shines. Despite the audience learning that Jessica and Hoffman were previously lovers before Valdemar’s appearance on the scene, Romero has little sympathy for them. Although Hoffman’s lines concerning the dying man appear to represent his real feelings, he also plays a role as a jealous lover from the wrong side of the tracks: ‘He’s a ruthless old man who takes pleasure in treating people as if they were possessions. He’s spent his whole life taking what he wanted without a care for anyone else. He took you away from me.’ However, Jessica’s earlier lines before Pike made it clear that she was also complicit in Valdemar’s appropriation of her sexual assets. She also tells Hoffman, ‘He didn’t take me. I went.’ Both lovers are contaminated by economic greed, a fact Romero emphasises when Hoffman attempts to resume his sexual relationship with Jessica with the following ploy—‘Time to liquidate a few assets of our own.’ Despite Jessica’s hesitation over this impropriety happening near her dying husband, she is deeply complicit in Hoffman’s scheme to rob her husband and cannot break away even if she wanted to. Romero’s depiction of the dissension and greedy nature of his lovers in high society forms an admirable complement to Zola’s own interrogation in Thérèse Raquin. Virtually all the characters in ‘Facts’ have few redeeming values and certainly not Hoffman and Jessica as major players in the economic game. While audiences might have conceivably sympathised with an old man dying in agony, his painful outbursts against Jessica also reveal evidence of his attitude towards her in life which resembles that of the patriarch in the ‘Father’s Day’ segment of Creepshow: ‘Where is that bitch of a wife of mine? Out spending my money?’ Eventually, after collecting further economic assets from Pike who knowingly threatens her—‘If anything should happen to Ernie, you’ll have a hard time collecting. So, do your best to keep him alive’—she finally decides to agree to her lover’s proposal and ‘liquidate a few assets of our own’. However, Valdemar’s death interrupts both their sexual foreplay and dreams of imminent economic wealth. Hoffman decides to conceal the body in Jessica’s basement freezer to allow for the necessary three weeks to liquidate the assets she has acquired from Pike. Although Romero shoots this episode in a style differing from Poe’s Gothic sensibility, he does introduce several strands of his own black humour. Hoffman puts Valdemar’s body in a food freezer which he and Jessica empty of its contents. Valdemar now becomes little better than ‘dead meat’ or a commodity the guilty lovers will use to feed their economic desires. They act in a manner little different from Romero’s army of the living dead in the zombie trilogy who continue their consumerist habits well after death. Although deceased, Valdemar is still under Hoffman’s 166

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hypnotic spell. So he, too, is another unit of Romero’s living dead community. Jessica and Hoffman intend to feed off Valdemar’s wealth in the same way as Romero’s zombies desire human flesh. Like the zombies, both lovers reveal their participation in a form of mental telepathy; Hoffman finishes Jessica’s sentence for her showing he knows what is in her mind—‘In three weeks, he’ll be . . .’ ‘Yes. He’ll be melted.’ In order to prevent Valdemar’s liquefying, Hoffman hits on the idea of preserving it in Jessica’s freezer so they can use the dead man’s body to liquefy his assets and live off the proceeds. Everyone is implicated in this economic chain. Hoffman alleviates Jessica’s fears over Pike: ‘He gives you a hard time. But underneath it all, he doesn’t give a shit as long as he gets his fees. That’s all he cares about. That’s all anybody ever cares about in the end.’ Jessica gets the message: ‘Money.’ Hoffman points out the moral to her: ‘Yes, it has a way, doesn’t it?’ His axiom also extends to the nurse (Christine Forrest) who has attempted to persuade Jessica to place her husband in a hospital. When she suddenly appears at the door during Hoffman’s removal of Valdemar to the freezer, she appears relieved to hear that Jessica has finally agreed to her suggestions. But she also states that she will still charge her for the visit. Although the nurse is completely within her rights on legal grounds, she exhibits no real sympathy for the wife of a dying patient and only cares about her fees in very much the same manner as Pike. When the guilty lovers later find Valdemar dead, but still conscious from Hoffman’s hypnotic techniques, they decide to continue with their scheme. Despite Hoffman’s recognition of their joint guilt in committing ‘grand larceny and fraud’, he emphasises the importance of conducting business as usual, a message which Jessica finishes telepathically in a manner complementing Hoffman’s earlier trait. When Hoffman begins his sentence, ‘We are felons. We have committed grand larceny and fraud. We have to maintain . . .’, Jessica completes it for him, ‘. . . an air of normality’. These two transitions have supernatural associations. They represent for Romero the real nature of the film’s particular magic which involves a deadly material desire for the destructive values of society. This desire will eventually lead to the respective deaths of the couple. Romero’s message in Martin emphasised that magic no longer existed in its original sense. Instead, adherence of various characters to a ‘living dead’ form of existence and their inability to break free from its various manifestations embodied a lifestyle little better than that of a medieval villager dominated by the power of the church or vampire. Most characters in Martin displayed a lack of true independence and an inability to move towards healthier, alternative modes of existence. Martin, Cuda, Mrs Santini, Christine and Arthur were all involved in their own versions of spiritual dead ends. Unable to break free from deadly patterns of behaviour, they had accepted the status quo and became little better than dehumanised slaves or human zombies. As the zombie trilogy revealed, humans and zombies are identical in nature operating according to similar ‘instinctual’ desires resulting from social construction and manipulation. The naturalist elements Romero employs in ‘Facts’ emphasises this meaning. It also dialectically operates oppositionally against the supernatural features inherent within the horror genre. The supernatural really represents a metaphor knight of the living dead

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for those controlling devices individuals submit to in various ways whether they are conscious of these operations or not. Also, in many instances, the supernatural elements often act as allegories for the human condition. In one scene, Jessica sits in a park; behind her is a stone gargoyle. Romero begins the shot by showing the gargoyle and then tracking away so that Jessica’s body appears in front of the image. She is the real monster, an interpretation supported by a little child’s voice uttering the word ‘monster’. Her attachment to economic gain appears ‘instinctual’. But it is really the result of her own conscious and unconscious desires. When we first see Hoffman’s apartment, Romero reveals a pentagram ceiling window before tilting down to reveal the interior. However, although the supernatural Gothic associations of ‘Facts’ appears to emphasise the role of the unknown, the really powerful elements in operation belong to the everyday world of the known and ‘normality’. These latter features are actually the dominant ones operating to control its victims. Romero uses the supernatural as an allegorical device to suggest that our everyday world now occupies an oppressive hold on human consciousness in much the same manner as the old powers of religion and superstition. Another key scene makes this evident. Upset at Valdemar’s continuing existence, Jessica spends the night sleeping on Hoffman’s sofa, not his bed. She wakes the following morning when a radiogram mechanically emerges from its closet to report the business news. The movement of this device resembles a coffin in a funeral parlour prior to its final journey, but it moves up rather than down to invade the human world as if symbolically representing the deadly nature of an economic system turning all its victims into living dead automatons. Although Hoffman’s apartment sequence begins with a shot of a pentagram ceiling, the camera movement concludes in showing objects from everyday life. The radiogram reports important economic news relevant both to Jessica as future heiress and the living subjects of a capitalist economy dominated by the currency of a dead object. However, even Jessica cannot stomach the pleas of her deceased husband for release, particularly when he refers to the presence of certain mysterious figures in the afterlife who wish to use his body to ‘pass through’. She finally shoots Valdemar leaving Hoffman with the problem of disposing of his remains. Although Jessica has ruined the first scheme, Hoffman has another one ready. He intends circulating news of Valdemar’s burial in Harrisburg after they inter him in his garden. Hoffman cynically comments, ‘People won’t ask any questions. They’ll co-operate—as long as there’s enough money.’ However, like Romero’s zombies, the forces from the afterlife cannot be easily bought off. They return to wreak vengeance on the two deadly lovers in a similar manner to the director’s other monsters, namely, in employing the repressed violence operating in the everyday world of normality. Jessica confronts her husband in their home. He informs her that he now functions in an instinctual manner due to forces beyond his control. The living dead Valdemar announces her fate: ‘They’re coming for you, Jessica . . . It isn’t me Jessica. It’s the others, Jessica, using my body.’ Valdemar echoes Johnny’s similar threat in Night of the Living Dead, ‘They’re coming to get you Barbara.’ After witnessing his lover’s body fall down at his feet, Hoffman looks up at the banisters to see Valdemar standing in the same position he occupied 168

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in his opening appearance. Although Hoffman finally wakes up his patient, he learns from him that it is now too late. Despite this, Hoffman takes monetary assets from Valdemar’s safe significantly concealed behind a mounted stuffed bear, and leaves for his apartment. The next sequence shows the police at the Valdemar home. One cop surmises that Jessica shot her husband and then committed suicide. They learn about the presence of blood in the freezer. The investigating detective (Tom Atkins) utters a line which is both unnecessary and over-emphatic: ‘Rich people! Sick stuff always turns out to be rich people.’ Since he also utters a variant of this line in the climactic scenes, the reference is too didactic for Romero’s cinema and more fitting for the world of Oliver Stone. They then find the decayed body of Valdemar. Although Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror builds up to this final revelation, Romero makes it redundant to the concerns of his narrative since the final act of his drama has yet to unfold. In the following sequence, the camera movement again begins with an establishing shot of Hoffman’s pentagram window ceiling before tracking down to reveal money from Valdemar’s attaché case and Hoffman asleep on his bed. As in an earlier scene, Hoffman uses his triangular metronome to hypnotise him to sleep. But shadowy forces from the underworld arrive. They pierce Hoffman’s body with the metronome which still continues its mechanical motion. The next scene significantly opens with a triangular skyscraper dominating the city. The two cops, previously seen at the Valdemar residence, arrive to investigate reports of screaming from one apartment. Apparently, the sounds have occurred for nearly two weeks. As if echoing an appropriate form of EC comic book poetic justice, the time coincides with that agreed upon between Jessica and Hoffman to conceal news of Valdemar’s death. The apartment supervisor reveals to the cops that the affluent apartment dwellers share many characteristics with Jessica, Hoffman and Valdemar in terms of their lack of humanity. He tells them that he ‘couldn’t get anyone to do anything about it. You know how people are.’ The cops break into the apartment and find money scattered around. One makes another redundant observation: ‘What’d I tell you? Another rich guy.’ After the cop (Atkins) leaves Hoffman’s blood spattered bedroom, he closes a mirror door. As the door moves back it reflects Hoffman’s now decaying body with the metronome still intact ticking away mechanically. Hoffman appeals to him, ‘There’s no one to wake me. No one to wake me.’ ‘Facts’ ends with bullets firing from the cop’s gun. The final shots reveal blood spots falling on dollar bills. Romero then cuts to the final image prominently displaying the triangular image with the overseeing eye which appears on ‘The Great Seal’ of the American dollar bill on the reverse side of George Washington’s image. Two Latin inscriptions appear above and below this triangular object, ‘Annuit Coeptis’ and ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’. The overseeing eye on the bill’s triangular object matches the red eye still functioning on the metronome embedded in Hoffman’s body now making him another of Romero’s ‘living dead’. Hoffman now becomes a homo economicus in death as he did so in life. He is little better than a programmed machine moving instinctually according to the rhythm of a triangular metronome which ticks like a human heart. In life Hoffman desired an affluent existence based upon the dollar bill, a dead knight of the living dead

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fetishistic object with excremental associations. His rapidly decaying body not only resembles a zombie but also embodies the decomposing aura of a previous human existence devoted towards anally-acquisitive ends. Romero reveals that the American dollar bill conflates two different realms: the magical world of the supernatural and the supposedly secular realm of everyday life. This is significant visual message concludes his contribution to ‘Two Evil Eyes’. Romero makes the dollar economy the ‘one evil eye’ in his version of ‘Facts’. This episode thus represents an interesting aspect of his work. It is Romero’s attempt at making a naturalist horror film in which supernatural elements deliberately play a supporting role, not a dominating one. The film works best at the level of suggestive dialogue and mise-en-scène. It does not really need the Gothic associations of either Valdemar’s survival beyond death or the ghostly ‘They’ to operate effectively. However, despite its interesting associations, ‘Facts’ appears tiring in execution and over-emphatic in delivery. No need exists either for Tom Atkins’ lines about rich people or its repetition. Romero could really have let the ‘Facts’ speak for themselves rather being over-emphatic here. Such meanings also appear implicitly in his other films without any need for over-emphasis. However, although ‘Facts’ is a lesser work, its flaws may be attributable to a period in which Romero expressed despair at a film industry in the grip of over-commercial, banal and reactionary concerns, the type Andrew Britton significantly described as ‘Reaganite Entertainment’. The director’s pessimism may have led him to become too over-didactic in spelling out the message and his despair at audiences wanting gore and zombies may have led him towards this direction. However, in ‘Facts’, Romero expresses Andrew Britton’s definition of artistic hesitation by employing Gothic associations which hinder, rather than help, his creative development. He is a director whose work always promises a movement away from stifling generic confines into some significant direction. His next association with Stephen King reveals the same problems which have affected his work in the horror genre, namely the limiting nature of supernatural meanings. King’s work is often more significant for its insights into the material dark half of the American Dream rather than thrills and scary monsters. But, like his surrogate character, Thad Beaumont in The Dark Half, King’s devoted audience reads his fiction for chills rather than comments on the American condition. As with the films of George A. Romero, Stephen King’s fiction is mostly dependent upon the formulaic demands most audiences expect. This factor limits its potential significance and hinders development of the possibility the author has of making pertinent critical comments on the American way of life within his fiction. King’s often cumbersome writing style and over-productive output embodies further problems. The author merely becomes a mechanical entity churning out product rather than engaging in an interrogative examination of his society; book after book appears to just emphasise the horror in a formulaic manner rather than investigate the real material causes underlying it. The Dark Half as fiction and film pertinently reveals this dilemma. It is a work which really does not need a supernatural ‘dark half ’. As Kim Newman insightfully notes in a review written from the twin perspectives of horror film critic and novelist, a problematic confusion exists in the film concerning the villain, ‘who 170

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never decides whether he is a pseudonym come to life, the ghost of a dead twin, or another incarnation of that malignant Elvis currently stalking American popular culture’ (1993: 40). One of the innovations Romero’s screenplay brings to King’s novel is the motif of Presley’s twin brother who died at birth which appears both in the 1950s rocker persona of George Stark as well as the use of the Elvis ballad ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ Romero obviously borrowed this idea from John Carpenter’s 1979 television movie Elvis where the King’s morbid communion with the shadowy persona of his deceased brother forms an important Gothic motif within the text. However, although Romero appears to have directed a seemingly faithful adaptation for mainstream audiences, other familiar concerns also appear throughout the film. Like the film, King’s The Dark Half begins with young Thad Beaumont’s 1968 brain tumour and the discovery of the remains of a twin brother inside his brain during an operation. It then moves directly to Thad’s ‘burial’ of his fictional alter ego, George Stark on the cover of People magazine in 1988 and deals with the reasons for this in retrospect before proceeding in a linear narrative direction. By contrast, Romero’s version never engages in flashbacks and moves in a concise linear manner throughout its duration. It depicts creative writing professor Thad Beaumont’s encounter with blackmailing student, Fred Clawson, after his class with the events leading to the decision to bury his violent pulp writer surrogate for good. Unlike the novel, Romero provides different reasons for Thad’s decision which primarily involve the encouragement of his wife, Liz (Amy Madigan). Although the female perspective of Dawn of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead occupies a subordinate position in this film, it is nevertheless significantly present during key moments within the narrative. The Dark Half certainly emphasises the critique of violent masculinity present in Romero’s other films such as Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead and Monkey Shines as well as paralleling King’s own real life decision to expose himself to the general public as the author of the Richard Bachman books. But it also reproduces the theme of masculinity as the woman’s nightmare (see Wood 1986b). Although the female roles in The Dark Half appear thankless, during several key moments Romero emphasises both the supportive, knowledgeable qualities of characters such as Liz Beaumont and Reggie Delesseps (Julie Harris) as well as concerns of minor players in the drama such as Annie Pangborn (Chelsea Field). This last character apprehensively notices the effect of the pattern of violence on her husband, Sheriff Alan Pangborn (Michael Rooker), who later becomes emotionally affected by the negative incidents he has to deal with. Pangborn nearly shoots her when he returns home one night fearing that George Stark has invaded his home. Also, when Pangborn angrily bullies Thad into revealing the truth, Romero inserts a brief shot of his wife’s knowledgeable, but fearful, reaction concerning a pattern of male violence also affecting her husband. Her worried expression complements Liz’s when she hears her husband on the phone threatening Stark like a character from the latter’s novels: ‘I’ll hear the birds and I’ll come and tear you apart.’ It is almost as if Mrs. Pangborn realises that her husband needs a scapegoat to distract his increasingly negative energies away from the realisation that perhaps George Stark is as much his dark half as Thad’s. Liz comes to the same realisation in both novel and film. knight of the living dead

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Unfortunately, the film’s ‘happy ending’ omits the intuitive understanding between Liz and Pangborn that George Stark will continue to haunt the Beaumont marriage long after his departure to the underworld.5 Also, Romero changes Thad’s consoling male faculty colleague in the novel to the female character played by Julie Harris. Like Liz, she also intuitively understands that George Stark is much more than a supernatural threat to Thad Beaumont. The pre-credits sequence begins with a flock of sparrows who embody the supernatural forces of the Greek psychopomps who fly skywards conducting human souls back and forth between the realms of the living and the dead. When the date ‘1968’ appears, Romero uses the significant lines, ‘Are you sorry we drifted apart’ from Presley’s ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’ to suggest Thad’s ambivalent feelings concerning the loss of his twin brother. After revealing young Thad’s operation, the discovery of the remnants of a twin not fully ‘absorbed into the system’, and depicting a huge flock of sparrows flying outside the hospital, the film moves to the present. The first scene shows Thad (Timothy Hutton) gazing at his image in the mirror. His hair is slicked back almost like that of his future alter ego, George Stark. While the novel barely mentions the physical resemblances between Thad and George, the film’s use of the same actor playing both roles emphasises the Jekyll and Hyde personality of its hero who really does not need an externalised supernatural twin brother. Romero introduces the Beaumonts to the audience via a scene that does not exist in King’s novel. While Thad looks at himself in a mirror as if expressing reluctance to part entirely with a George Stark persona (who has provided money as well as an avenue to divert away his frustrations with domestic life), Romero reveals Liz reading a page of his new manuscript. Their twin children William and Wendy play near her. Thad then finds William playing with a page of his manuscript, which he retrieves before any harm occurs, and humorously remarks, ‘A born editor’. This incident appears a more positive image of the life of writer and family than the one contained in King’s novel The Shining, where alcoholic frustrated writer Jack Torrance violently reacted when he found his son, Danny, playing with his manuscript. However, as Thad’s fascination with his mirror image shows, dark currents exist beneath this harmonious domestic surface. Unlike her fictional counterpart in The Shining, Liz affirmatively supports her doubting husband who expresses little confidence in his talents and clumsily drops toys. When Thad asks, ‘Not that bad, is it?’, Liz replies, ‘Not much. It’s wonderful. It’s great. It’s a great book. You’ve actually really done it.’ Thad also mentions, ‘It’s not coming out of me easy’, a statement expressing both his creative efforts as well as contrasting with his George Stark books where the dark side of masculine violence easily expresses itself and no doubts occur whatsoever. Liz’s influence in supporting her husband as writer as well as gently urging him to perform domestic duties unthinkable for George Stark reveal her as positively influencing Thad’s gentle role as a father no matter how much he may unconsciously react against it. Romero’s direction of Timothy Hutton as Thad reveals a personality at war with himself. Thad appears intuitively wishing for his worst side to emerge to escape from his mundane domestic world. This feature occurs in the next sequence which shows him teaching his creative writing students and urging the values of freedom from 172

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repression: ‘The writer has to get that inner being out of the locker, otherwise the work will be inhibited, timid. Without passion it will be a pack of lies.’ But the presence of blackmailer Fred Clawson (Robert Joy) forces him to confront his darkest desires. Reacting against Clawson’s economic threats of losing an audience who pay hardback novel prices and believe the author resembles his characters, Thad refuses to submit to blackmail. He, instead, threatens him in a violent manner more appropriate to his fictional surrogate than his everyday persona. Although Thad later expresses irritation concerning Clawson’s invasion into his life, Romero has Liz suggest that her husband go public with the information and bury George Stark forever. This differs from the novel where Thad appears to have made the decision himself. Amy Madigan’s Liz appears in the film as Thad’s ‘better half ’ as opposed to George Stark’s macho ‘dark half ’. Although Thad agrees with her suggestion, his playfully violent comments to his baby after diaper duty suggests that he does not entirely regret the decision to regard George Stark as dead and buried. While Thad gleefully comments, ‘I’d like to knock him through the loop, let Alexis Machine get him, cut off his pecker, shove it in his little rat mouth, so they’ll know he’s a squealer’, Romero cuts to Liz’s worried expression. She knows that George is a significant part of her supposedly gentle husband’s personality and may not easily go away. The key role of gender difference operating as a key structural element in The Dark Half also exists in the characters of Thad’s literary agents. Although divorced, Miriam (Rutanya Alda) and Rick Cowley (Tom Mardirosian) continue their business relationship. But former husband and wife have different attitudes concerning Thad’s announcement of a decision which will affect their profits. While Miriam utters her full support, Rick expresses concern on both the financial and consumption levels: ‘I read George Stark because it’s fun. I read Thad Beaumont because it’s my job.’ Miriam then significantly comments, ‘That’s why we live across town from each other.’ Unfortunately, despite their different attitudes, they will both face the revenge of an author who does not wish to die. The scene then dissolves from the New York skyline to show Thad and Liz sharing the same concerns. Thad expresses regret for killing off a profitable source of income. But Liz both reassures her husband about the decision he has agreed to follow as well as expressing relief at the demise of a vicious fictional character. However, she does recognise a disturbing affinity between writer and creation noting some regret in her husband: ‘You don’t want to give up George. You’ve become attracted to him . . . He can do anything you want, be anything you want. He’s your drinking buddy . . . You really don’t realise what you’re like when you write the books, do you. It’s like witnessing Jekyll turning into Hyde.’ Despite Thad’s denial of such a relationship as well as his concealed alcoholic tendencies (which are exposed when George later finds Thad’s hidden whiskey bottle in his study drawer), Romero subtly shifts the weight of the argument on Liz’s side rather than Thad’s. In this scene, Liz appears much more straightforward than her evasive husband who does not appear to relish the prospect of entirely jettisoning a significant part of his personality. By playing the dual roles of Thad Beaumont and George Stark, Hutton’s performances form a perfect psychological match. While Stark takes pleasure in the joyful knight of the living dead

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release of his violent libido, Thad generally engages in subdued threats as if secretly hoping his dark half will perform the vicious actions he cannot bring himself to do. As well as enjoying his earlier threat against Clawson of disposing of him like Stark’s fictional character, Alexis Machine, Thad also takes sadistic pleasure in scaring New York writer Mike Donaldson (Kent Broadhurst). When Donaldson remarks that the links between author and creation suggest ‘classic symptoms of schizophrenia’, Thad relishes Stark’s reaction towards such civilised definitions. Thad’s attitude resembles Allan Mann in Monkey Shines who secretly wishes that a convenient monster fulfil his darkest desires. He is also irritated by the garrulous presence of elderly photographer Homer Gamache (Glen Colerider) who rambles on about death in philosophical ways while having no clear ideas about its brutal alternative versions. Although Thad consciously expresses relief at the death of his literary twin, he subconsciously resents his new commitment to the full-time role of devoted father without having recourse to the psychological release provided by George Stark’s aggressive fictional world. This results in the remains of Thad’s unborn twin brother emerging from the family graveyard to evolve into Stark who embarks on a bloody trail of vengeance against all those responsible for his ‘death’. After the brutal killings of Homer and Clawson, the police suspect Thad since his fingerprints appear on the scene of both crimes. However, at this point of the film, Romero’s subtle constructions begin to collapse into formulaic representations. The audience has already seen George Stark’s shadowy presence twice in the film before his full appearance at Miriam’s New York apartment. He now becomes an external embodiment of Thad’s dark desires. However, although Romero’s films contain precedents for Stark’s monstrous appearance in terms of zombies and deadly monkeys, George Stark becomes little better than a figure from the average horror film whose rampages have little relationship to the human dilemma which have caused his appearance. Earlier Romero screenplays often balance competing claims of the horror genre’s excessive violence and their strong connection to relevant social problems in a concise allegorical manner. Unfortunately, in this adaptation of a King novel where the Gothic element clearly overwhelms significant aspects of human psychology, the result becomes an incoherent film which lacks the development of key potentials in the material. Although King’s work contains both social and supernatural features, his readers often prefer the latter to the detriment of understanding the former elements which are really responsible for key developments within the narrative. It is a similar dilemma shared between Thad Beaumont and George Stark as well as a director such as George Romero in relation to an audience who constantly request more bloodshed for sensual gratification. Stark sells more copies than Beaumont. Zombies appeal more to the average fan than Knightriders. Problems exist whenever any talent employs a genre noted for its excessive qualities and usually regarded as devoid of any relevant social meaning. Romero often works himself out of this dilemma by finely crafted screenplays which explicitly attempt to raise audience awareness of the tensions existing between the special effects and the social conditions which really generate such manifestations which often remain submerged amidst excessive fetishistic signifiers. Unfortunately, The Dark Half (like its original source) raises the 174

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question of personal control and responsibility (always a key issue for Romero). But it finally ends up by drowning it in a deluge of scary incidents. Although Stark’s explicit presence in the film later takes attention away from the real reasons concerning his appearance as Kim Newman pertinently notes,6 individual fragments still remain scattered throughout The Dark Half suggesting one direction the film could have taken. It would have involved dispensing with Stark entirely or clarifying Thad’s guilty responsibility for creating and nourishing his dark half. However, despite Liz’s urging Thad to tell Pangborn the truth—‘you’re keeping secrets, Thad. That’s no good, never was . . . This is not a good time to hold things back’—the film’s version of the ‘truth’ is a convenient monster on a slaying spree and not individual responsibility. Stark’s bogeyman figure is clearly a surrogate scapegoat device. Romero inserts into the film an important confrontation between Reggie and Thad which never appears in King’s novel. It is one urging Romero’s axiom of confronting hard questions directly and taking human responsibility for trying to control events whether they be supernatural or otherwise. Like Romero’s other positive female characters, Reggie knows more about her faculty colleague’s problem than he does himself. Her dialogue forms a rare moment of reflection which The Dark Half loses in its climactic special effects ending. She comments that Stark is really a creation of Thad’s will: ‘We all have something of the beast inside us. We can either suppress it or encourage it. In your case, you encouraged it too much. In your subconscious you wanted it to live. You wanted it so badly it actually came to life. Your characters have always been vividly written, Thad.’ Reggie’s lines concerning human responsibility and an author’s fascination with the dark side of his personality gain support from earlier scenes in the film such as Thad’s threat to Clawson, his ‘playful’ discussion of its implications with young William witnessed by Liz, and Thad’s unconcealed enjoyment of the way Stark would deal with a cynical, New York intellectual reporter such as Donaldson. Even Thad admits his guilt at this point when he confesses to Reggie his realisation of George Stark embodying his ‘dark half ’: ‘I wanted him to live. God forgive me. It’s true. Part of me has always admired George Stark, admired his simple violent nature, a man who doesn’t stumble over things, who never looks weak or silly, a man with a straight answer for everything.’ Reggie also embodies Tania Modleski’s definition of ‘a woman who knows too much’.7 But unlike her cinematic predecessors she belongs within Romero’s particular cinematic world. This allows her the capacity to interrogate patriarchy and confront self-deceptive males such as Thad with the responsibility for their guilt. Although Thad denies Reggie’s assertion that he still ‘admires’ Stark, she emphasises that his desires represent the key issue: ‘If you don’t want him here, he can’t remain.’ However, Stark is the one who is trying to take ‘real life’ away from Thad feeding on his creator’s dark desires in very much the same way as Romero’s zombies feed on human flesh and instinctually follow the worst patterns of civilised behaviour. She counsels Thad that both he and Stark are symbiotic blood brothers who know each other intimately. She warns Thad, ‘Don’t let him seduce you, don’t.’ But, finally, as Reggie affirms, ‘In the end, it’s what you believe.’ Thad leaves and expresses his gratitude to her for giving him ‘the weapon I need’. knight of the living dead

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The film moves towards its final confrontation between Thad and his twin brother. Stark has kidnapped Liz and the twins and holds them captive in Thad’s country retreat. Realising that Thad’s psychological struggles are beginning to cost him his life, the now decomposing Stark wishes his twin to begin a new Alexis Machine novel that will reverse the decaying process. Thad’s struggle is really internal. But, despite Timothy Hutton’s performance as Thad, Stark’s physical presence in the film unfortunately reinforces the horror genre’s frequent recourse to convenient externalisation and distracts the viewer away from the battle going on inside its main character. As the psychopomps fly against the windows to carry away the loser, a deadly psychological chess game continues between Thad and his dark half. Both begin to take on each other’s attributes. When Stark overcomes his hesitation of a fictional character becoming his own creator, his body begins to heal while Thad’s begins to deteriorate. However, Thad rallies by initially overpowering his antagonist and stopping his bodily deterioration, but Stark soon revives. Both men are now physically healed and balance each other’s personality more than ever. Stark knocks over a book in Thad’s manner, a fact the author recognises by his comment, ‘Clumsiness, George.’ Thad then begins to speak like his dark half relishing the threat to his twin’s existence in a similar manner to his earlier encounter with Clawson: ‘I’m not doing anything, Hoss. I’m just waiting around to see how things turn out.’ When Stark then attempts to shoot Thad’s children, Thad then moves against him using a typewriter to knock the gun away; he had earlier used a Black Beauty pencil (Stark’s favourite writing implement) against him, but he now uses Thad’s preferred instrument to win the battle finally. The birds then break into Thad’s study and dismember Stark’s body before carrying the remains away to the underworld. Alan Pangborn eventually arrives to witness the final act and the film ends. Thad has clearly overcome his dark half. But his initial use of Stark’s preferred writing instrument against his adversary and his final threat resembling Stark’s own speech appear to question any positive outcome the film may attempt to move towards. Thad may have reverted back to his own persona by using the typewriter against Stark, but Stark’s clumsiness also shows that he has also become like his weaker twin. However, the intriguing ambiguity of this final act remains in doubt since the film moves to a perfunctory, rushed ending, indebted to a spectacular display of special effects that Romero very rarely indulges in. Possibly, studio demands may have resulted in this hasty ending since it leaves many questions unresolved. Will Thad be totally cured after realising the violent tendencies in his own nature? Romero’s better films end on a note of provocative ambiguity. Unfortunately, The Dark Half does not provide this. It is a film which does contain some intriguing insights. But it is also the product of a studio system now almost exclusively devoted to ‘mindless entertainment’, disavowing important classical and 1970s traditions which made films much more than that. Romero’s temporary retreat from direction from 1992 to 2000 may represent his recognition of the very factor. Despite his involvement with many projects, none of which ever came to fruition, he was trapped in development hell and could have remained frustrated until he finally moved to Canada, where a more welcoming film community appreciated his talents and gave him the opportunity to work again in a more consistent manner than before. 176

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chapter thirteen

From Bruiser To Land of the Dead

it is an inescapable and unfortunate characteristic of any film industry that a director becomes indelibly associated with a particular genre, especially one in which he made his name. While John Woo is now mainly known as an action director, despite wishing to diverge into other fields and make a musical, Romero will always be linked with the zombie movie in the industrial and popular mind, a format he has been most instrumental in developing. Despite his creative versatility and his production of different types of films such as Knightriders and Bruiser, Romero will find it difficult to escape the stereotype, especially in a world where a monolithic production line now dominating the Hollywood film industry makes divergence impossible. However, at this stage in his career, a stage both late and mature in the creative sense of the word, he now finds himself associated with a particular genre in the same way that John Ford and Howard Hawks were in their own eras. Although the later films of these directors have their critical supporters, it is difficult to argue that Two Rode Together, Cheyenne Autumn, El Dorado, and Rio Lobo match their earlier achievements. Romero is at least a decade younger working in the autumn years of his career than these two giants of an earlier phase of Hollywood cinema. He is also fortunate enough not to be trapped by a now malignant studio system whose corporate development affected the talents of Ford and Hawks. However, although we all hope for other future George Romero films that he is creatively capable of doing, his last two achievements are more innovative and satisfying than the above-mentioned films of these two directors which, despite brief occasional flashes of former brilliance, merely followed familiar trails. In contrast, Romero has developed (and in one instance even exceeded) the stylistic and thematic patterns of his previous work and is capable of achieving much more in the independent framework he has chosen to operate within. As the lines to the theme song accompanying the credits of El Dorado suggest, Romero will ‘ride, boldly ride to the end of the trail’. Unlike the later Hawks, he may still find his El Dorado. When the first edition of this book appeared, it looked like Romero would suffer the fate of many creative independent directors of the 1970s who found themselves facing a changed production and distribution system that drastically affected the

diversity and circulation of many films of that era. As he mentions in his DVD commentary to The Crazies, small local theatres began to close or were taken over by huge distribution chains that limited the number of films shown despite the increase of screens.1 Small production companies collapsed before the assault of big budget competitors whose victory actually limited the number of different films that could be shown. This naturally affected the type of cinema Romero cherished. After spending most of the 1990s trying to get projects launched in Hollywood and finding his efforts often frustrated at the last moment, Romero returned to his preferred form of low-budget filmmaking, but this time in Canada, not Pittsburgh. As he mentions in a recent interview, production opportunities diminished in his home environment, but Canada offered both financial incentives and the freedom to make his own type of films.2 This opportunity allowed him to work with not only a new creative community but also a more sympathetic producer such as Peter Grunwald, who has acted in that capacity on Romero’s films from Bruiser onwards. Although Romero made this film while he was still living in Pittsburgh, it is in many ways a different version of those independent films he made between Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. But, here it is much more of a chamber drama than any of his earlier works. Like the chamber music of Mozart and Shostakovich, it utilizes common elements of a tradition to create a much more cerebral composition. In Bruiser, Romero utilizes the formal elements of cinematography and professional actors to create a film that has many similarities with themes contained in his earlier work. However, Bruiser is a deliberate work of cinematic alienation made in the hope that audiences will consider the challenging ideas contained within its structure and not identify with either characters or illusory cinematic mechanisms. The film represented a challenge for both Romero and his audiences. As a result, it never gained theatrical distribution but went immediately into DVD distribution. Although Bruiser is deliberately cold and alienating, it is not bereft of ideas. But, by eschewing the usual processes of cinematic attraction rather than utilizing them for subversive means as in his more accessible films, Bruiser did not gain theatrical release. However, despite these problems, it represents a bridge between a studio production such as The Dark Half and the more challenging Diary of the Dead that Romero made in the first years of his Toronto residency and his acquirement of Canadian citizenship. Romero broke with the land of his fathers in more than one way. However, from the very moment of his birth as a child of Cuban and Lithuanian lineage, he has always been an outsider in a ‘Land of the Free’ that is, in reality and metaphorically a ‘Land of the Dead’. Despite its interesting features, The Dark Half could have foreshadowed the type of unchallenging Hollywood cinema Romero could have found himself trapped within. Bruiser represented a necessary artistic break for Romero before he went on to capture the best of both his cinematic worlds involving accessibility and subversiveness in Land of the Dead. But, rather than being satisfied with the result, he again decided to challenge himself by making another type of intimate character chamber drama that worked far more successfully than Bruiser in providing the audience with characters they could initially identify with (as far as the younger market-geared audience of today’s cinema is concerned) and then critique. By contrast, Bruiser’s 178

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main character is unsympathetic from his very introduction. Although one may understand the nature of his revenge, he is still a product of the very society that created him whose actions mirror its very nature. Although Henry may be Romero’s Frankenstein monster in this film, he lacks the sympathy of Karloff’s original character. By contrast, other leading characters in Romero’s later films contain some elements of empathy (with the exception of Kaufman and his corporate elite). However, this does not mean that they are immune from the director’s particular form of critical interrogation. The closest parallel to understanding the cinema of George A. Romero remains the following comment of Theodor Adorno’s. In his posthumously collected series of essays, Adorno regarded the real function of art as not involving a denial of the real world. He believed that art undergoes qualitative change when it attacks its traditional foundations . . . and becomes a qualitatively different entity by virtue of its opposition, at the level of artistic form, to the existing world and also by its readiness to aid and shape that world. Neither the concept of solace, nor its opposite, refusal, captures the meaning of art.3

The films of George A. Romero neither offer consolation for the sad state of society, nor do they withdraw from any type of involvement. Instead, they are critical and satirical works of artistic engagement in their own right. Although a vast difference exists between Adorno’s aesthetic theory and Romero’s films, these remarks by the Frankfurt school’s major spokesman are relevant for understanding the significance of this under-appreciated independent director. Romero exists outside the Hollywood system, operating in an era when the critical community needs to reject the fallacious arguments of certain realms of cultural studies and postmodernism and say, ‘Come back Frankfurt school. All is forgiven!’—at least, to a certain degree. The cinema of George A. Romero opposes the currently monolithic Hollywood system of debased values both formally and thematically. The films express oppositional and qualified utopian yearnings for a better world but realize that such a world is impossible unless audiences actively seek to change the present system. Otherwise, they are little better than the ‘living dead’ of Romero’s films, a collective entity including both humans and zombies. Neither naively affirmative nor cynically pessimistic, the films depict fictional situations in which characters may try to change their lives or submit to the system at great personal and emotional cost, as illustrated by Henry Creedlow (Jason Flemyng) of Bruiser. Although films such as Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead suggest potential re-awakenings for surviving characters, the possibility for change remains tentative and under threat from internal and external forces. However, Romero constantly functions as a knight of the living dead for those aware of the values of his films and the liberation only they can achieve for themselves. Romero is the knight who loosens the chains. But this realization of liberation can only be achieved by those who read the films and act on their warnings. This aspect runs through his entire work. It is a message naturally antithetical to the corporate world of contemporary Hollywood. Romero’s absence from film production since 1992 is not surprising. knight of the living dead

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Both he and Meryl Streep were compared to ‘yesterday’s pizza—cold’, a term that occurs in Bruiser and used by Romero in his 2000 Chicago seminar at the Siskel Center. Ironically, both he and Meryl Streep are active again, so news of their demise was, in Mark Twain’s words—‘premature’. Although different in nature from his previous films, Bruiser again raises familiar issues concerning individual dehumanization in late-capitalist society, especially work-place bullying practiced by Henry’s present and future bosses. Stylistically, Bruiser represents a distinctive variation from Romero’s past and succeeding films: it is shot in an antiseptic, almost clinical, manner, resembling dehumanizing professional Hollywood, contemporary techniques of television representations as well as the empty, spiritually unfulfilling, affluent environments dominating its protagonists. Here, style appropriately represents content.4 Dedicated conformist Henry Creedlow works for a slick magazine, ‘Bruiser’, aimed at the ‘me’ generation. Living in a house well beyond his means and still in process of construction, he wakes up and discovers himself trapped under a faceless mask the morning after his wife has cheated on him with his boss, Milo Styles (Peter Stormare). Best friend Jim (Andrew Tarbet) has been robbing his portfolio to support his affluent lifestyle and purchase new cars. Henry uses his newfound identity to avenge himself on all those who have wronged him by robbing him of his individuality, a process in which he himself has been complicit. His victims include a thieving Hispanic domestic, cheating wife, Janine (Nina Garbiras), Jim, and, eventually, Milo himself. During Milo’s party, he sees him flirting with his wife and does nothing about it. However, he nurtures an overpowering sense of murderous rage. Before his change, Henry engages in a revenge fantasy before boarding a train by pushing a woman down and being responsible for her decapitation by the wheels. This is his savage symbolic compensation for the castration that he already undergoes in his daily life and one that that society also performs. But, like his earlier suicidal fantasy in the bathroom he is in reality also hurting himself since he is also complicit in his oppression. His rage takes a monstrous form suggested by the bland mask created by Milo’s wife, Rosemary (Leslie Hope), which she makes during Milo’s party. She hangs it up near several of her former creations, including one coloured by the Stars and Stripes. Henry’s real monstrous self eventually emerges, one having little difference from the repressed everyday normal appearance as he daily encounters personal and social humiliation. Pursuing his revenge, Henry becomes famous, appears on the front page of tabloids, and becomes a celebrity for the first time in his life, one ironically designated by the mask that covers his features. Because the police can not catch him, Henry now revels in his anonymity and uses it for revenge. After discovering Milo screwing Janine, Rosemary photographs the scene and threatens her husband with divorce. Milo is the wealthy owner of ‘Bruiser’, specifically aimed at an affluent post-capitalist readership, a former refugee from Communism who has sold out to Western material values. His very character is a major indictment of the insidious contemporary trend of globalization, that is, in reality, another form of capitalist dehumanization and enslavement. However, Rosemary can not make the final break from her affluent lifestyle that chains her as much as any physical bond, until she discovers the identity of the faceless killer and what actually 180

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motivates his avenging acts. When the police discover Janine’s hanging body outside Milo’s apartment, they try to set up Rosemary as the murderer. Detective McCleary (Tom Atkins) exhibits similar patriarchal attitudes to those of his counterpart in Jack’s Wife when he brusquely remarks, ‘The dame did it.’ Although lacking zombies (a factor thus that must have influenced the direct-toDVD release), Bruiser not only contains many features of the social criticism found in Romero’s other films but also represents another cinematic version of a modern satiric grotesque as defined by John R. Clark. Clark notes that in an era characterized by the degrading of the hero ‘modern satire has been especially fond of utilizing the absurdities of perverse gothic underground men entrapped in their own entropic universe’. Henry thus fits Clark’s definition of ‘an organization man trapped in his own labyrinth, a narcissist stultified by the stunted invariable features he sees in the glass’. The deliberately unlikable Henry Creedlow is a modern victim of regimentation encouraged by a society producing mechanical behaviour encouraging apathy and atrophy. It is no accident that mirror imagery occurs in two key scenes in the first part of the film.5 Bruiser opens with Henry waking up in the morning and listening to a radio talk-show. The host abuses his listeners, evoking the previous situation in Martin as well as paralleling the verbal tactics employed by Milo and Henry’s future boss at the climax. As Henry listens, a distraught male commits suicide on the air after bemoaning the loss of his house due to taxes. He has identified himself with his property, feels that he has nothing to pass in his name to his children, and has no individual value outside the economic system of his society. Since ‘house poor’ Henry lives in an affluent, but sterile, neighbourhood inside an unfinished house, the event affects him emotionally despite the fact that his face does not register the tragedy of this event. Even before the mask imposes itself on his features, Henry is already a faceless automaton. The caller articulates his entrapment within materialistic values: ‘You shovel shit all your life and you don’t leave a mark at all. It’s as if you’ve never been here at all.’ After the suicide, Henry appears to use a gun to commit the same act against himself, but the following shots reveal that it is a fantasy. Later, at the station, Henry supposedly decapitates a woman and injures an affluently dressed male. He becomes enraged when she jumps the queue and takes out his frustrations on her and the man. The sequence ends by revealing that it is another of his fantasies. He wakes up the following morning to find his features covered by a blank, white mask, a situation that appears to be real and not fantasy. It occurs the morning after Janine condemns him as an economic loser and drives off to spend the night with Milo. Henry discovers this as he listens to her on the phone that very morning as she speaks to his boss. His rage seeks a symbolic victim, one provided by a Hispanic domestic who robs his home, obviously supplementing her meagre income. Henry’s masochistic tendencies, illustrated by his suicide fantasy stimulated by listening to the talk-show the previous morning, now turn into sadistic plans of revenge against all those who have humiliated him. He overreacts by killing the domestic in the same way as he overreacted against the woman at the train station in his previous fantasy. Bruiser’s two opening fantasy sequences contrasting masochistic and sadistic solutions to Henry’s psychological dilemma creatively evoke elements contained in Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ that argues that these knight of the living dead

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supposedly opposing instincts actually counterpoint each other in any human condition struggling against the constraints of a rigid society. Although Henry’s world is a century after Freud’s, he still suffers from instinctual psychological damage that takes a toll on his personality. The internal everyday monster becomes an external one. Viewed in this manner, Bruiser’s screenplay represents one of Romero’s most daring achievements in cinema. He disavows the supernatural elements of his most accomplished films, choosing instead to emphasize core elements of what is really important in these films. However, by bravely choosing to disappoint audience expectations by not providing zombies, he takes a very calculated risk and one that did not help distribution prospects in the twenty-first century. Bruiser is an independent film venture of Romero’s where he tries to approach familiar concerns from a different angle in sharp contrast to the films he previously directed. Unfortunately, the result is too alienating for most audiences. Like Martin, Bruiser plays with those boundaries dividing fantasy from reality in such a manner that both realms appear to merge. But, unlike Martin, there are no Gothic sequences where we can be certain that the events are really fantasy. Confusion deliberately registers in the minds of the audiences, but one meant to be challenging. Unfortunately, most audience members would not accept the challenge, especially in an era when the type of experimental cinema familiar to Romero and his generation is no longer as accessible as it once was forty years ago in urban and college centres. Bruiser is really a film influenced by the art cinema of alienation typified by Antonioni and Bergman but mediated according to Romero’s stylistic and thematic interests. This era of diverse and difficult cinema is now over thanks to the corporate control of the media and lack of distribution for any demanding films. This may explain why Bruiser appears as an unusual work for Romero. In reality it is not. But since audiences no longer have the opportunity to view challenging experimental and independent films that deliberately break boundaries and confuse viewer expectations, the film appears deliberately mystifying. Bruiser’s world is one in which it is recognizably clear that what once passed for normality no longer exists. In fact, it is dehumanizing and ugly. The pursuit of false goals of affluence and materialism have resulted in personal existence becoming little better than a living nightmare with the dispossessed safely contained within their new positions of talk-show guests facing humiliation or marginalized outside Milo’s affluent parties. They do not belong in his world. When Henry awakes one morning to find his features altered into the mask Rosemary modelled from his face during Milo’s barbecue, the supposedly deceased victim of the talk-show host also appears on the radio. He announces that he has ‘risen from the dead’, that he is not going to take ‘any more shit from rotten bastards like you anymore’. In many ways, he anticipates the zombie army led by Big Daddy in Land of the Dead who also decide that they are not going to take it anymore. This Lazarus figure also announces, ‘You can’t turn a man into nothing’, a statement paralleling Henry’s past and present situation. When Rosemary finished the mask, Henry commented, ‘It didn’t look like anything.’ She replied, ‘It’s an exact replica’, and advises him to see if ‘you can work on your image’. Later that evening, Janine criticizes Henry, ‘You swallow your emotions. You take any shit . . . You’re nothing, nobody.’ After discovering that a colleague has 182

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witnessed his murder of Janine, Henry warns him, ‘I used to take every kind of shit handed to me. Don’t develop a taste for it.’ When his face finally returns after his murder of Milo, Henry tells another colleague that he finally ‘stood up’ for himself. Although Henry’s character respectively evokes both the title characters of The Beatles’ ‘Nowhere Man’ and Jim Thompson’s The Nothing Man (1954), Bruiser also contains further Romero criticism of violence as a solution. Although Rosemary recognizes why Henry acts in the way that he does, she reacts against him in ways reminiscent of Romero’s previous heroines. Despite her reservations, she helps him escape by donning his mask and costume during Milo’s masquerade ball. She exits from the film walking into the distance after giving McCleary Henry’s mask; Rosemary also wears an identical costume to Henry minus the mask. An earlier scene showed her wearing the mask while bathing in a Jacuzzi, an act revealing her own form of entrapment. After enduring an unsatisfactory marriage with Milo and existing in a rich and sterile environment representing the final version of Henry’s unfinished house, Rosemary is now free to live her own life and pursue her own goals. This conclusion contrasts with that involving Henry in Romero’s ironic epilogue to Bruiser. Henry is now a long-haired, tie-dyed T-shirt-wearing office boy delivering mail. When he encounters verbal abuse from another aggressive boss, Henry immediately reverts to his violent masked persona and moves towards his victimizer. The cycle of violence will continue anew. Only radical change in society and social behaviour will finally end it. Bruiser ends in an abrupt manner, but the implication concerning this unsatisfactory resolution is clearly implicit here. For Romero, who described this film as a ‘parable about disenfranchisement’ during his presentation at the Siskel Film Center of Chicago in September 2000, modern society has now become a dark nightmare, a situation envisaged in the climactic ‘masquerade’ where Henry takes his final revenge on Milo. This masked ball is a late-capitalist version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death where Milo’s Prospero ironically perishes by a red laser beam that first castrates him literally (paralleling the symbolic act of castration he had inflicted on Henry) before killing him. Milo becomes an egotistic spectacle in death as well as life. His grotesque masked ball is a descendant of those other grotesque visual displays found in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels such as La Curée, Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, and Au Bonheur des Dames that revealed the decadence of upper levels of society. Deliberately depicted in demonic terms with Milo bearing a satanic horn and a little boy dressed up like a devil emphasizing the ideological links between the older and younger generations within this late-capitalist social structure, this masked ball represents another celebration by crowds who are little better than living dead zombies. Here again, Romero intuitively merges the naturalist aspects of Zola’s crowds with the supernatural associations of his earlier films. As McCleary ironically remarks, ‘Everybody here is faceless.’ His line also evokes images of those faceless zombie legions in Romero’s well-known films. Although the director has no actual zombies in this sequence, he significantly cuts to certain scenes showing dismembered body parts as candy on trays devoured by the partygoers. The masquerade represents the logical culmination of Zola’s earlier vision concerning commodification, spectacular displays, and consumerism. Organized by a twenty-first-century version of Octave knight of the living dead

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Mouret from Au Bonheur des Dames who also uses and abuses his female employees as bodily commodities, the masked ball metaphorically represents key themes present within Romero’s films. The entertainment presented by the Misfits also involves spectacular displays of violence on the part of several participants in this happening as if suggesting that the Altamont incidents documented in Gimme Shelter (1970) has now become a normal event in this particular decadent society. If not actual zombies, the participants are all living dead versions of late-twentieth-century capitalism, the descendants of those affluent consumers seen in the 1920s films of Cecil B. DeMille.6 Henry appears as a masked figure at this ball, his costume reminiscent of the title character of Louis Feullade’s Judex (1916). Although Romero frequently cites Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face (1960) as one of the sources for Bruiser, the French director also remade Judex in 1964 and finished his career with L’Homme sans visage (1974), whose title bears more than a coincidental analogy with the dilemma of Henry Creedlow. Like Monkey Shines, Bruiser is a film where Romero has deliberately chosen to change his style towards a more minimalist form of representation. But this different stylistic choice should not deceive viewers. Many of Romero’s familiar themes still operate. Like other directors approaching the height of their powers, Romero has realized that less can actually represent more in terms of significant meaning. Although it would be pleasing to think that Romero’s return to mainstream filmmaking resulted from Hollywood’s belated respect for the innovator of a genre that saw a recent ignominious revival with Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead in 2004 and the similarly ignominious new version of Day of the Dead (2008), neither of which Romero was involved with, such was not really the case. As he states in a recent interview, this revival owed more to market forces than any genuine social obsession. However, Romero recognizes how he can manipulate the system for his own ends. ‘My zombies . . . I keep coming back to them and I find that I can use them when I want to make an observation about the cultural or the political scene in North America. I can put the zombies in there! To me the zombies represent something like a hurricane, a disaster happening. My stories are more about the people, the humans, and what’s happening in the world, what’s happening to the individual characters who can’t adjust to this change. So it’s very easy for me to just use that, basically the same story, and make different observations about what’s happening at the time.’7 Released in North America on June 24, 2005, and distributed by Universal Pictures, the $16 million budget film Land of the Dead represents the second version of Romero’s movement towards a wider audience, the first being Dawn of the Dead. But it is one that never compromises its bleak and serious vision, a vision influenced by the more dangerous world of the twenty-first century. Unlike the remake of Dawn of the Dead and the numerous direct-to-DVD zombie films littering rental shelves, Land of the Dead is neither superficial nor designed to exploit contemporary tastes for one of the few remaining Hollywood genres surviving from a once prolific period within the industry. Although the film is set in Pittsburgh, like Bruiser, it was shot on location in the Ontario province of Canada. Diary of the Dead similarly refers to Pittsburgh but is also a Canadian production. Like his main character, Riley Denbo 184

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(Simon Baker), Romero has decided to head north towards another area where he may comment further on his dark version of a contemporary American nightmare. After all, Canada is within the continent of North America! As with Diary of the Dead, Romero opens his film at the very beginning of a situation that introduced Night of the Living Dead to his first audiences. However, the opening image is a reproduction of the mid-1930s Universal Studios logo that introduced many contemporary horror films of that era, to say nothing of its different type of generic products. Although viewers may be tempted to associate this with the German expressionist-influenced horror films of James Whale and others, it should not be forgotten that this logo accompanied many films that appeared during the Depression era. Romero may also be making a similar reference to the equally bleak period of the opening years of the twenty-first century, one witnessing the dictatorial activities of the occupants of the White House, the ‘war on terror’, and a widening gap between rich and poor far exceeding anything that appeared in the Reagan era. If FDR’s words the ‘only thing we have to fear is fear itself ’ characterized the era of the Great Depression, Romero’s Land of the Dead not only shows us its contemporary version of fear but also what generates it—which do not exclusively involve zombies! One should never overlook the satirical ironies within the work of this director. Twenty years after filming Day of the Dead, a critical interrogation of the Reagan era, Romero now begins his history lesson for the twenty-first century. Following the caption, ‘Some Time Ago’, black and white images appear under the opening credits depicting the beginning of the zombie plague with voice-overs repeating lines from earlier films. Then the screen changes to a blue filter image depicting a world where zombies control the outer perimeters of civilization. A caption appears, ‘Today’. Since the zombies appear in various stages of decomposition, the suggestion is that this contemporary brave new world occupies a time somewhere between the end of Dawn of the Dead and the beginning of Day of the Dead whose zombies (with the exception of ‘Bub’) appear in more advanced stages of decomposition. Land of the Dead occupies a cinematic parallel world to those of earlier films, unlike Diary of the Dead, which moves its action back to the very beginnings of Night of the Living Dead. Romero has moved away from a linear chronological depiction of events towards a narrative reflecting different movements paralleling the ones he depicted in his earlier zombie trilogy. In this way, Romero’s direction resembles the work of symphonic composers such as Beethoven and Mozart, who, while moving towards the ultimate expression of their creative talents, both rework the traditions they have inherited as well as provide musical variants and different types of parallels to the scores that they have written. At this stage of his career, Romero has intuitively developed this type of creative expression according to his own type of personality as well as his deep familiarity with a genre he has helped to create, a genre he is also attempting to contribute towards as well as engaging in an artistic form or representation rather than mere repetition. As Land and Diary show, Romero will not be content to rest upon his laurels. Instead, he contributes new levels of meaning to familiar themes. The next scene in Land of the Dead reveals the grimly humorous sign ‘EATS’, the significance of which is not lost on devotees of Romero’s zombie films. Mirosław Baszak’s knight of the living dead

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accomplished neo-noir cinematography now introduces us to the dead world of Uniontown, whose occupants are as marginalized as both the American working class and union membership in the secure homeland of George W. Bush. As the camera cranes diagonally to the right, we see zombies congregating outside an abandoned church and others scattered around a cemetery before a pause reveals zombies attempting band practice in a gazebo. A zombie couple walks together hand in hand ironically reproducing former human feelings. Tenderness still exists alongside their newly acquired carnivorous tendencies. This collective movement of the zombies is nothing new since it has characterized previous films. However, what makes this scene significant is the suggestion that zombie attempts at human behaviour are more enduring than temporary and that the presence of a leader may co-ordinate their clumsy efforts into something much more meaningful. He will soon emerge in the presence of African-American gas station attendant Big Daddy (Eugene Clark). Like Bub of Day of the Dead, he appears more intuitive and intelligent than any of his peer group living dead compatriots. But, unlike Bub, this intelligence will develop into strategic qualities of leadership that will unite this marginalized group against the forces who control Fiddler’s Green. A zombie steps on a gas station tube, normally used to alert the attendant to the presence of a car needing fuel. Big Daddy shuffles outside to the gas pump. When he discovers that a car is not there, a point-of-view shot reveals his perception of the tube on the floor followed by a shot revealing a basic level of understanding that his former intuitive memory pattern needs revising. He has clearly advanced beyond the Pavlov-dog type of educational conditioning that Dr. Logan used on his zombie subjects in Day of the Dead. But this time, no Dr. Logan is present. It is not enough to merely repeat patterns of past memory. Big Daddy has clearly worked things out for himself and begun to realize that his former mode of conditioned behaviour is now redundant in a new situation. This will have definite consequences for the development of Land of the Dead ’s new trajectory. Riley Denbo watches the situation from afar exchanging comments with another human about these new developments. ‘They’re learning to be us again.’ ‘It’s like they’re pretending to be alive.’ However, after noting Big Daddy grunting to other zombies, Riley comments, ‘It’s not like they’re walking. They’re thinking. They’re communicating. There’s something going on.’ Riley has also befriended the traumatized figure of Charlie (Robert Joy), who resembles a zombie in his initial appearance until Riley informs one of his team about the difference. Sometime in the past, he has rescued Charlie from a fire and his friend still bears the scars from that incident. However, although he appears slow-witted, Charlie is actually a crack shot resembling Gary Cooper in Howard Hawks’s Sergeant York (1941). He believes that it is he who is looking after Riley rather than the other way round. Romero again affirms the influence of Howard Hawks on his work. Charlie represents a new version of those afflicted friends of the hero in Hawks’s work. Charlie is very much like a developed version of Eddie in To Have and Have Not (1944), who, despite his physical affliction, is an essential part of a professional group. Riley is also the designer of Dead Reckoning, an armoured vehicle containing remotecontrolled machine guns, missile launchers, surveillance cameras, and a fireworks 186

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launcher used to distract the zombies whenever he leads expeditions to retrieve salvageable goods for the sanctuary of Fiddler’s Green, which resembles the old world with class and racial distinctions still enforced against the less affluent members of that society. Inside the divided perimeters of Fiddler’s Green, grotesque ‘bread and circus’ entertainments are devised to distract the attention of the less well-off concerning their oppressed status while Cholo (John Leguizamo), Riley’s Hispanic second-in-command, eliminates anyone ‘on the streets’ who proves a threat to the status quo. Here he resembles those characters such as Nelse McCleod (Christopher George) in Hawks’s El Dorado (1967), a professional who has sold himself to the highest bidder. Before this uncohesive group begins to plunder retrievable supplies, Riley gives the order to ‘put some flowers in the graveyard’. His navigator, ‘Pretty Boy’ (Joanne Boland), epitomizes the image of the cool Hawks woman who is now part of this new group. She immediately puts this into effect firing display rockets into the sky that distract the attention of the zombies. As Cholo contemptuously remarks, ‘They’re just like kids. They can’t keep their eyes off them.’ At this stage of the narrative, the zombies are seduced by the society of this particular spectacle in very much the same way as the lower-class occupants of Fiddler’s Green are by ‘entertainments’ provided for them by Kaufman. Like most Americans during the annual July the 4th fireworks display who never question what their Independence Day originally meant, the event is a mere party designed to divert their attention from questioning a manufactured status quo. However, this situation will not continue. As Riley warns his team, ‘Things are changing. Just be careful.’ Although the mission’s goal is one of obtaining essential supplies, Cholo also seeks to supply the more affluent tastes of the rulers of Fiddler’s Green by going after champagne and cigars. His actions also cause the death of one man by a zombie. Irritated at the slowness of one of his team in shooting a zombie who attacked him, Cholo overturns a box of cigars and orders him to pick them up. This results in another attack by a zombie. Oblivious to his own responsibility for this incident, Cholo callously shoots the infected team member and moves on towards fulfilling his own self-serving trajectory by acquiring loot for the benefit of his masters. By contrast, Big Daddy looks out for his own team by moving zombies out of the way of machete-wielding bikers and mercy-killing a decapitated female zombie by crushing her head, especially when he sees that she is still watching the fireworks display used as a distracting form of entertainment. While Cholo kills one of his infected team ostensibly for the same reason, his action is more formal and inhumane as opposed to Big Daddy, who exhibits some degree of intuitive awareness and regret for an action that he must perform to prevent further suffering. As Dead Reckoning takes its plunder to Fiddler’s Green, Big Daddy picks up a machine gun left by the human invaders, looks at the Tower skyscraper in the distance (perhaps modelled on the Black Tower inhabited by former Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman, referred to in the 2008 satire Tropic Thunder), and recognizes it as the goal for the destination he and his group will move towards. Big Daddy is not just the leader of an army of the living-dead proletariat. He also embodies that earlier image of the feared Native American leader such as Geronimo and Sitting Bull who will fight against the territorial imperative of a ruling class that is now in retreat behind a modern version knight of the living dead

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of that stockade seen in so many Westerns such as Drums Across the Mohawk (1939) and others. Dead Reckoning enters the detritus-ridden boundary of fortress Pittsburgh at dawn, a city surrounded on two sides by rivers like a medieval castle and on the other by an electric barricade. No longer is that ideological and imperialist maxim of John Winthrop’s City on the Hill spreading its beacon of light to the surrounding world viable any longer. Instead, America’s chosen people now find themselves surrounded by the zombie forces outside in the same way that those old Puritan settlements felt themselves threatened by the demonic forces of Native Americans centuries ago.8 This new City on the Hill has given up any pretence it ever had to spiritual authority. It is now a capitalist Fascist entity characterized by military power and class oppression. Significantly, Romero briefly inserts a scene of a religious speaker impotently attempting to assert the validity of a now bankrupt creed in the enclosed proletarian world outside Fiddler’s Green. Dead Reckoning and biker hordes plunder the outlying community in the same way that savage Native Americans formerly did in Hollywood B Westerns. This new City on the Hill no longer makes any pretence of beaming its moral message to the outside world. Instead, it is a rigid society with its proletariat now confined to slum districts in this new Pittsburgh while the more affluent and privileged members inhabit Fiddler’s Green. The name itself represents Romero’s sense of ironic humour. Fiddler’s Green derives from the idea of an afterlife found in classical mythology and later adopted by the U.S. Cavalry involving a future realm of perpetual happiness whose very premises were deliberately questionable. The term had military associations and was the name of an artillery Fire Support Base in Military Region III in Vietnam during 1972.9 Since Pittsburgh is now a city subjected to military power organized by the figure of Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), whose parallels with George W. Bush and his ‘war on terror’ are by no means accidental, the analogies are obvious. Fiddler’s Green is an enclosed pleasure dome available only to the wealthy members of a particular racial class. It differs little from the world depicted in an old promotional video now beginning to show signs of wear and tear advertising ‘luxury living in the grand old style’. Kaufman’s Fiddler’s Green Black Tower (another Romero reference to a Universal Studios now completely different from that which saw the production of the 1930s Frankenstein series and the 1940s Val Lewton horror films) is the New World Order headquarters of this CEO figure now presiding over his own version of the new American century. Kaufman is also the name of a wealthy Pittsburgh store owner. But he is also the person who buys commodities as well as people, signified by the European origins of his name, kaufen. He also represents a new version of the title character of Citizen Kane (1941)—a film by one of Romero’s cherished predecessors—living in his own version of Xanadu. Kaufman buys people such as Cholo to do his dirty works and supply him with commodities still available in the outside world. Romero also uses a distinctively Wellesian deep focus shot showing the spacious interior of Kaufman’s high-rise Xanadu apartment.10 As played by George W. Bush supporter Dennis Hopper, Kaufman also evokes those figures associated with the 1960s who have now sold out and made their own personal deals with capitalism. Romero even allows his actor an 188

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uncharacteristic Easy Rider–type line as if conscious of the difference between then and now: ‘Zombies, man. They freak me out.’ With his neat suit, red tie, US flag lapel badge (a sign of ‘patriotism’ now re-utilizing the former role of the swastika in revealing its wearer as an adherent of the new version of Blut und Boden), and another unmistakable reference (‘We don’t negotiate with terrorists’). Kaufman’s political associations need no further comment. Romero thus engages in ironic observations towards a former icon of the counter-culture who over-indulged in his youthful days like his revered President. Since Kaufman is also seen smoking a cigar, he is certainly inhaling the substance, unlike a previous occupant of the White House who denied such activities in his former 1960s life. Romero identifies Kaufman as an older version of the self-serving young character in There’s Always Vanilla (1972), who has sold out many years before and now occupies the upper levels of the corporate ladder. Kaufman’s introduction also recalls the lines used in the News of the March documentary sequence in Citizen Kane, since this figure is a modern Kublai Khan also inhabiting a ‘stately pleasure dome’. Like a new version of Clyde Griffiths, Cholo seeks his own ‘place in the sun’ within this community. Although he now has the economic means to do so, unlike Theodore Dreiser’s prototype in An American Tragedy (1925), he discovers that class and racial barriers still rule this new twentyfirst American century as it did in the past. Riley had already tried to enlighten Cholo. ‘They wouldn’t let us in. We’re the wrong kind.’ When Cholo enters into the privileged area of Fiddler’s Green, his desire for acceptance leads him to ignore one essential fact. No people of colour have ever enjoyed access to these facilities so far. He passes affluent whites and mechanical birds confined within a gilded cage, the same type of cage that will later lead to the encirclement of this privileged community by the zombie forces led by Big Daddy. Despite the fact that Cholo has already cleaned up the mess in a nearby apartment after the suicide of one of its occupants and has already performed his own type of CIA/FBI ‘black operations’ against any dissidents, whether inside or outside Fiddler’s Green, he is still an outsider. As he tells Kaufman, ‘Does your committee realize what goes out with the garbage?’ Clearly, the ‘garbage’ includes any privileged inhabitants of Fiddler’s Green who question Kaufman’s authority. However, despite his services to the head of this privileged elite, Cholo finds that he is still an excluded ‘Other’. Kaufman refuses his request for admission to this enchanted realm. ‘I’m sorry but there’s a very long waiting list.’ He also mentions the existence of a Board of Directors and Membership Committee similar to those in New York brownstone apartments eager to exclude any outsiders no matter how affluent they may be. Cholo leaves planning revenge. As with overseas dictators previously supported by American foreign policy such as General Noriega and Saddam Hussein, Kaufman now sees him as a menace since he has risen above his station. However, Cholo will soon become a serious threat in the brave new world of Fortress Pittsburgh. Like the alternative version of the hunter in the Puritan Captivity Mythology, he will become the Frontiersman who has gone ‘native’ like Simon Girty aligning himself with the new version of those demonic forces outside civilization.11 It is not entirely coincidental that Cholo’s arms include bow and arrows as well as firepower. knight of the living dead

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The members of the underclass exist outside the Black Tower of Fiddler’s Green inhabiting a detritus-ridden urban environment avidly devouring blood and circus entertainments devised for them by Kaufman to distract them from radical consideration of their real oppressed status. While the rich enjoy gourmet food served to them by waiters, the poor devour repugnant-looking junk food, or watch a Punch and Judy show framed within a non-functioning television set where Mr. Punch now batters his zombie spouse. Here Romero subtly suggests a link between earlier Grand Guignol forms of entertainment celebrating spousal abuse and violence and its television descendants such as The Weakest Link, Big Brother, and CSI, all involving displays of humiliation and torture, whether verbal or physical. This is a world where gratuitous elements of the society of the spectacle dominate viewer consciousness, a theme that Romero will develop in Diary of the Dead. Furthermore, as succeeding scenes of zombies humiliated by photo shoots and used for target practice show, it is a short step towards the type of government-approved torture existing at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and secret CIA rendition areas across the world. As Adrian Martin has recognized in an excellent essay, the political allegory of Land of the Dead is crucial for understanding this film.12 Opposition does exist within the outside community as seen in the character of Mulligan (Bruce McFee), who attempts to mobilize Riley into joining a group who intend to ‘pull him [Kaufman] down off his throne’. However, Riley intuitively recognizes that any attempt to change and reform this type of society is futile. ‘You can’t fix a place like this, Mulligan. You just have to get out of it.’ He rejects the use of firepower and Mulligan’s belief that an alliance would make them ‘unstoppable’. After refusing Mulligan’s offer of his whiskey bottle, he comments, ‘Everyone’s stoppable’, and leaves after passing on antibiotics for Mulligan’s ailing son Brian (Devon Bostick). Relevant references exist within the narrative for any careful viewer to discern, especially within the mise-en-scène. Newspaper clippings with banner headlines ‘No More War’ appear on a wall prior to a zombie attack on a soldier. While Dead Reckoning uses fireworks displays to distract the zombies, the lower depth nightclub supplies ‘live entertainment’ for the decadent and violent tastes of its customers involving a gladiator contest between the living and the dead. Romero continues his contrast between the human and zombie worlds but in a complex manner recognizing that the old divisions between upper classes and lower classes or ‘them and us’ are no longer valid in the old ethical senses of the terms. Not all of Kaufman’s community is evil. Towards the end of the film the young daughter of an executive cowers in terror before the zombie force that will consume every human in sight. Kaufman’s black servant performs his servile social role choosing to survive in the best way that he can in the new order of things. Also at the end of the film Brian Mulligan appears to have recovered from his consumption and now wields a gun, ominously echoing the earlier gestures of Kaufman’s military bodyguard. Mulligan’s group have taken their property back from its former ruler, who has now lost his throne, but there is no guarantee that their regime will be better than the one they have overthrown. Divisions may still exist as in the old order. Kaufman and his privileged class exploit both Cholo and the underclass outside Fiddler’s Green. The latter group is fragmented. They range from Riley’s professional 190

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group operating Dead Reckoning to those providing ‘blood and circus’ entertainments inside a nightclub such as Chihuahua (Phil Fondacaro). Secretly allied with Kaufman, he provides blood and circus forms of entertainment for inhabitants of Fiddler’s Green who can afford to pay for their illicit pleasures. Two chained zombies provide photo-booth entertainment for those who can pay.13 Unlike Spielberg’s demeaning vision of working-class audiences gratuitously enjoying the destruction of obsolete artificial entities in A-1 (2001), Chihuahua’s lumpen-proletariat audience is made up of those who can pay, women as well as men, screaming for the spectacular event of Slack’s dismemberment by other zombies. Also, despite the ‘woman and minorities’ nature of the SWAT team Kaufman imposes upon Riley, ethic identity offers neither any guarantee of ethical practices nor solidarity in a tight situation as Pillsbury’s reaction to his female number’s glance shows when she attempts to enlist him in an act of betrayal. Pillsbury does not intend to betray this new group. Of the three minorities, he appears the most macho and threatening. But here, Romero again undermines another pernicious type of bourgeois liberal stereotyping in an era that provides many examples of the fact that race and gender do not guarantee any evidence of progressive behaviour in adverse circumstances. By contrast, the zombie group looks out for its own. Led by Big Daddy, they are beginning to exhibit more signs of the old human awareness and primitive intelligence evoked by Bub in Day of the Dead, so much so that in the final fireworks display the Fiddler’s Green privileged community hopes will finally distract them, the zombies all turn their gaze away from the display to their real enemies within. Noticeably, by this time in the film, they do not need Big Daddy to lead them to this form of awareness since they all then know their enemies. During the earlier attack on the zombies, Big Daddy pushed members of this group out of the way of the bikers, obtained a rifle from one of them (similar to the action of the zombie who acquires Peter’s rifle in the closing scenes of Dawn of the Dead ), and teaches a female zombie how to use it. Also, when they approach an exterior compound and discover zombies hanging upside down for target practice, Big Daddy utters a cry of rage, one paralleling the angry reaction he exhibits when he finally sees his enemy Kaufman during the attack on Fiddler’s Green. Although some reviewers have criticized Eugene Clark’s movements as being too human, this is mistaken since it ignores Romero’s conscious designs not only to blur boundaries between humans and zombies but also to depict contradictions existing within these categories. Zombies are certainly dangerous to humans, but Big Daddy looks out for his team in the same way that Riley does for his own professional group. Big Daddy attempts to rescue members of his zombie group or perform acts of mercy killing, one of which later involves his dispatch of a zombie on fire. This act parallels Riley saving Charlie from dying in a similar agonizing manner. As Charlie tells Slack, ‘He pulled me out of the fire. It was bad.’ Cholo exploits members of Dead Reckoning in a manner similar to that of his boss, Kaufman. However, while Kaufman’s privileged group exercises control over its acquired territory, Riley and Big Daddy’s group are merely seeking another destination. Unlike the humans and zombies in Dawn of the Dead, they are not engaged in acquiring property. After the final exchange of looks between Riley and Big Daddy at the end of the film, begun by Riley’s binocular glance and knight of the living dead

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intuitively responded to by the latter, Riley stops Pretty Boy from decimating this group who are no longer a threat to them since they are moving on. ‘They’re just looking for a place to go, same as us.’ The urban ghetto outside Fiddler’s Green contains a population of all races and classes. Riley regards his evening work as his last expedition before he intends to leave the area for a world ‘where there are no fences’. As mentioned above, Mulligan’s opposition to Kaufman’s regime appears questionable and he appears to use the same manipulative actions as his enemy. Slack (Asia Argento) has been forced into becoming an undercover hooker rather than being allowed to join the Army of the Green. This places her in even greater danger. Once her real identity is discovered she is thrust into a cage to fight two zombies before Riley rescues her. Her former revolutionary colleagues are conspicuously absent during a time she needs support and rescue. However, Slack joins a very different type of army and becomes an essential component of a caring professional group aiding Riley and Charlie in their goal of recovering Dead Reckoning, which Cholo has stolen from Kaufman. Like Osama bin Laden, Cholo intends to turn against his former master by using technology against him. As he tells an associate, ‘I’m going to do a jihad on his ass.’ Appropriating Dead Reckoning and its technicians, he aims at destroying Kaufman’s Black Tower, an obvious metaphor for the Twin Towers, until he later discovers that the zombies are soon going to do his ‘dirty work’. Refusing to accede to Cholo’s monetary demands, Kaufman frees Riley, Charlie, and Slack from jail, giving them the mission to retrieve Dead Reckoning. As he tells his Board of Directors, ‘We don’t negotiate with terrorists. There are no other options.’ However, to guarantee the reliability of these new mercenaries, he also assigns three SWAT members to the mission. Two Hispanics and one female: Manolete (Sasha Roiz), Pillsbury (Pedro Miguel Arce), and Number 9 (Jennifer Baxter). While Kaufman wants ‘his two million dollar equipment returned’, Riley has a more altruistic goal in mind. He tells Kaufman, ‘This is for the people in the city. What do you think is going to happen to them if Cholo blows it up?’ He has the less privileged inhabitants of the community in mind rather than those occupying Fiddler’s Green, but, as the audience will see, even they will not be safe from attack. Acquiring an open-top vehicle that offers them little security from outside attack, unlike Dead Reckoning, they set off in pursuit. Attacked by a zombie, Manolete becomes the first of the SWAT team to be killed in action, whilst Pillsbury decides to join the team, refusing Number 9’s attempt to enlist him in betrayal. The zombies pause at the river boundary separating them from the city fortress of Pittsburgh. Looking at the Black Tower controlling Fiddler’s Green, Big Daddy gazes at the lights emanating from this perverse version of the City on the Hill and plunges into the depths. He has already realized that the dead can not drown. His followers do likewise, and like the demonic Native Americans of the Puritan Captivity Mythology re-emerge on the other side of the river like born-again Christians eager to participate in their own cannibalistic version of the Eucharist.14 Although he has yet to meet him, Big Daddy intuitively sets his sights towards another savoir figure, Kaufman, who has set up his own version of a chosen people selected on the grounds of affluence, class, and race. Big Daddy leads a melting-pot version of a diverse American community 192

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that will take revenge on those they believe responsible for their exclusion from an American Dream that has long since turned into a nightmare. He is a Nat Turner of the twenty-first century realizing Malcolm X’s dream of unity between all racially oppressed communities. When they eventually meet during the attack on Fiddler’s Green, both immediately recognize their enemy. Big Daddy utters a sound of rage, while Kaufman impotently fires his gun while uttering an outraged bourgeois comment against those from the underclass who have ventured away from their designated ghetto. ‘You bastards! You have no right!’ Big Daddy leads a diverse gender and racial group who are all characterized as being outsiders of a different class to those who oppress them. The assault on the privileged world of Fiddler’s Green represents the revolt of an oppressed class. Although any ruling establishment may pride itself on allowing limited access to carefully monitored members of certain gender and racial categories, as opposed to those belonging to the poor or working class, this is a calculated strategy designed to avoid any real change in the system. By contrast, Big Daddy’s group is inclusive, an Army of the Dead that he mobilizes in the manner of a Hawks professional group and one whose members he cares about. Riley and his team eventually regain Dead Reckoning from Cholo and frustrate his attempt at firing missiles in the direction of Fiddler’s Green, a move that would destroy affluent and underclass, the latter of whom are already under attack by the invading zombie force. While Cholo and Foxy (Tony Nappo) decide to go it alone, Riley takes Dead Reckoning back to Fort Pittsburgh to try to help the survivors. Attacked by a zombie, Cholo refuses Foxy’s offer of mercy killing and also decides to join another group in the same manner as Pillsbury did. He bids his friend farewell with the line ‘I always wanted to know how the other half lives.’ Like Big Daddy, he decides to face his real enemy. ‘This is between me and the man.’ The final confrontation occurs in the underground car parking area of Fiddler’s Green. Accompanied by his black man servant Knipp (Gene Mack), the only member of a different ethnic group allowed in that privileged racial ghetto as a result of his ante-bellum plantation servant status, Kaufman finds himself confronted by Big Daddy while his servant escapes. Ironically reverting to his former profession as a gas station attendant, Big Daddy picks up the pump and pours gasoline into the car. Unable to start the vehicle since the keys are in his suitcase, Kaufman now finds himself trapped in a more claustrophobic interior than that of his Fiddler’s Green apartment where viewers initially saw him. To his surprise, Big Daddy walks away. But as Kaufman goes outside to retrieve his car keys, he faces another enemy: his former garbage disposal man, Cholo, who, now as a zombie, ‘fully understands how the other half lives’. The final act of this drama involves the accidental alliance of two members of America’s racially oppressed class: African-American and Hispanic. While Cholo and Kaufman struggle beside his affluent CEO automobile, Big Daddy returns. This time he rolls a flaming canister down the slope of the parking lot, where the gasoline from the fuel pump causes an explosion killing both adversaries. Big Daddy earlier witnessed the effectiveness of this device during his attack on the city. It is another example not only of his developing human awareness but also of his role as a strategist using the enemy’s techniques against them in the same way that Ulzana does in Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid (1972) and the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. knight of the living dead

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Dead Reckoning arrives too late to save the survivors of Fiddler’s Green from the zombie cannibal feast, and Riley orders Pretty Boy to decimate the area since he believes the inhabitants are all dead. However, when he emerges he sees Mulligan and the surviving Army of the Green now out to take over the property and begin the process of reconstruction. Since Brian Mulligan appears to have recovered from his ill health and eagerly brandishes a rifle, this new situation is not entirely positive since the new community bears within itself the dangerous attitudes associated with the old world of Kaufman.15 The screenplay notes that Brian is now into violent aggression, ‘his innocent face speckled with the blood of the dead’. Riley can no longer remain. He shakes his head. ‘It’s all yours Mulligan.’16 Riley then sees Big Daddy and his community walking away into the distance. They obviously have no intentions of occupying Fort Pittsburgh and Fiddler’s Green, unlike their predecessors in Dawn of the Dead, who remain in control of the Monroeville Mall they were once expelled from. This is another significant difference between these two Romero zombie films and a telling reminder of how much remains to be developed in a saga that the director never repeats but moves into new directions. Seeing the key relationship between his group and that of Big Daddy’s, who are both ‘looking for a place to go’, Riley stops Pretty Boy from firing missiles in their direction. Instead, the only missiles Dead Reckoning fires at the end of the film are the last supplies of Skyflowers. Once used to distract the zombies, they are now redundant. Riley comments, ‘We’re not going to need them anymore.’ Riley gives his final order, ‘Take us north’, and the last image shows Dead Reckoning heading in that direction as the firework display celebrates the achievement of Riley’s original goal. Like Riley, George Romero has gone north having now decided to work in Canada rather than his original home base of Pittsburgh. Bruiser, Land of the Dead, and his next films will all be filmed there. Land of the Dead represented a change of direction for Romero in more than one sense. In a way, it is his farewell to Pittsburgh, a city recreated in Toronto for Land of the Dead but now an environment of the past. Fleeing to Canada over forty years ago represented one escape route for anti–Vietnam War draft dodgers and deserters and for anyone despairing of the state of the land of the free and seeking a nearby haven.17 In Bowling for Columbine (2002), Roger Moore presents Canada as an alternative to America. But this escape route is no longer as viable as it once was. As Land of the Dead moved towards post-production, the American government announced that its citizens now required passports to move back and forth across the border. Although the stated reason was ostensibly to prevent terrorists from Canada penetrating American security, it actually represented a strategy to prevent young Americans evading a future draft by heading north. Canada itself is no longer a haven for fugitive Americans. As several Iraq War deserters have found out to their cost, the Vietnam War era opportunities for political asylum no longer exist in a government which like all others in the Western world is dominated by the Right. This recent historical development is another example of how Romero intuitively recognizes changes in society, changes that his films reflect unconsciously. The final image of Land of the Dead shows Dead Reckoning heading north against a background of darkness. As in all his films, Romero recognizes that life is precarious and any form of escape into a better world extremely circumscribed. 194

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chapter fourteen

Diary of the Dead

on its release, Diary of the Dead encountered more adverse circumstances than those facing Land of the Dead. Evidently, Romero did not intend to repeat himself, nor was he going to surrender to the Hollywood studio system. Land of the Dead had a bigger budget, studio support, theatrical distribution, and planned DVD release (including scenes not featured in the original version such as Cholo dealing with a suicide in the vicinity of Kaufman’s apartment).1 By contrast Diary of the Dead was treated shoddily by the Harvey Weinstein Company. Written and directed by Romero and co-produced by his partner, Peter Grunwald, Diary of the Dead had a limited theatrical release in North America during 2007 and was difficult to see even in Ontario, Canada, before its 2008 DVD release. Unlike Land of the Dead, the majority of critical and popular reaction appeared lukewarm as comments on many Internet sites and certain reviews in Cineaste and Cinema Scope reveal.2 Stylistically and thematically, Diary of the Dead is worlds apart from Land of the Dead, a film that Romero regards as his version of Beyond Thunderdome.3 Although Romero had gained from a relatively large budget and production expertise of a major studio, resulting in the most satisfactory distribution of a zombie film since Dawn of the Dead, he clearly wished to move in other directions and avoid industry pressures to film Land of the Dead 2. It seems as if he wanted to avoid the fate of John Carpenter, who made some disappointing studio-backed films such as Christine (1983), Starman (1984), and Big Trouble in Little China (1986) before regaining his previous momentum with Prince of Darkness (1987) and They Live (1988). However, while Carpenter continues to have an uneasy relationship with the Hollywood studio system, Romero appears to want to avoid this fate entirely. Diary of the Dead also resembles Romero’s personal type of low-budget cinema, one seen in the early films of Wes Craven before the Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream series moved his talents in other directions. Despite his cult reputation as a master of gore and zombie film director, Romero has never been a crowd-pleaser. The difference between the remake of Dawn of the Dead and those various DVD-released sequels to Day of the Dead etc reveals this fact. Diary of the Dead is Romero’s version of Jean-Luc Godard’s “return to zero” in Le gai savoir (1969). It also parallels Brian DePalma’s intention in directing Home Movies (1979).

After making different types of accessible films, these directors decided to explore their own forms of low-budget cinema, whether for political or stylistic reasons, in reaction to certain temptations affecting their own personal type of cinema that was in danger of being appropriated by industrial forces that would make them merely manufacturers of a familiar and recognized product. While Land of the Dead bears little relationship to the excessive dimensions of The Fury (1978) that drowns the political message of its narrative, it does allegorically parallel Godard’s interrogations as to how one may live historically in any political era.4 Yet, although Land of the Dead is a remarkable achievement for its political message in the reactionary era of the Bush administration, rather than taking one step forward that could have become two steps backward in the world of corporate Hollywood, Romero decided to take one step progressively backward. In reality, it represented two steps aesthetically forward. By returning to the challenging world of low-budget filmmaking that characterized his early Pittsburgh films, Romero was in a much better position to experiment rather than deliver product for the corporate studio system. Diary of the Dead represents a return to the possibilities of radical critical interrogation that low-budget cinema allowed several decades ago. Romero now sought to interrogate the twenty-first-century applications of new technology that contaminated both producers and consumers. Such an approach would not gain corporate approval within the current studio system. Thus Diary of the Dead is another example of the type of radical cinema characterizing a director who can not be confined to any form of convenient categorization and certainly not under the labels of “gore” and “zombies.” Diary of the Dead is Romero’s own version of Home Movies but one analyzing the very nature of contemporary spectatorship and the dangers inherent in these new technologies that make their users little different from carnivorous zombies. Distributors may have possibly recognized the nature of this attack and formed strategies of theatrical damage control to counter a film that would challenge the type of demeaning product flooding multiplexes today. Their allies in the critical community would support them by negative reviews labelling Diary as Romero’s worst film and criticizing the supposed limitations of his young actors, who are certainly worlds apart (and much better actors) from their more famous avatars such as Angelina, Brad, and Jen. But so they should be. Diary of the Dead may also be seen as an equivalent of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) but lacking that film’s big-budget pitfalls and other flaws.5 Stylistically and thematically both films are worlds apart. But they equally have a common aim in returning a radically historical repressed to their different generic arenas. While Heaven’s Gate reveals late-nineteenth-century corporate capitalism planning genocide for European immigrants and working-class Americans in the same way that they did with the original inhabitants of the Land of the Free, Diary of the Dead unveils a similar dehumanization operating within a supposedly diverse twenty-firstcentury media apparatus. Whether cable, satellite television, low-budget cinema, ‘blogs’, texting, and the Internet, these multiple forms of communication may be little different from the old forms of mainstream media dissemination of information that manipulated their audiences in the past. In Night of the Living Dead and The Crazies, the government uses the media for its own oppressive ends. Throughout the course 196

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of Dawn, the media gradually breaks down and the final ignominious result of its former power is a talk-show revealing bickering participants arriving at no viable solution. Volatile negative emotion, rather than rational discourse, dominates the agenda, a pattern seen today in contemporary reality television. Diary of the Dead reveals that promises of human liberation by access to a wider realm of information are flawed and highly questionable. Chaos, rather than communication, results. Diverse opposing sources of information resemble warring tribes attempting to gain ascendancy over their opponents often using verbal, as well as visual, violence. The contemporary phenomenon of ‘Internet rage’, resulting in the decline of many initially cordial discussion groups originally set up with the best of intentions, reveals this. Furthermore, recording devices may contaminate the person behind the lens (as well as the viewer), infecting them with doses of dehumanization similar to the bite of a zombie. Romero demonstrates again that little difference exists between the contemporary world of humans and their zombie opponents. In fact, those who escape zombie contamination may be in even greater danger of another form of infection, one represented in Diary of the Dead by a brave new world of technology appealing to the darker instincts buried within the human personality. Diary of the Dead is a devastating critique of a contemporary human condition in which the media has a certain investment. It is not surprising that attempts were to bury it on its initial release. Although now residing in Toronto rather than Pittsburgh, Diary of the Dead is as much a product of Romero’s creative home roots as his earlier films. Operating on a low budget with a supportive community of artists and technicians allowing Romero the type of creative control he excels in, the director has returned to his own form of “zero” and produced as challenging a film as Godard’s Le gai savoir (1969) but in a more accessible manner—for those who have ears to hear, eyes to see, and patience to interrogate and understand the film’s implications. Diary of the Dead can not be fully appreciated on just one viewing but demands several—and even then the radical implications of its artistry and message will still need further exploration. If Land of the Dead continued the zombie saga during the same period of Day of the Dead, Diary of the Dead returns to zero by commencing at the actual moment of the zombie threat to human existence. But like Night, it is also a film of its time by a director fully aware of new cultural and historical circumstances conditioning its appearance. Although Romero has questioned the type of critical interpretation that sees Night as a direct allegory of the Vietnam era, he has on several occasions spoken of Diary as an allegory of the new twentieth-century era of information technology. At the same time, the film carefully depicts Romero’s own version of Marshall McLuhan’s well-known tenet, ‘The medium is the message.’ Collaborating on the DVD audio-commentary of Diary with cinematographer Adam Swica and editor Michael Doherty, Romero speaks of the creative freedom to experiment that his association with Artfire Films allowed him to do. Rather than constantly having to write memos or deal with Hollywood production executives overseeing his every action, he was able to ask friends such as Wes Craven, Stephen King, Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro, as well as long-term associates such as John Harrison and Tom Savini, to contribute to the voice-overs added in post-production.6 When speaking knight of the living dead

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about the Amish farm sequence shot in the three-day period following the twentyday production schedule, Romero significantly remarks about the humour contained both there and in other films such as the custard pie sequence in Dawn of the Dead. ‘I can’t take it seriously.’ For Romero, the surface level of his films resembles a comic book where he intends to ‘have fun’ as opposed to the deeper and more serious levels of meaning that he constructs beneath the generic surface. Significantly, the gore fests that attract many of his fans are really insignificant formal elements within the text, a necessary evil to supply generic familiarity but not devoid of any hope that viewers may move on to more advanced levels of interpretation. In his audiocommentary Romero also comments that Diary had ‘no place for gore as a whole’ as opposed to the zombie banquet scenes characterizing Night, Dawn, Day, and Land. These films were all shot in the form of third-person objective camera. By contrast, Diary deliberately employs a dominant mode of first-person subjective camera where style is more inherently attuned to meaning than in Romero’s previous films. As a result, the free-wheeling movements of the subjective camera and quick reaction shots employed in the film make the excessive spectacular gore fests of the earlier films redundant. And so they should be. As the first edition of this book argued, Romero is not a zombie film director. He is more of an intuitive artist fully aware of the dark historical circumstances governing human existence. His deliberate choice of a different stylistic option for Diary further demonstrates his creative concerns to blur boundaries between human and zombie species even further. If some survive at the end of Dawn, Day, and Land—and the nature of their survival always remains questionable—nobody gets out alive at the end of Diary, a film that is Romero’s most pessimistic statement since the conclusion of Night. Where Night concluded with the lynch mob victorious, Romero’s originally devised ending for Diary ended with the three survivors closing the door on the zombies invading the house. In Romero’s first version, the humans would find themselves trapped in an eight by twelve room with nothing but video screens and images surrounding them. This ending would represent his usual type of ironic happy ending, one very much indebted to the world of EC Comics that influenced him when he was growing up. Everybody gets what they deserve. It would also be the logical culmination of everything that had previously happened in the film. However, Romero chose to conclude Diary with a brief epilogue that is not only thematically appropriate but also complements his new version of a technologically different brave new world affecting the survivors, who, also, have been infected in a parallel manner to the zombies. It is no “happy ending” but one complementing the pessimism contained in his original vision for the conclusion. The year 2007 also witnessed the appearance of two other films employing the use of a hand-held subjective camera: Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield and Brian DePalma’s Redacted. However, despite the technical expertise exhibited by both these films, their use of this particular technique does not parallel the type of cinematic achievement of Diary. Cloverfield’s subjective camera technique is more gimmicky in a narrative where the 9/11-influenced scenario is marred by the influence of a Godzilla movie. Despite its contemporary resonances, Cloverfield resorts to the traditional devices of the horror genre where the enemy is outside. Although Redacted is much 198

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more sincere in its aims and more accomplished than Cloverfield, it merely repeats the premises of the director’s earlier Casualties of War (1989) in a different war zone without, thankfully, resurrecting the victim to deliver absolution to the one good American hero. Redacted is more accomplished in its recognition and use of new twenty-first-century technology affecting the recording of events than Cloverfield and is worthy of further study. But a gap exists between the recording of the events and the effect on the recorder that Diary explores in far greater depth. One interesting and more relevant precedent is Patrick Duncan’s 84 Charlie MoPic (1989). Written and directed by a Vietnam veteran, this film also employs the use of a subjective camera. It is mostly filmed from the perspective of an amateur cameraman, MoPic (Byron Thames), who, like Jason Creed, we do see in a few scenes. As a pseudodocumentary also subtly edited in a similar manner to Diary, the film not only conveys the tedium and horror of combat but also develops a more emotional bonding between the cinematographer and his subjects lacking in either Redacted or Diary. Unlike these two films, 84 Charlie MoPic concludes in a positive, albeit tragic, manner. At the climax, MoPic leaves his camera still recording in a rescue helicopter and returns to help squad leader OD (Richard Brooks) to safety. He dies in the attempt, the camera recording the death of this auteur-documentarian at the climax, one who performs an action unthinkable for the later protagonists of Diary of the Dead.7 Romero may never have seen this film. But it represents a more positive counterpoint to the images he inserts into a pessimistic film made in the shadow of a new twentieth-century war involving a more rigid control of images and spectatorship. Finally, another indirect influence on Diary may be Sam Peckinpah’s last film, The Osterman Weekend (1983). Although it never employs the subjective camera techniques of these other films, it contains a similar pessimistic vision to Diary. It begins with a video monitor image of the last moments of a romantic couple before the woman is brutally murdered on screen by the collusion of the CIA and KGB. The bereaved husband, Lawrence Fassett (John Hurt), plans his revenge on Company Head Maxwell Danforth (Burt Lancaster), who has planned the whole affair by using against him the very technology that recorded the incident. Fassett recruits television talk-show host John Tanner (Rutger Hauer) into his scheme by manipulating images to present a false version of reality. In this neglected and underrated film, Peckinpah shows that the media contaminates both the avenger and his ally so that they eventually become little better than their common adversary. This very complex and underrated film concludes with Tanner facing his audience in a Brechtian close-up and challenging them to switch off a television set that is merely a purveyor of ideological lies. The final shot of the film reveals an empty studio, and it is left open as to whether Tanner has succeeded or the system has again won by removing another obstacle to its totalitarian power of manipulating reality. Although The Osterman Weekend differs from Diary of the Dead in several ways, both contain pessimistic messages concerning the role of the media in everyday life and how it may be entirely impossible to escape from its control. At the end John Tanner challenges his audience to switch off. But how many of them will do so? Diary of the Dead opens significantly. The first image reveals a blurred camera lens that is wiped clean by a technical assistant from a television news crew. This initial knight of the living dead

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scene already questions the veracity of the artificial eye as well as revealing the role of human agency involved in any recording of the world of true reality. If the camera does not lie in recording the first event of the film, an event filmed in a chaotic manner violating all the rules of correct media recording, the audience will later see how those images are manipulated in post-production to give an entirely different message. An ambulance crew wheels bodies on gurneys out of a house. The driver nonchalantly munches a cheeseburger, another Romero humorous insert paralleling the sign ‘EATS’ in the first sequence of Land of the Dead. A cop utters ‘humanitarian’ sentiments to the television crew when asked about the deceased’s identity. ‘Who knows his name? Who cares? Fuck him! No idea! He probably squirmed across the goddamned fucking border.’ As we will soon see, the members of this deceased family are immigrants, as their dark complexions reveal.8 However, even in the tragedy of death the white players in this drama reveal their obsession with boundaries whether involving those of race or the correct methods of shooting a scene as opposed to the more fluid methods of independent filmmaking. Even in these spontaneous circumstances of attempting to capture the reality of the scene before them, the crew are already directing for the camera. Preoccupied with obtaining the ‘perfect shot’, the television crew has already asked the ambulance driver to move out of their line of vision, exhibiting a callous attitude towards the events before them while trying to capture their version of objective reality. The dead awaken causing chaos in what was supposed to have been a carefully orchestrated reproduction of television news reality. At the same time, we are not witnessing an actual event occurring on the television screen at the same time of its recording. We next hear Deb’s voice-over before we actually see her in the film. ‘We downloaded this video from the Net over the last three days. I don’t remember when.’ An ambulance man tells the reporters that the father killed his wife and son before committing suicide. Before the dead return to life, the voice-over commentary resumes. ‘Some of this footage was never broadcast. It was secretly uploaded by the cameraman who shot it. It was his way of trying to tell the truth over what was happening.’ To everyone’s amazement, the dead refuse to remain in their assigned boundary of rigid immobility but return to life. The camera zooms back and forth to record the events before dropping to the floor as the female ethnic zombie attacks the newscaster. Its position significantly duplicates the position of the camera in the climactic sequence of the film when Ridley (Philip Riccio) attacks Jason Creed (Joshua Close). The narration resumes as Debra Moynihan (Michelle Morgan) mentions that we ‘downloaded a lot of what was happening on TV, blogs, the Net. Much of it was bullshit. None of it was useful. This is what we were getting from the news networks.’ A series of media images follows depicting the chaos without any reason given for the events. One commentator cites Orson Welles’s 1938 Mercury Radio Theatre broadcast of ‘War of the Worlds’. The media claim lack of knowledge: ‘Now it’s 24/7.’ This opening series of images are crucial for understanding the nature of Diary of the Dead. It is not the usual type of Romero zombie movie, and this may explain certain types of critical and commercial disappointment towards the film. The director deliberately attacks conventional ideas of familiar boundaries in terms of questioning familiar representations of reality and media construction. Dead people return 200

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to life. We witness what appears to be unedited footage ‘secretly uploaded’ by a cameraman who attempted to ‘tell the truth over what was happening’. However, the intrusive voice-overs accompanying this sequence reveal the presence of another person presenting her interpretation of events to viewers. We later see this footage co-opted and re-edited by the authorities with a different author presenting his version of the events: Police Chief Arthur Katz (played by Romero himself ) delivers an entirely different version of the events blaming the victims and immigrants for attacking official boundaries of law and order. Although Deb initially appears to be our ‘reliable narrator’, the very nature of her voice-over interventions over the initial footage and the manner of presentation raise questions concerning both the nature of her authority and the construction of events that will be presented to the viewer. In these opening sequences, Romero carefully presents a Chinese-box version of the events for viewers to consider and question—if they are so disposed to do so. He uses the conventional narrative tropes of television reporting, cinematic voice-over techniques, and the auteur device of ‘A film by . . .’ introducing so many contemporary dreadful Hollywood films in a subtle, teasing manner so that each succession of images deliberately collides with each other in challenging ways. Like Brian De Palma with Home Movie, he returns to a form of low-budget cinema that he is most at home with. But he also utilizes this concept in a more interrogative manner than he has ever done before. Diary of the Dead is not Night of the Living Dead, although it does begin at the beginning of that earlier film. Instead, it represents a parallel universe to that earlier film but now from a perspective of nearly forty years later. Diary of the Dead is more intellectually challenging than any of his previous works. It invites viewers to engage in his new version of a ludic political cinema that is as serious as any of his other films. Conventional film captions follow. ‘The Death of Death: A Film by Jason Creed.’ Deb’s voice-over continues. ‘Jason wanted to upload it so that you, the people, would know the truth.’ This aim echoes her previous comments concerning the television cameraman who uploaded his footage as ‘his way of trying to tell the truth over what was happening’. As noted above, we will later see how this news footage will become manipulated according to status quo intentions of lulling the public into a false sense of security by blaming the others. The messengers, of course, believe that they are not as contaminated as those they film or speak about! Technology, for them, also represents a neutral medium of recording reality as that old axiom ‘The camera does not lie’ states. However, as Jean-Luc Godard later changed his beliefs about the cinema from ‘Truth—24 frames a second’ to ‘Lies—24 frames per second’, Diary of the Dead will show its audiences that neither recorded facts nor the recorder can really be trusted. Although contemporary audiences have access to different forms of information technology than their predecessors, this does not mean that they are free from manipulation or safe from negative elements within their own psyche that the new media might evoke. Following the auteur credit, Deb mentions the technological equipment used in the film: Panasonic HDX 900 and HBX 200 cameras. But does this information really matter in the context of the film? The issues that Diary examines have less to do with equipment but more with how this equipment is used in the hands of different characters as well as a manipulative media world outside. knight of the living dead

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Do zombies really matter? Surely, the internal challenges facing the young characters matter more? Are zombies really a necessary evil on the part of a director preoccupied by other more important issues but also realizing that they are an expected element that will get his work into distribution? Many critics and viewers do not want to approach these issues, to say nothing about exploring the deeper levels of this film. But they are still essential features within the style and narrative structure of Diary of the Dead. The continuing voice-over informs the viewer that what they will see is already constructed and not raw reality. Although Romero and his associates hoped to employ a subjective camera exclusively throughout the film similar to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), issues of narrative and editing necessitated the use of many cuts, many of which were concealed in the film.9 As Hitchcock found out, the longtake subjective camera technique was impossible to realize 100 percent. However, as Romero has stated, Diary of the Dead ’s employment of the subjective camera technique was designed to contrast with the objective camera of Land of the Dead. Unlike Hitchcock, Romero will not cheat his audiences. He announces the fact of audience manipulation immediately in terms of Deb’s voice-over commentary introducing the film. The events viewers will see are not versions of recorded reality. They have been edited for an audience, and Deb’s role in this activity differs little from the official media outside as well as Jason Creed’s approach. Deb announces, ‘I’ve done the first edit on Jason’s laptop.’ A series of dissolves showing characters we will see later in the film follows. This artificial type of introduction parallels 1930s Warner Brothers’ post-credit display of leading players in films such as Public Enemy (1931), G-Men (1935), Bullets or Ballots (1936), and many others. It is a well-known cinematic technique having little to do with issues involving truthful reality. In fact what we will see is little different from an actual scary movie similar to the Mummy student movie Jason originally began filming.10 Deb further mentions that ‘I’ve added music for effect hoping to scare you. You see in addition to telling the truth I am hoping to scare you so that you will all wake up. Maybe you won’t make any of the mistakes we made. Anyway, here it is—Jason Creed’s The Death of Death.’ The sequence ends with a mirror reflection of Jason pointing his camera at the audience. Deb’s intentions appear sincere. But why is there a need to tell this tale as a ‘scary movie’ constructed with the benefits of new technology that will result in a narrative little different from others in the horror genre with special effects and added music? At least, the television cameraman attempted to secretly upload his footage on the Internet. But this did not prevent the authorities re-editing it to deliver a different message nor Deb using it as part of a scary movie as a posthumous homage to Jason. Even these early sequences raise important issues that Diary of the Dead will explore in greater detail as the narrative develops. Diary continues by using its own version of an extended flashback. It begins with Jason’s night shooting of his University of Pittsburgh student film on the night of September 24th at 11.0 p.m. Dressed as a mummy, Ridley pursues Tracy (Amy Lalonde), clothed in a nineteenth-century costume complete with bodice. Jason stops the shooting telling his leading man that running fast like zombies in the remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) and 28 Days Later (2002) is not realistic. 202

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Tracy criticizes the generic stereotyped female role of tripping during the pursuit and having her bodice ripped. ‘It ain’t going to happen.’ Seen in the light of a later sequence her comment has ironic associations especially in a film designed to undermine any notion of boundaries, whether those involving arbitrary divisions between recording reality and fictional reconstructions or those others between the living and the dead and those involving definitions of the enemy in the ‘war on terror’. This is one of the many subtle ways Romero integrates contemporary historical events into a narrative that is neither political film nor scary movie but really a challenging combination of both. Tony Ravello (Shawn Roberts) also criticizes this senior project shot for five credits by someone who supposedly wanted to be ‘a documentary filmmaker not a horror film director’. Alcoholic Professor Emeritus Andrew Maxwell (Scott Wentworth) works as project supervisor and sarcastically defines the film as having ‘an underlying text of social satire’, while Jason argues that he’s ‘not trying to make a scary movie here’. These conflicting arguments represent the two ways that most people define horror films as either scary movies or satirical texts. More often than not both definitions may blend within any particular film, with people tending to take either one position or the other. Sometimes the genre can consume the author no matter how sincere the intentions may be. Or the seductive nature of the technological apparatus may dominate the director like a twentieth-century Frankenstein monster. Diary of the Dead raises these issues in an extremely challenging manner in a film made by a director aware of these problems and how they affect creators and spectators. While the young crew debate as to whether Jason is really filming ‘a stupid horror movie’ in Tony’s words, the television in their Winnebago trailer reports that the dead are returning to life. Tony dismisses the report, ‘The news is always hostile.’ Ridley decides to return home with his girlfriend, Francine (Megan Park), and invites the others to join him in his ‘fortress home’. The rest decide to travel to a University of Pittsburgh dorm to see if Jason’s girlfriend, Deb, is safe. During the filming of the mummy sequence, the television news report of the zombie outbreak and the journey to the dorm, Jason is always behind the camera lens. He only puts it down on Deb’s bed when he finds she is safe and embraces her. However, this particular gesture is more callous than caring since it resembles a director’s cameo appearance as an actor in the film he is making. Jason is already less than a human being. By contrast, worried about lack of contact with her family, Deb wishes to return home. As they begin the first phase of the journey, Deb’s voice-over again fills the soundtrack. She speaks about conflicting information occurring ‘all over the Web but no one knew what was really happening. I think that’s what started the panic—not knowing the truth.’ The official television news broadcasts are little different. They range from the Department of Homeland Security affirming that there is ‘no indication of a terrorist attack’ to the belief that the incidents are really ‘isolated phenomena’ and that an ‘unauthorized virus strain’ has led to ‘mass psychosis’. Although the media attempts to assure its audiences that the ‘President is monitoring the situation from his retreat’, no images appear of the Commander-in-Chief. Audiences will remember the lack of activity and absent presence displayed by a certain leader during the first impact of the 9/11 attacks. knight of the living dead

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As in Night, Dawn, Day, and Land, Romero’s central characters again find themselves in an enclosed environment. But this time it is a Winnebago. Although they are moving towards a destination, this does not exclude the appearance of tensions among them similar to those occurring in previous films. While scared Catholic Mary Dexter (Tatiana Maslany) drives the vehicle, Jason attempts to record his fellow travellers in a manner paralleling Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (1961), but the objects of his technological gaze are certainly sceptical of his particular version of documentary pure reality. They also resent his intrusive presence. The group is already uncohesive. Apart from the tensions existing between them they are all from different locations. While Jason, Deb, Ridley, and Elliot are from Pennsylvania, Tony is from Queen’s, New York, and Tracy proudly asserts her Texan origins. Since tuition is mentioned by one character as being in the region of $100,000, they all appear to be from affluent homes. Ridley’s mansion and Deb’s own house display the economic nature of the common class background they all share. Gordo (Chris Violette) and Tracy appear to have a much closer relationship than that existing between Deb and Jason. The latter union is already showing signs of strain, with Deb becoming increasingly critical of Jason’s fascination with the camera. Thus in a later scene, Jason remains behind the camera, revealing no sign of emotion at the death of Gordo. He is separated from Deb by his fascination with his version of Dziga Vertov’s ‘kino-eye’. By contrast, Tracy remains by Gordo’s side ready to fire the fatal bullet that will prevent him returning to life. Significantly, Jason’s camera remains at a distance to record the incident in long shot. Even he seems to realize that he can only go so far. Tony appears critical of this new version of the filmmaking experience, while Deb exhibits the first signs of irritation in her relationship with Jason. ‘You know what happens when we try to work together.’ Elliot (Joe Dinicol) merely wishes to return to his home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. By contrast, Maxwell does not give a damn, defining his status as ‘having nothing to do. Nowhere to go and I’m not with anyone. I’m just here for the ride.’ However, despite his cynical attitude reminiscent of Graham Greene’s whisky priest in The Power and the Glory, he will later return to his own earlier cultural and humanitarian roots. The first crisis soon awaits the group. As they approach a car crash, Mary clutches her St. Christopher medallion, and they confront a charred zombie state trooper. Driving the vehicle into the already dead bodies before her, Mary experiences guilt feelings and attempts suicide as they take a break from their journey at 4.13 a.m. of the following morning. Once there, they hear more reports of chaos from a hospital radio and encounter more zombies.11 ‘Dead doctor, dead nurse. Makes sense, doesn’t it?’ During these encounters, Jason remains attached to his camera, recording each incident rather than putting it down to help his friends. He attempts to tell the dying Mary that ‘the people you killed were already dead’. After recharging the instrument’s batteries, Deb appears holding a hospital video camera and pointing it in Jason’s direction, very much like a gunfighter in a Western. Using a reverse point-ofview shot, Romero shows us Jason with his camera pointed at her from her perspective. Although employing classical Hollywood continuity editing practices here, the sequence shows both characters seeing and recording each other through the lens of 204

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their cameras. This implicitly suggests a dualistic mirror imagery binding them both together. Although the sequence is antagonistic, with Deb challenging Jason—‘See how it feels! To have a camera shoved in your face. To have to answer stupid questions when other people are dying all around you! You see how it feels!’—this scene also ominously foreshadows what will happen to Deb at the end of the film. Blood spots appear on her clothes, and she tells Jason of a zombie attack he missed. ‘You missed it. If it didn’t happen on camera, it didn’t happen, right? He was almost on top of me before I saw him. Gordo shot him. Scream for the camera, right?’ Deborah then screams. Gordo then arrives, expressing similar guilt feelings to Mary. ‘I just shot another man. I killed three men and a woman in the first half-hour.’ Deborah and Gordo condemn Jason’s technological callousness. He has become a figure obsessed with recording ‘reality’ behind the lens and hiding behind it rather than putting the machinery down to help others. Although Jason was not present to record the attack on Deb, he will use a substitute image from home movie footage that shows a zombie clown attacking a father during a family birthday party. The father later attacks Deb in an incident that Jason does not record. When she tells him of this assault, she condemns his entire attitude. ‘You missed it. If it didn’t happen on camera, it didn’t happen, right?’ However, this will not stop Jason. Like many Hollywood studios having to deal with the deaths of actors such as Oliver Reed and Heath Ledger during the shooting of Gladiator and The Dark Knight Returns (2008) and coming up with CGI solutions for these ‘missing scenes’, Jason soon engages in his own substitution for a missing scene featuring a girlfriend he no longer cares about and who is now merely a disposable commodity in his viewfinder. As an older man and product of an earlier generation, Maxwell appears a redundant member of this group. Disillusioned and taking solace in alcohol, he is bored with his role as superfluous mentor overseeing a student film project he has no real interest in. Any formula horror film would dispose of him early in the narrative, leaving the field clear to concentrate on the young survivors, who echo the ages of target audiences studios aim their products at. However, although representing a typical generic character, he transcends the stereotype in the same way that Romero’s young actors also subvert the usual rigid roles allotted to them in recent horror movies. Like all major directors, Romero uses the archetype but also reworks it in a different way. For example, audiences would not expect devout Catholic Mary to commit suicide. But she does. Deb survives as heroine but at a certain psychological cost. Jason records footage of events like a character in Cloverfield. Yet Romero raises questions concerning his real motivations that are never satisfactorily answered. Is Jason devoted to capturing absolute documentary truth even at the cost of his own life? Or has he become a calculating and inhumane slave to the machine he uses? Also, if the final film is supposedly realistic, how does one explain the use of post-production techniques such as editing and soundtrack that make it little different from any commercial production? Diary of the Dead explicitly raises issues that the audience should consider, issues that affect the young characters in this particular drama. Grim parallels exist between shooting a victim and shooting a film. If the camera is not a weapon of murder, it can be an accessory to acts of violence leading to murder, especially in the hands of a cameraman oblivious to the resonances of suffering that knight of the living dead

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he or she should help to avoid. Diary of the Dead explores a different version of the camera as ‘murderous gaze’ than William Rothman’s analysis of its role in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.12 Romero condemns those who hide behind the lens of the camera objectively recording events repressing feelings of human compassion and sympathy that would spur them into helping others. Implicit parallels also exist with certain features in Hitchcock. In the 3-D version of Dial M for Murder (1954) the hand of Margot Wendice (Grace Kelly) stretches into the auditorium appealing for help to an audience usually passively spellbound in darkness before this special effect. However, here Hitchcock attempts to appeal to the conscience of an audience who are mostly there to enjoy a gratuitous thrill rather than consider the dark implications behind what they are watching. As many critics note, the brutal slashing of Marian Crane (Janet Leigh) in the shower sequence of Psycho (1960) undermines the gratuitous voyeuristic enjoyment of the audience. The gaze immediately becomes a murderous one and the director challenges the perception of each member of every audience watching these scenes. Likewise, Romero presents his own version of a twenty-firstcentury morality play challenging twenty-first-century audience fascinations with new technologies and the inhuman acts recorded. Parallels with the staged theatrical footage from Abu Ghraib immediately spring to mind. They also feature those who have directed the very nature of those humiliating and grotesque compositions. Other photographs also show torturers photographed beside the very bodies of those victims they have sadistically murdered. The camera is a murder weapon in more than one sense, involving the recorder as well as the victim in a deadly and violent symbiotic manner. Although Romero may not have had such parallels consciously in mind, such comparisons are inevitable. Since Maxwell belongs to an older generation, he realizes the seductive nature of both technology and violence. When Gordo anguishes over his act of violence, Maxwell compares his wartime experience (possibly the Korean War?) with a different generation’s attitude towards it.13 He regards the filming as a ‘diary of cruelty. In wartime when the enemy can become marked as this son of a bitch or that son of a bitch then cruelty becomes justified.’ Maxwell condemns the murderous gaze of Jason. ‘Killing comes easy especially If you don’t have to do any of it. [He looks in Jason’s direction]. There’ll always be people like you, waiting to document, waiting to record, wanting to document some sort of diary.’ Jason hypocritically denies his responsibility, seeking to blame someone else. ‘You’re the one who put a camera in my hand. You made me do it.’ His denial echoes those defendants at the Nuremberg war trials as well as their successors seeking to evade responsibility for their actions up to the present Middle East conflict. Maxwell counters by accusing Jason of making a ‘document of cruelty’. After all, he has encountered the enemy in battle and ostensibly killed them rather than hiding behind a camera. When Mary revives as a zombie, Gordo can not kill her. Instead, while Jason runs his camera, Maxwell takes the gun from Gordo and kills her. He wryly notes Jason’s reaction. ‘You’re stuttering Mr. Creed. Don’t try to speak. Just shoot your picture. Direct! Shoot for as long as your heart holds out, as long as your heart drive holds out.’ He also condemns those photographers recording past and present (Iraq, Afghanistan) wars who remain far removed from the battlefield and do not put down their camera as did MoPic. 206

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As he speaks these words, he speaks directly to the camera, violating one of the cardinal rules of filming. His gesture relates not just to Jason but to all those who record whatever spectacle of violence occurs before them rather than putting the camera down to help victims. Maxwell then gives the gun to Tony. ‘Take this. It’s too easy to use.’ His comment also applies to the camera that now controls Jason. Deb’s voice-over again fills the soundtrack. ‘It’s interesting how quickly we find what we are capable of becoming. Up to this night we lived predictable lives. Now we would not be able to predict what would happen next. God had changed the rules on us and surprisingly we were playing along.’ When a zombie attacks Elliot in the hospital corridor, both Jason and Deb record the incident without making any attempt to help him. Their behaviour also results in Gordo’s being bitten by the zombie since they are too preoccupied with filming rather than being aware of their dangerous surroundings. Although Elliot manages to save himself, he only survives by using his own initiative. Horrified by her entrapment, Deb returns the camera to Jason, repeating Maxwell’s earlier lines, ‘Take this. It’s too easy to use.’ She counters Jason’s argument that she can shoot better than he can. ‘I don’t want to become you. That’s why I stopped.’ Parallels between both forms of shooting are obvious here. Deb appears here to belong to previous Romero heroines from Dawn and Day who reject the world of violence and affirm their own independence from the chaos surrounding them. As they continue the journey her voice-over resumes. She muses over a media remark of being ‘compelled’ to broadcast images. ‘What is it? What gets into our heads when we are seeing something horrible . . . a horrible accident! Something keeps us from just driving on. Something holds us. But we don’t stop to help. We stop to look.’ Her comments suggest that she will be a survivor like Fran and Sarah at the end of these earlier films. She will physically survive but not mentally. Although Deb will not become as psychologically affected as Barbara during most of Night of the Living Dead, she will not escape unscathed. By stopping to look behind the camera lens at the zombie attack on Gordo and Elliot, she was unable to help either them or herself. The next morning is October 29th at 7.0 a.m. duly recorded in documentary fashion. The group buries Mary while Tracy asks Tony for a gun so that she can put Gordo out of his misery when he rises from the dead. After accomplishing this task, the group witness Armageddon scenes of chaos and looting on the Winnebago monitor screen before stopping to repair the vehicle at an Amish farm. Although Romero plays the sequence involving the mute Amish farmer (R.D. Reid) for humour until the inevitable tragic outcome, it does contain serious overtones. The farmer can only communicate by writing words on a slate. It is he who warns the group about the approaching zombies and takes immediate action to save them. He also offers them temporary refuge while they repair their Winnebago. This interior is the only one in the film where the fugitives face no threat within the usual type of supposedly safe havens in Romero films. As Reynold Humphries has perceptively observed, the role of this figure is ‘bitterly ironic’. His highly symbolic deafness and the fact he communicates simply by writing words on a slate is a neat comment on how ultra-sophisticated technology and the unscrupulous use

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made of it by the very media Romero has been smiting hip and thigh since Night of the Living Dead have led to a breakdown in collective communication. What passes for ‘news’ is now carefully orchestrated by those in whose interests it is to pit one group of victims against another in order to preserve neoliberal economic interests.14

Similarly, those who pick up the camera to objectively record and impassively stand by while life-threatening incidents affect other people become as contaminated as the zombies. They become trapped within by a twenty-first-century world of a society of the spectacle where any disastrous event is fair game for media consumption and manipulation. As they stop on their destination to Deb’s home, a band of armed blacks whose leader was formerly in the National Guard confront them. This group decides to offer them sanctuary away from the ‘damn rowdies from town going crazy’, an obvious reference to the redneck posse who shoot Ben in the final scenes of Night. As they arrive inside a compound at 11.0 a.m., an event covered by a surveillance camera whose footage Jason will later incorporate into his own film, the issue of borders, one common both to Homeland Security as well as Romero’s ironic take on this issue, emerges again from media commentary over news footage. ‘The problem is not people crossing the border into our country but those crossing the border between life and death.’ When asked why his group remained while others fled, the leader ominously answers, ‘Because we got the power. For the first time in our lives we got the power. Cause everybody else left, all the folks without suntans.’ The relationship to Hurricane Katrina is obvious as well as Romero’s recognition of the necessary alliance involving both class and race. As Humphries points out in his response to Hiram Lee’s review, the role of this group can not be merely limited to any banal definition of race and diversity. Although Lee recognizes that this group has been left to fend for itself like the social underclass ignored in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this working-class group also parallels the role of African-Americans in Romero’s other zombie films that prove themselves both adaptable and resilient in a crisis situation. In Land of the Dead, the leadership role is undertaken by Big Daddy. The human leader of this particular group is his logical successor. Rebutting Tony’s belief in the effective agencies of the army and the National Guard, he replies, ‘I’m in the National Guard. They ain’t going to put anything together. No man, it’s doing what you have to.’ As the group enters the compound, they pass a television and see how the official media has re-edited the scene that opened the film. During his interview, Romero’s Police Chief Katz presents a different version to that already seen with carefully selected and re-edited scenes to support an ‘official’ version. ‘The attack was carried out by a bunch of illegal immigrants mistakenly pronounced dead before the attack took place. The only time they were dead was when the white guys shot them.’ Romero’s cameo appearance represents a contrast with his earlier one as a television studio director in Dawn vainly attempting to instil some sense of order in an increasingly chaotic situation. He knows all too well that the new order of twentiethcentury television has no place for such a marginalized figure. The group angrily reacts to these changes they see on the screen. 208

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Deb’s voice-over again occurs. ‘The media was lying to us or the Government was lying to them. They were trying to make it seem as if everything was going to be all right.’ Parallels with the aftermath of 9/11 need no explanation. When Jason uploads footage from the compound security cameras with his own recorded images, the dialogue contains the reference ‘9/11’. Contrary to Deb’s initial belief, Jason is not going online to get in touch with his father ‘or something’. While she exhibits concern for the fate of her family, he only cares about how many ‘hits’ his footage has received on the Internet. Deb realizes that she can never communicate with him. As her voiceover comments, ‘It was a pretty one-sided conversation.’ All he is concerned about is 77,000 hits in eight minutes. Deb recognizes that Jason cares little for any form of human relationship let alone sympathy for her concern over her missing family. ‘Congratulations, you’re famous.’ She walks away, intuitively recognizing that he has become as dehumanized as the zombies he seeks to document. As Jason takes up his camera to record one of the black occupants of the compound turned into a zombie, Romero ironically includes a scene showing him briefly frightened by the reflection of his own image in a cobwebbed mirror depicting the dual nature of his own personality. Jason soon shrugs off this all-too-human reaction. He begins calmly recording himself, repeating the introductory image of Deb’s first voice-over announcing him as a key player in this forthcoming television special. After Tony defends himself against the zombie while his friends stand by and record the event, Deb decides that she wishes to return to her family home sixty-five miles away in Scranton. In a key scene, she faces off the black leader who admires her resilience and orders his men to supply her group. ‘Hey, I think you’re a lot like me. Good luck.’ Deb responds similarly. ‘Good luck to you, too.’ This interesting sequence reveals two of Romero’s minority characters affirming each other’s professionalism. At this point of the film, Deb appears ready to follow alternative and humane precedents established by Fran in Dawn and Sarah in Day. However, Romero will undermine this possibility. He recognizes that the enemy within is far stronger. The group acquires weapons in addition to food. As Maxwell notes, self-defence is important ‘because when people start running out of food and water, they’re going to start shooting at each other’. However, he refuses to acquire a gun but instead takes a bow and arrows. ‘It seems friendlier, somehow.’ Unlike his younger companions, Maxwell respects the past. He appears to be the only character in the film that has grown up in a pre-technological world. Maxwell prefers the direct values of the past rather than new and dangerous twentieth-century technological devices such as the camera that diminish qualities of humanity and sensitivity. He consumes alcohol as a protective device to hold at bay a world he is increasingly uncomfortable with. However, this does not mean that he becomes as alienated and dehumanized as Jason. Once the group arrives at Ridley’s mansion, Maxwell becomes excited at discovering a library and a first edition of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. They all ironically live in the ‘best of times’ represented by new media and technology as well as the ‘worst of times’ signified by the zombie assault. However, the library wall conceals Ridley’s Panic Room. It is doubtful whether he or any of his family ever read any of the books. They appear little better than display items purchased by the affluent for their cultural capital status value than anything else. Books no longer knight of the living dead

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represent objects of ‘use-value’ but ‘surplus value’, except for rare individuals such as Maxwell who can still appreciate them. He also recognizes the increasing obsolescence of the new technology influencing his younger companions. As he tells Deb as they journey to her home, ‘It won’t be long before nothing works at all.’ Deb’s next voice-over questions the value of new technology as a recording device designed to discover the truth. Jason began as a documentary filmmaker who turned to making a scary movie. He quickly graduates toward a new type of filming that really directs him rather than the other way around. Jason becomes little better than a dehumanized recorder of violent events. Using another piece of news footage, Romero reveals an image of people with cam-recorders placed next to their faces obliterating any personal features. They are little better than zombies instinctually recording events before them. Deb’s voice-over resumes. ‘The mainstream had vanished with all its money and power. Now it was just bloggers, poster kids. The more voices there are, the more spin there is [Romero revealingly inserts a shot of the Capitol Building to follow this line]. Truth becomes that much harder to find . . . it just becomes noise.’ When they finally arrive at Deb’s house, Jason is quite prepared to abandon her. As he views her through his lens, he articulates banal platitudes associated with a departing lover from a Hollywood movie. ‘I’ll come back for you’ Deb displays a sceptical look. However, despite Jason’s callous behaviour, the rest of the group will not allow him to repeat the mistake Tom Dunson made with Fen in Red River (1948). Following Tony’s action, they all decide to accompany her into the house and save her from any zombie attack by members of her own family. While Tony cares about Deb’s safety, Jason remains behind the camera to record whatever will happen. Before Deb’s traumatic discovery of her family her voice-over again occurs on the soundtrack. ‘I thought long and hard whether to leave the footage in the film. I decided in the end to show what had happened.’ Although her decision follows strict documentary guidelines concerning the recording of reality and not taking a decision about editing certain scenes out of the narrative, she already follows Jason’s footsteps, as Romero notes on the DVD audio-commentary. Speaking from a future perspective, she has allowed her documentary perspective to dominate whatever tragic feelings she once had during the original incident when her zombie mother and younger brother attacked her. After they leave the house, Deb’s voice-over recognizes the implications of her actions as editor. ‘By now, we’d become part of it, part of 24/7. It’s strange how looking at things . . . seeing things behind a lens, rose-coloured or black, you become immune. You’re supposed to be affected . . . I used to think it was you up there, the viewers, but it’s not. It’s us as well; the shooters [insert shot of Deb filming]. We become immune. We become inoculated, so just what happens around us, no matter how horrible, we just wind up taking it in.’ Romero delivers a remarkable insight that many of his critics perversely refused to recognize. He not only draws a parallel between 9/11 and his fictional world of 24/7 but also implicates both consumers and the manufacturers as accessories in this contemporary brave new world of dehumanizing images. Throughout Diary, he repeats shots of characters already dead, captured during moments of friendship 210

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(such as Gordo and Tracy) that they will never experience again. They have become little better than repetitive devices making spectators immune to the devastating implications of their tragic presence—very much like repeated images of the collapse of the Twin Towers and photographs from Abu Ghraib showing Americans humiliating vulnerable prisoners. Diary of the Dead is perhaps the most critical film to have emerged condemning both American government foreign policy and media complicity in its actions. As Tony comforts Deb in the Winnebago, Jason adjusts the blurred image into sharper focus. When Tracy offers to take over the camera, Deb responds, ‘Leave him alone, Trace. He’s right where he wants to be.’ Dehumanization affects even an independent and sympathetic character such as Tracy. Others will soon become contaminated. The group decides to travel to Ridley’s mansion and take up his offer of hospitality. On the way, they experience further incidents of official violence, direct and indirect. A marauding band of white National Guardsmen loot the Winnebago for supplies but leave them weapons to survive. This is the first time that Jason has to stop recording. Their vicious leader threatens to shoot him if he does not. He now encounters a more deadly form of violence that makes him cease recording. As they continue their journey, the group view Internet footage recorded from the helmet cam-recorder of a military unit who break into an elderly couple’s residence who can not kill younger family members that have now become zombies. Obvious parallels to the cam-recorders on the helmets of National Guardsmen in Iraq exist that Redacted also reinforces. The elderly couple pleads with the invaders. ‘They are family. They were family.’ But the military unit rejects these different cultural values. When a member of the team becomes bitten, the order is given not to shoot the couple in the head but to kill them so that they will also return to life. The vindictive attitude of the military towards those having different values in this state of emergency appals the group, with the exception of Jason. He is too occupied filming the developing romance between his Deb and Tony. When the Winnebago arrives at Ridley’s mansion, Maxwell wryly comments, ‘It’s what God would have built. If only he had the money.’ However, they find no heavenly sanctuary in this affluent environment. Jason’s camera explores the interior of this Pennsylvanian capitalist Xanadu. Debussy’s Prelude in D-flat Major plays on speakers, representing another form of cultural capital complementing the furnishings and library in Ridley’s rich home. Their host appears still wearing his mummy costume emerging from the bookcase entrance to his Panic Room containing video surveillance monitors. He invites them to stay. Tony then becomes the next member of the group caught in Jason’s trap when he is forced to use the second camera. He comments, ‘I guess Jason was right. You can’t resist.’ When Tony earlier remarked, ‘I don’t want to make this kind of movie’. Jason replied, ‘I can’t change the script.’ Ironically, the following sequence involving Ridley and Tracy attempts to follow part of the original script but not in the manner Jason originally intended. Noticing Ridley’s strange behaviour, the group learns that his family has suffered a zombie assault. Deb notices a bite on Ridley’s wrist when he shows them bodies in a swimming pool before he leaves them to die. Returning to life as a zombie, Ridley knight of the living dead

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heads for the Winnebago and attacks Tracy while Jason films the event. Although she asks for help, Jason continues filming and does nothing to rescue her. The scene is too good to lose. During the chase, Tracy does the very things she objected to in the earlier filming: tripping up like heroines in horror movies and having her bodice ripped. Jason then attempts to distract Ridley by ending the scene, ‘Cut! Cut!’ After temporarily dealing with Ridley, Tracy has had enough. She decides to leave for Texas. Jason films her departure, making no effort to stop her and save her from a dangerous world outside. Previously happy to abandon Deb at her home, he has no conscience about allowing a single female to travel alone. Humanitarian values are completely absent from Jason’s form of cinema. Although Tony suggests they leave, Deb believes they are safer inside a house containing a secure Panic Room. ‘Out there, we’re lunch. In here, we’re reinforced.’ As they gather their weapons, Maxwell takes a broadsword down from the fireplace. ‘I’ve always fancied myself as a swashbuckler.’ Like his bow and arrows, this is another direct weapon he will use.15 While Ridley disposes of Elliot upstairs, Deb and Jason debate the choice of a safe haven very much like Ben and Harry in Night. However, Romero’s films offer no safe havens for anyone. Jason refuses to hide in the Panic Room. ‘We’ll be locking ourselves out of the fucking world.’ Deb replies, ‘The world will bite us on the fucking arse.’ His real reasons are self-serving. ‘We can’t go in, Deb. We’ll miss everything.’ During their debate, both face each other with video cameras again pointing in a manner resembling a gunfight from a classic Western. They debate from different perspectives but they both hold the same type of contaminating weapon infecting their different personalities. No real survivor will exist at the end of the film. Jason is already dead well within the land of the living dead. Like a mad scientist from a classical horror film, his answer is very reminiscent of Karloff’s final lines from The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)—‘We belong dead.’ It is the machine that really matters.16 ‘Who wants to survive in a world like this? All that is left is to record what’s happening for those who remain when it’s over.’ Jason’s lines evoke the ending of Cloverfield. All that remains is a recorded image with no human survivors. Despite his dehumanized attitude, Deb makes one last plea to him. ‘I don’t want to go in there without you.’ When Jason turns his back on her, Ridley appears in front of his lens. The camera drops to the floor. It films the encounter in a manner similar to that recording Deb and Jason’s earlier embrace in her dorm room. Now the camera records a world of Thanatos rather than Eros. Jason finally submits to his underlying Death Instinct that his beloved technology led him to. Maxwell splits Ridley’s head with the broadsword, an action recorded by the bitten Jason’s camera. But it is far too late for the director. Romero’s attack on the dehumanizing nature of twenty-first-century technology concludes with the final moments of his life recorded by Deb. The dying Jason pleads to her, ‘Shoot me.’ Tony has a gun in his hand. Deb picks up the camera to film Jason’s last moments, takes Tony’s gun, and shoots her former boyfriend. By doing this, she does not end the circle of violence but rather facilitates a transfer of deadly authority. During the hospital scene, she earlier returned the camera to Jason, repeating Maxwell’s lines to Tony. ‘Take this. It’s too easy to use.’ Jason pleaded with her 212

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to continue. ‘Come on, Deb. You used to shoot better than me.’ She replied, ‘I don’t want to become you. That’s why I stopped.’ It is now too late for her. She shoots Jason with camera and gun. Diary’s concluding five minutes are ominous. It opens with cinema-verité footage of an enthusiastic Jason about to begin a project. Facing the camera, he describes it as having ‘no fakeness, really raw, really real’. The next image shows the camera dollying round Deb’s chair in a similar manner to many Hollywood productions. ‘Reality’ is already artificial. Tony now holds the camera. He records Deb’s intention to complete Jason’s mission. ‘I’m going to finish his movie.’ Although Tony pleads with her, ‘The movie’s over’, Deb now sees the world in terms resembling those of Jason. ‘No, there’s going to be more. There’s got to be more.’ On the next day of October 26th at 6.24 a.m., she records Maxwell shaving with an electric razor in front of a mirror reflecting the video monitors in the Panic Room. Looking at his aged face, Maxwell remarks, ‘The mornings show you what you are rather than what you think you are.’ Like an experienced director, seeing the cinematic association between mornings and mirrors, Deb asks him, ‘Will you say that again? I didn’t get it.’ She picks up her camera, revealing that she is now once more in another perverse cinematographic relationship that replaces the one she had with Jason. But this time she is both director and co-cinematographer. The camera (held by Tony) pans right. Maxwell responds with a classical line that reinforces not only Diary’s connections between images and violence but also Deb’s own self-betrayal. ‘Et tu, darling?’ Tony then notices zombies approaching the mansion on the video monitors in the Panic Room. The zombies congregate and the humans seek refuge inside the Panic Room. Although Romero originally intended his film to end with the survivors trapped in a small room full of video monitors, he adds a footnote also acutely supplementing the last scene. Deb’s voice-over occurs for the last time as she shows the ‘last thing he downloaded before he died’. Romero’s archetypal redneck hunters use zombies for target practice. The final shot shows a female zombie hanging by her hair on a tree branch, reminiscent of past lynching practices in the Deep South that also influenced the final scenes of Night of the Living Dead. Little has changed during the past four decades that saw the appearance of Romero’s classic film. Instead, a female rather than a black male is the final victim and Romero obviously intends her to symbolize the now dehumanized Deb. A hunter fires a twelve-bore shotgun at his victim, leaving only the upper part of her face hanging. A bloody tear trickles down her cheek. ‘Are we worth saving? You tell me.’ As director, this question certainly does not apply to Deb. She has already embraced Jason’s technological dehumanization, becoming a twenty-first-century Frankenstein monster. But so, too, are audiences who gratuitously consume such images. Romero ironically concludes his film on the mangled head of a female zombie lynched like a black in the ‘bad old days’. This living dead person sheds a tear meant not just for herself but any viewer who can not escape this technological infection of the twenty-first century. Romero’s zombies again symbolize another form of dehumanization in the latest chapter of his American epic. This time the woman is not exempt.17 Diary of the Dead is perhaps Romero’s greatest achievement to date. Returning to his independent film roots, he has managed to make a film directly critical of a knight of the living dead

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contemporary American dilemma. Diary is a very challenging film needing close and constant attention to understand radical premises that go far beyond gore and zombies. George Romero is one of the great talents of American cinema. Diary of the Dead far transcends a contemporary mainstream cinema now delivering product to audiences who do not want to think about a more dangerous world affecting them, even one more insidious than that of the past.

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chapter fifteen

Survival of the Dead

as i write, Romero’s sixth entry in his zombie series is circulating on DVD in England. It gained a VOD (Video on Demand) release in North America at the end of April followed by a limited theatrical exposure in May. The mode of distribution resembles that of its predecessor, intimating that this latest instalment in Romero’s zombie saga is not regarded as good box office in an age of undemanding and undiscriminating audiences. Internet sites reveal divided opinions among bloggers. They range from those who respect the film’s intentions and others who regard it as another disappointment from a director who appears to have fallen far short of his earlier achievements. This latter perspective, one which appears the majority view at present, has ironic links with the American reception of the works of one of Romero’s key influences, Orson Welles. That director ostensibly achieved the height of his cinematic creativity with Citizen Kane (1941) and then disappointed his admirers with following works. The cinema of Romero and Welles are distinct entities, but they do share one thing in common especially concerning the nature of their later works: both are talents who engaged in experiments far removed from the dominant Hollywood norms and encountered misunderstanding from those who were unwilling to understand what the real significance of these experiments were. It is only recently that the significance of Welles’s later work has received the recognition it truly deserves. For many of his former admirers, Romero may have begun at the top with Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead before steadily ‘going downhill’ himself as Welles said tongue-in-cheek during one scene in F for Fake (1973). To take such a view ignores both the diversity of Romero’s distinctive talent as well as a deliberate neglect of the various modifications he has brought to each zombie film he has directed. In the case of George Romero several changes have occurred in his life since the first edition of this book appeared. He has now relocated to Canada and is content to make films on non-inflated Hollywood budgets that allow him to express the type of creativity that forms a unique aspect of his talent. Although, like Welles, he is an independent, Romero operates within the basic narrative structure of Hollywood cinema. But it is one he subverts in his own inimitable manner. Romero provides

a narrative that appears initially comprehensible on the surface but one demanding frequent viewings for its implications to be thoroughly understood. In an era of even worse instant cinematic consumerist gratification this presents more of a challenge to most audiences than in the days of the classical Hollywood studio system. By constantly reviewing films such as Diary of the Dead and now Survival of the Dead, one encounters Romero’s deliberate employment of a particular genre that contains as much distinctive harmonic variants as the symphonic structures employed by Mozart and Beethoven in their day to develop themes in more original and succinct ways. This is what distinguishes a modest film such as Survival of the Dead from the current type of ‘scary movie’ product filling the shelves of DVD rental stores and comic variants of the genre such as Zombieland (2009). Like Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland is an amusing diversion but contains nothing of any intrinsic significance for generic development. Survival of the Dead is a modest, low-budget film providing audiences with desired scary moments but ones that do not dominate the narrative. CGI techniques such as the top of a zombie’s blasted head falling down represent fun moments designed to appease an audience section of certain fans but contribute nothing of any value to the film itself. Romero ‘sugars the pill’ by providing the type of humorous and graphic images that his fans expect. Survival of the Dead appears to be another of his familiar zombie movies but one that he reworks with significant variations. Familiar components exist in this film, ones that we have seen before: a small group of beleaguered survivors comprising female and non-Caucasian elements; their decision to leave the institution which they belong to and ‘light out’ for a new territory; the deceptive temptations of old ideological family values that are no longer relevant in a different type of highly dangerous ‘brave new world’ they now face; two major characters fighting each other rather than rationally recognizing a new dangerous situation and combining to defeat the threat; the dark sacrifice made by one person to bring further chaos into an already threatening situation; and the attempt to find a solution that may lead to some form of resolving the problem. All these occur in one way or another in Survival of the Dead. The first is familiar from Romero’s preceding zombie films, the major variant in Diary of the Dead being the black community who survive on their own and belong to a different racial and socio-economic class than the affluent young students who flee in the Winnebago. The second evokes themes contained in Dawn, Day, and Land, with the survivors usually searching at the end for another territory that may prove illusory as the desert island in the final scene of Day. Far from personally moving into a brave new world, these remnants may end up just reproducing the problems they have previously encountered, problems inherent within the socially conditioned psyche of the main characters that they have to learn to overcome. As Dawn of the Dead revealed, an affluent consumerist mall paradise provided no real solution for those human survivors who took it over in the same way that their ancestors took over lands belonging to Native Americans generations ago. Far from finding freedom from persecution, they took their former ideological behavioural patterns with them and began persecuting others, reproducing variants of the ways in which they underwent persecution. This is an old story as relevant to the contemporary dilemma of the state 216

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of Israel in terms of its treatment of the Palestinians as it is to American history. The allegorical dimension of Romero’s zombie films is extremely important both in the late twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first. In Survival of the Dead, the survivors recognize that the supposedly idyllic sanctuary of Plum Island offers no solution to their problems, and they may even end up eventually reproducing the worst aspects of the islander’s behavioural patterns. This involves the reproduction of not only violence but also former behavioural patterns that were redundant and useless in the first place. Like the Hispanic wife in the housing project scene in Dawn, Janet (Kathleen Munroe) attempts to reach out to her dead sister Jane (Kathleen Munroe) in one last attempt to repair the breach between them. But, as the wife in Dawn finds out before her zombie husband bites her, such feelings are now dangerous and a redundant survival of the past as irrelevant in this new world as the million dollars contained in the truck stolen by the racist rednecks in Survival. Such vestiges of economic and emotionally ideological currency retain a dominant hold in this new world despite the clear fact that both are now irrational and useless. Old values are difficult to reject. Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Welsh) and Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) reproduce the struggles of Ben and Harry in Night. Both believe they are right and intend giving no quarter to each other despite the fact that the attitudes they hold have elements of rationality that could be combined in a collective strategy that could benefit everyone. But, like the television studio audience confronting the suggestions of the scientist (Richard France) in Dawn, they absolutely reject any alternatives despite the fact that they might offer one way out of a dangerous dilemma. Like Miguel in Day, Chuck (Joris Jarsky) opens his version of the gates of hell, shooting off a lock that contains the new ‘livestock’ in the corral, both sacrificing himself and engaging in an irrational attempt to avenge himself on Muldoon in a manner that destroys both himself and most of the warring family members of Plum Island. Finally, Janet discovers that Muldoon was right after all but it is too late for her to inform the survivors. The film ends by showing that there is another alternative, but it is tentative and not the last word in the drama. This final solution in the latest chapter of Romero’s zombie saga is also one that may offend viewer sensibilities to say nothing of vegetarians! Flesh is flesh no matter where it comes from. Survival of the Dead is another variation on themes Romero has long explored in his cinema but one that also reveals that any solution to the dilemma originally presented in Night is as far from being realized today as it was in that film’s grim climax. Survival of the Dead also introduces a new element into Romero’s work, namely merging the Hollywood Western with the zombie film. He had already briefly played with that element as seen in the cavalry charge bugle that accompanied the biker invasion into the mall in Dawn. Knightriders also represented an earlier example of fusion in its diverse mixture of medieval fantasy, biker movie, and a Howard Hawks professional group treatment of an independent community struggling to survive in a commercialized and hostile world. The Western elements may appear hackneyed, particularly with the type of Irish accents employed by some of the actors that make them appear first-generation immigrants rather than those who have inhabited the New World for some time. However, if we allow Romero the artistic licence he is due, knight of the living dead

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then we may see Plum Island as his perverse version of that old community opposing the forces of change and time in the MGM musical Brigadoon (1954). But this community no longer represents that safe and tranquil haven from the modern world that Gene Kelly eventually returns to, but one harbouring worse dangers than the ones the humans attempt to escape from in a mainland now becoming dominated by zombies. Romero’s use of the Western is by no means opportunistic, especially when we consider the cultural role of that genre in American life as well as the desire of Tea Party followers to escape to their reactionary version of a blissful world of the past. The director is not going to deceive his audiences with the reward that Ronald Colman receives when he returns to Shangri-La in the closing scene of Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937). We must also remember that the Western was once regarded as the ‘American genre par excellence’, and its premises have often reflected the dark history of that country’s imperialist manifest destiny City on the Hill ideological colonialism that involves subjugation of women and minorities, if not outright extermination. If Romero’s disparate group of National Guard now represents a more cynical, contradictory, and disunited version of the Hawks professional group thrown into a more hostile world, the O’Flynns and the Muldoons not only represent those two warring patriarchs from William Wyler’s The Big Country (1959), played by Burl Ives and Charles Bickford, but also the most dysfunctional representatives of those traditional Irish communities often celebrated in the films of John Ford. Despite their seeming antagonism, Patrick O’Flynn and Seamus Muldoon echo each other. Both exterminate outsiders as their immigrant forefathers and Western frontiersmen once did to Native Americans, a policy their successors continued with later ‘threats’ such as blacks, Hispanics, Jews, socialists, and trade unionists. O’Flynn forms a ‘posse’ to cleanse Plum Island of zombies, while Muldoon exterminates any living outsiders who enter his domain, carrying the fantasies of those right-wing extremists patrolling the American-Mexican border to their most extreme and logical conclusions. Zombies represent a perverse example of ‘livestock’ now contained in Muldoon’s barns and corrals. Despite their family connections, those who do not adapt and become ‘good Indians’ by learning skills and contributing their ‘use-value’ to the island economy are immediately shot. When O’Flynn returns to his former domain, he finds zombies performing the function of delivering mail, chopping wood, ploughing the field, and operating as twentieth-century versions of those former ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ found in pre–Civil War plantations. Survival of the Dead is a ‘minor work’ in the same way that more concise and shorter works such as Une page d’amour and Le rêve represent minor, but nonetheless significant, interludes in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series of novels. But it is nevertheless crucial to Romero’s structure of zombie films in the same way as Zola’s shorter works are to the author’s greater vision. Despite its brevity, Survival of the Dead contributes to an extremely important corpus of meaning running throughout all of Romero’s films. Survival of the Dead opens with a close-up of Sarge (Alan Van Sprang). As the camera slowly zooms out to reveal finally a covered corpse at the right foreground of the frame, his voice-over begins. Immediately recognizable from his brief appearance as a hold-up man in Diary of the Dead, Sarge’s presence evokes uneasy feelings for the audience. Is this person really the hero of this new film? Since Romero’s 218

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previous use of voice-over was associated with an ostensible heroine in his last film, what rationale lies behind this introduction? After all, Sarge showed no redeeming qualities when he plundered the Winnebago in the earlier film and his introduction here is little short of unusual.1 The answer may lie in the fact that normal definitions of morality now play little part in a new world of monsters, necessitating different qualities of adaptation in terms of changing circumstances. Romero’s characters are often complex, and the opening sequence revealing Sarge illustrates that he is more complicated in nature than his previous appearance that led audiences to regard him as a stereotyped villain suggests. If Romero has decided to return to his Night of the Living Dead zero point of origins to present new perspectives, he is quite entitled to take a minor character seen in a brief sequence of Diary and make him ‘hero’ rather than ‘villain’. At the same time, these terms are qualified since Sarge is as much a contradictory entity as those other characters we will soon encounter in the film. The world of Survival is one of changing circumstances, and as in all Romero films, adaptation is essential. Thus a character we have formerly taken for a villain in the previous films now takes centre stage. This is relevant to comments made in Sarge’s voice-over at the end of the film where he mentions that he never learned the whole story of the events at Plum Island from O’Flynn. Similarly, in Diary, audiences never gain access to the full story behind the activities of Sarge and his renegade group of National Guardsmen. The voice-over describes the same world of the zombie outbreak as Diary did. Again, we are back at the beginning. Fifty-three million have died, and survivors face a world of chaos where old values play no role. The problem is the same as that in previous films: adaptation. Will humans learn from the new situation and reject dangerous and redundant former patterns of behaviour? Or will those old behavioural and instinctual patterns reoccur, thwarting any further chances of development and survival? The film’s title refers as much to the living as it does to the dead. Like Peter in Dawn of the Dead, Sarge mourns his lost buddy and waits for his return as a living dead survival he will have to confront. ‘They were easy enough to kill except when they were your buddies.’ The reason for Sarge’s vigil appears. Unlike Peter in Dawn, he is not waiting to save his friend from becoming one of the legions of the damned but to punish his senior officer for incompetence, echoing similar feelings of National Guardsmen and recruits sent to Afghanistan and Iraq who feel resentment not just against inexperienced officers but also towards those politicians (who never experienced combat) who sent them there in the first place. ‘You got D.J. killed. Now you’ve got to kill him . . . You can’t do it right but you can do the right thing.’ However, like the various occupants of the White House, this person can neither do it right nor do the right thing. This ‘superior officer’ is not up to the task and should not have been put in command in a time of extreme danger. He hesitates and becomes victim to another zombie guardsman who suddenly appears from behind. Sarge’s other buddy, Kenny (Eric Woolfe), disposes of the zombie, leaving Sarge to fulfil reluctantly the task of eliminating a now-infected, living dead D.J. himself. Although Kenny regards himself as Sarge’s friend, Sarge never acknowledges the relationship until the end. He has been hurt enough and hides his real feelings beneath a macho exterior like a Howard Hawks hero who never wishes to reveal knight of the living dead

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his human vulnerability. Sarge tells Kenny, ‘It sucks. We never should have signed up for this shit. We’re better off on our own.’ For Sarge, desertion entails isolation from vulnerable human feelings and an attempt to retreat into the values of a world of violence. Like Peter in Dawn, he has been traumatically affected by the spectacle of violence surrounding him, one that has now claimed his best friend. Sarge now chooses to withdraw from both his own feelings and the institution he has previously supported. This is probably why Romero includes the memory of the scene in Diary when Sarge robs the Winnebago. In Diary, it appears to be the act of a brutal and selfish man. Nothing in his brief appearance in Diary would lead the audience to think otherwise. However, by reintroducing this character into Survival as a major player and introducing this key pre-credit sequence into this new chapter to his saga, Romero obviously wishes audiences to consider why Sarge behaved as he did in the earlier film. This introductory scene preceding this audience flashback to Diary forms an important component to a larger picture. We now understand Sarge’s motivations in the earlier film. On its own it appeared as an incomprehensible piece of a larger jigsaw puzzle. Now that Sarge’s role becomes developed in Survival, it becomes possible to see him as much more than the ruthless thug who appeared in Diary. Characters that played leading roles in the earlier film are now relegated to becoming marginalized background players in Survival as Sarge was previously. They do not count in the same way as the first zombie appearing in this film does not. Instead, Survival will focus upon Sarge and a new gallery of leading players in this new segment of Romero’s saga. Is escape really possible? The final words of Sarge’s voice-over before the credits begin raise this issue. ‘It had been an “us vs. them” world. We were looking for a place where there were no “them” ’. Survival of the Dead will interrogate this dilemma, suggesting that any form of escape may be as illusionary as the fantasy island that appears in the final sequence of Day of the Dead. The isolated environment of Plum Island may suggest a safe haven, but it will prove as illusionary and dangerous as the mall in Dawn of the Dead. Sarge considers his fifteen seconds of fame on the Internet following his brief appearance in Jason Creed’s documentary remarking that he could have made millions and bought an apartment if such values counted anymore. The credits roll revealing the isolated Plum Island off the coast of Delaware. ‘Six days after the Dead began to walk.’ Despite its isolation, the small island community, which appears to be populated exclusively by two Irish families, now faces problems similar to those of the outside world. While Patrick O’Flynn chooses to follow a solution similar to those human survivors dealing with zombies on the mainland, his antagonist and counterpart seeks a different path. After dispatching one zombie, O’Flynn decides to form ‘a posse’ to rid the island of its infected population. Before they visit members of the Muldoon family they suspect have concealed their non-zombie children, O’Flynn and his daughter argue over his strict methods. At this point of the film, it may be unclear for most viewers who this daughter is. But since her combative attitude echoes what we later learn about Janet, it is not Jane who is an unseen presence and a zombie at this point of the film but Janet herself. She challenges her father’s ‘strict’ methods. ‘Would you be strict enough to gun one of your own? What if you die? Would any of us be strict enough to gun you down?’ O’Flynn refuses to answer, 220

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merely stating that he would perform the act himself. We later learn of his partiality towards Jane, and his reluctance to be ‘strict enough’ at this earlier stage of the film will have dangerous consequences later. By allowing Jane to survive, he ironically reveals himself to have the same preferential family values as his antagonist, Seamus Muldoon. ‘One of our own’ is different to those outside the clan, and O’Flynn’s reluctance to kill his daughter evokes the macabre family values of those older Muldoons who used photography to preserve and remember the dead bodies of their departed. After O’Flynn ends the conversation, Janet calls her horse, mounts it, and follows the posse. This horse is dark brown and has a star on its forehead. Sarge’s voice-over concludes this scene commenting that ‘we heard what happened afterwards. Not everyone was on his side.’ This retrospective line also foreshadows later audience reflection at the end of the film concerning the concept of the two daughters that Romero employs very much like a suspense motif in the Hitchcock tradition. When Muldoon goes into exile, his rebellious daughter is on horseback. Later, a zombie resembling this daughter rides past Sarge’s group. Has the daughter seen in the earlier part of the film now become a zombie? But this motif is much more important than an irrelevant MacGuffin device designed to deceive the audience. It contains a key element revealing that there are also similarities as well as differences within the characters of O’Flynn and Muldoon. Rather than killing her as he has done to other zombies on the island, O’Flynn has allowed Jane to live, thus continuing his partiality towards a favourite daughter in death as well as life. He certainly is not following that family tradition of ‘Till death do us part’ but following a similar dysfunctional family behavioural pattern as that of his rival Muldoon. Romero never shows Janet until a third of the way into the film. He leads his audience to believe that Janet has died and become a zombie during her father’s absence from Plum Island until the real situation emerges following Sarge’s recovery from his wound. Although this is not made explicit until halfway through the film, Romero does play fair with his audience. Up till the time Jane appears, he only refers to one daughter. But both ride horses that are virtually identical except for their colour. The two horses have a star on their foreheads, but Janet’s is dark brown while Jane’s is black. Unless the viewer is alert, the two daughters can be easily confused, Romero thus tempting his audience to make mistakes. For example, when Tomboy later goes in search of Cisco, Jane watches on horseback. Later when Boy goes into the wood, he is spied on by Janet. The two sisters are identical twins hard to distinguish until one dies. But one is O’Flynn’s favourite while the other will experience her father’s one and only attempt to be ‘strict’. But, by then, it’s far too late. When Janet challenges her father over whether he would ‘be strict enough to gun down one of your own’, this reveals that he has not disposed of Jane in the way he intends to deal with the infected zombies of Plum Island. Janet knows her father all too well. At the end of the film, O’Flynn does become ‘strict enough’ to dispose of an infected daughter, one who ironically is about to reveal the successful outcome of an experiment everyone has doubted. But the solution is both too late and ironically premature since Janet can not finish delivering an important message to the survivors. Forming a posse to kill other zombie family members while refusing at this point of the film to act against one of his own suggests that O’Flynn’s motivations knight of the living dead

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have less to do with sanitizing Plum Island and more to do with repressing the fact that he can not eliminate a favourite daughter. His actions parallel those of Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956), who engages in a murderous regeneration through violence, a scenario that has more to do with morbid issues rooted in his family than anything else. Both characters repress and sublimate their dark psychological feelings by using violence against surrogate victims. While Ethan wishes to kill Debbie due to his dark feelings concerning her involvement with Scar, O’Flynn also wishes to keep possessing a favourite daughter in death as he did in life for reasons that are not entirely wholesome. Muldoon wishes to keep possessing living dead members of his own family to contribute to the island economy. Although the 1970s era of the family horror movie has now passed, it is interesting that one of the key contributors to this genre still sees its relevance several decades later. When O’Flynn and his posse enter one of the Muldoon homes, Beth Muldoon (Philippa Domville) not only refuses him access to her infected children upstairs but comments, ‘You enjoy doing it.’ However, this has less to do with any enjoyment O’Flynn has in his deadly task but more with the way his family feelings have become repressed and channelled into violent activities. When he sees the two Muldoon children chained to their beds, he is hesitant to kill them as if re-experiencing and remembering the same kind of feelings when he found Jane in a similar condition. Finding that nobody in his clan will perform this deadly action, he appears reluctant but is about to shoot the two children as if hesitant to lose face before other members of his family and reveal his contradictory behaviour. Family values take on dangerously violent forms of activities. O’Flynn has allowed his zombie daughter to survive in violation of his vigilante goals. Seeing the two zombie children chained to their beds evokes the memory of why he allowed Jane to survive. He must conceal his devious and hypocritical activity by following his violent path to its most logical conclusion. However, he is saved from confronting this dilemma. Seamus Muldoon and his family then intervene to prevent O’Flynn’s reluctant form of mercy killing. As well as having Catholic sensibilities that motivate his actions, Muldoon is opposed to ‘killing our kind as if they don’t belong to us’ and wishes to preserve them in the hope a cure may be found. By contrast, O’Flynn believes in ‘putting the dead to sleep before they put us to sleep’. Both father figures have rigidly opposed ideas. Muldoon regards O’Flynn as a heretic to his way of life. ‘If he don’t turn my way, I’m going to shoot him.’ For both men, family is paramount in a community which is exclusively xenophobic. ‘There’s never been a stranger in our midst until now Patrick O’Flynn, and it’s you.’ Although Plum Island appears an ideal sanctuary to those on the outside, it is equally ridden by violent tensions as the outside world which Sarge and his group seek escape from. Later in the film Sarge reveals to Boy that he has come from a small town in Alabama and has rejected its lifestyle since small towns produce small minds. Plum Island embodies the worst aspects of rigid family values and insularity, whose logical product leads to violence against all alternative ideas and those who do not adapt to accepted norms. While O’Flynn engages in his own form of ethnic cleansing against the living dead, Muldoon attempts to preserve the dead, ‘to keep them with us’, in the same way that his own family has morbidly taken photographs of their dead in the past to preserve their image and 222

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memory. The zombie plague offers Muldoon the logical extension of this family possessiveness of preserving the dead forever. Although he looks towards an eventual cure for the zombie plague and attempts to channel away appetites from human flesh towards animal, Muldoon is no benevolent patriarch. He only looks after his own, treating zombies like ‘livestock’ in his barns and corrals, disposing of those who do not conform and develop in the manner he expects them to in the same way as the unfortunate pig that does not attract the appetite of one of his experiments. If a pig does not attract the appetite of a zombie and fulfil its designated function, Muldoon will consume it that evening. No compromise is possible between two violent patriarchs who have been fighting ‘since schoolyard days’. Both O’Flynn and Muldoon use and abuse various victims. Using what remains of the Internet to masquerade as Captain Courageous to send human survivors to Plum Island where they will die at the hands of the Muldoon clan, O’Flynn is as equally manipulative and opportunistic as Muldoon. Both fathers represent two opposing types of economic systems. While Muldoon is the rancher figure from a Western, O’Flynn is a self-employed fisherman who has nothing but contempt for those who have earned salaries. The systems they embody are exploitative in more ways than one. While Muldoon attempts to educate and exploit the living dead to become good ranch hands, O’Flynn decides to take on the old mantle of the Saviour by becoming a ‘fisher of men’ on the Internet. But his activities lead to destruction of those who wish salvation from the mainland rather than survival. Although he curses Muldoon when he returns to Plum Island and sees the dead bodies of those he has sent over the water, his reaction is hypocritical since he bears equal responsibility for their deaths. His only intention of sending them over was to ‘annoy’ his rival. Yet, O’Flynn knew enough about his rival’s attitude to strangers and must have realized the dangers they would face. As in the case of Jane, O’Flynn has repressed another dark consequence of his actions. Also, rather than co-operating for the common good, both patriarchs engage in violent forms of behaviour and threats reminiscent of the worst practices of the Cold War. They are dominated by instinctual forms of behaviour that will destroy both themselves and others. As a coda to Survival, Romero will show how such instincts will operate in death as they did in life. Both fathers act in contradictory and hypocritical ways. While O’Flynn can not apply his ‘strict’ practices to his own daughter at the beginning of the film, Muldoon has made an exception of his anti-stranger attitudes by employing fugitive criminal Chuck to work on his ranch and tend the livestock. Quite obviously, even before the plague, Muldoon probably economically exploited him in the same way that the avaricious Taiwanese couple exploits fugitive criminal Kai (Anthony Wong) in their South African restaurant in Herman Yau’s Ebola Syndrome (1996). Strangers do have their use-value, especially if they are illegal immigrants vulnerable to economic exploitation. Now Chuck has other forms of livestock to tend and nowhere to go. As he tells Muldoon, ‘Nobody’s hiring.’ Both father figures are as stubborn and violent as their earlier counterparts played by Charles Bickford and Burl Ives in The Big Country. But they also embody within their personalities rigid and unyielding aspects of power politics, past and present, that may eventually lead to a similar type of apocalyptic conclusion as the one in knight of the living dead

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Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964). As Sarge notes in his final voice-over, he had naturally taken O’Flynn’s side and accepted his version of events. ‘I was with O’Flynn from the beginning and I always thought of Muldoon as the enemy. But, now I’m not so sure.’ Had Sarge known the whole story, it is doubtful whether he would have changed sides and joined an equally dangerous enemy. Although Muldoon intends to kill his old enemy—‘I need to be rid of him’— Janet pleads with him to allow her father the option of exile. ‘You can put him on a boat.’ Muldoon agrees to her request. While some O’Flynns join the exiled patriarch, others decide to stay, including Janet, who watches his departure on horseback, ironically evoking the first image we will see of her sister in the film. Muldoon yields to Janet’s expression of family solidarity. But the consequences will be deadly for everyone concerned. The scene changes to reveal an isolated area outside Philadelphia three weeks later. Kenny watches a talk-show host on one of the few remaining television stations operating exchanging banalities with a guest despite a time of national emergency. One of the jokes echoes the caustic anti-establishment attitude of the film. ‘Why don’t zombies bite politicians?’ The answer is ‘professional courtesy’. In addition to Sarge and Kenny, other fugitive members of the group comprise racially mixed lesbian Tomboy (Athena Karkaris) and sexually charged macho Hispanic Catholic Francisco (Stefano DiMatteo) attempting in vain to score sexually and ‘change’ her life. Listening to the broadcast, she comments, ‘All the wrong people are dying. All we have left are assholes.’ Cisco’s behaviour and the voices from the television show do not contradict her. They emerge from a dying world in which TV shows offering money for the right answer still fill the airwaves. As one survivor in the group comments, ‘There’ll always be money at the end of the world. Maybe you can buy yourself a condominium in heaven.’ However, other, more dangerous, assholes exist, as they soon discover. Alerted by the sounds of moaning, the team discovers a group of rednecks who have sadistically disposed of zombies by decapitating them and leaving their still living heads to suffer. Sarge views this spectacle in disgust and finishes them off. It is not coincidental that all the zombies are African-American since extremeright racism lies behind this appalling act. After finishing off the perpetrators the team finds a young man, Boy (Devon Bostick), in the group. He has been robbed by the rednecks and like them has no particular place to go. ‘Lousy times make lousy people. Who are you?’ Sarge answers affirmatively and cynically, ‘Lousy people?’ But his recent actions in putting the living dead out of their misery prove that he is far from being in that category. When Boy reveals the presence of over a million dollars in the redneck trailer, the group decides to flee north until he tells them of an Internet advertisement by O’Flynn operating in his new businessman persona of “Captain Courageous” telling of access to an island sanctuary, ‘small and under control’ for the right price.2 Resembling Albert Sharpe in Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959), O’Flynn is also a malevolent human leprechaun who robs desperate people of their ‘pot of gold’ by sending them across the water to Plum Island, which is by no means a safe haven ‘over the rainbow’. Persuaded by Kenny that ‘going to this island ain’t like signing up with Uncle Sam’, Sarge orders the truck to move south. When they arrive 224

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at the point of embarkation, the group battle both O’Flynn’s greedy mercenaries and marauding zombies, until they finally secure the Amherst Islander ferry. After witnessing the death of his allies and the end of his exploitative business, O’Flynn is rescued by Tomboy as they leave the mainland. The devious O’Flynn forms an alliance with Sarge. He comments, ‘We’re all on the same side—those of us living.’ But the manipulative patriarch intends to use the better armed National Guardsmen for his revenge on Muldoon, giving them only his selected version of the full story like a political spin doctor. The living O’Flynns and Muldoons are certainly not on the same side, but they have similar contradictory attitudes concerning family values. O’ Flynn can not kill his zombie daughter but murders members of other families in the same way that Muldoon disposes of any of his livestock that does not perform in the manner he expects them to. Muldoon keeps his dead wife functioning in the kitchen. Significantly, O’Flynn seems to have no problem with Tomboy being a lesbian, while Muldoon would have had he known this. O’Flynn only gives Sarge’s group his version of the facts, not the complete depiction of a very complex situation, in order to initiate the invasion of Plum Island with superior firepower. As he tells Sarge, the intention is ‘to annoy a certain character who thinks he owns this rock’, a policy having parallels with contemporary American foreign policy decisions designed ‘to annoy’ certain heads of state who think they have complete national autonomy over their own affairs. Fired on by two Muldoon snipers on their arrival, Sarge becomes wounded and loses his buddy Kenny in an ambush. Despite his macho exterior, he is clearly upset by this loss and feels responsibility for the decision he earlier made to turn south rather than north. ‘Why did I bring you with me? I never signed up for you. You never signed up for me. I never took a bullet for anyone.’ Although he puts on a front like Geoff Carter in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) who ‘wouldn’t ask’ anyone ‘to do anything’, he has taken a bullet for Kenny and reveals his real feelings by losing control when O’Flynn dispatches his friend. O’Flynn discovers the bodies of those he sent over to Plum Island killed by the Muldoons, including a young girl (now a zombie) whose mother gave him her last thirty dollars on a parting gift of a woollen hat for a daughter she believes the older man will save. However, O’Flynn is no fatherly Saviour but a Judas in disguise who looks after this daughter in the same way he has acted as a father to Janet and Jane. He has sent ‘illegal immigrants’ across the border without any real thought about their safety, and they have ended up as victims of a group resembling armed right-wing border patrol militia patriots who in real life would love to follow Muldoon’s actions. Although O’Flynn rails against Muldoon’s policy of ‘shooting the living and sparing the dead’, he also bears responsibility for the deaths of these illegal immigrants. Borrowing ammunition from the group, he departs and shoots the three zombies now working on the property that was once his own. His actions not only reveal his obvious disgust at Muldoon but also embody those of an angry capitalist who now finds poor people working on his land and shoots them as trespassers. Other losses affect the group. Tomboy discovers Cisco suffering from zombie infection and kills him rather than allowing him to commit suicide and damn knight of the living dead

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himself according to the tenets of his religion. Despite her feelings over this act, she takes compassion on a colleague with whom she had engaged in verbal combat concerning his sexual propositions that her lesbian identity can not embrace. He has now changed her life but not in the way he originally intended by making her feel sympathy for his plight as a human being. This denouement echoes Chuck’s line to Lem Muldoon (Matt Birman) when he notices him looking at Jane’s photo. ‘You were sweet on her, weren’t you,’ to which he replies, ‘It wouldn’t have worked out. Nothing ever does.’ The same applies to the various strategies employed by O’Flynn and Muldoon as well as the relationships in this very different world with characters still searching desperately for alternatives as in Romero’s other films. Significantly, another photo appears to the right of Jane. It shows two horses both with a star on their foreheads anticipating Janet’s later revelation to Sarge that she has a twin sister who is now a zombie, the woman they saw riding past the group when they arrived at Plum Island. Like Sarge’s feelings about Kenny’s death, Tomboy’s mercy killing of someone she regarded as a nuisance has allowed another side of her identity to emerge, namely compassion over the loss of another person. Unlike O’Flynn she is both strict and merciful. But her action also foreshadows O’Flynn’s final fatherly act towards Janet, one which is ominously deadly. During their final meeting, a brown horse is seen in a corral. This background detail could be easily overlooked. But, in retrospect, the audience will recognize that it is Janet’s own horse. As with O’Flynn’s daughters, only two horses appear in the film. Throughout the whole film, actions, emotions, and motivations are highly complex, paralleling their appearance in everyday life. That is why, like the later films of Howard Hawks, Survival of the Dead is a work exploring the interaction of character but within a completely new context more complicated than ones occurring within the work of this classical Hollywood cinema director whom Romero reveres and updates to a new type of cinema in a completely different historical era. Those expecting the typical gore and violence of most zombie films will be disappointed unless they go along with the particular construction of this type of film. Like Sarge, Tomboy also expresses her real feelings of comradeship towards a fellow National Guardsman. Despite her antagonistic exterior, she has the same feelings towards him as Sarge did for Kenny, although they are not sexual. Tomboy saves him from eternal damnation according to the teachings of his religion. Like Sarge, Tomboy has humane feelings hidden by putting on a macho exterior, one that was as necessary as protective armour in the mostly male world of the National Guard. This is not the only expression of another side of her personality. When O’Flynn’s zombie daughter rode past on horseback, she expressed regret to him over his bereavement, the only one in Sarge’s group to do so. Muldoon captures two women, one living (Tomboy), the other dead (Jane), intending to use them in different ways for his patriarchal goal. Choking on a badly cooked meal Muldoon has offered her (while he seems to appreciate whatever type of home cooking is on his plate!), Tomboy hears a sound in the kitchen and asks whether the cook will join them. Muldoon responds in recognizable Republican Religious Right overtones. ‘Women and children here have their place. Children quiet in bed. Women in the kitchen.’ Tomboy replies, ‘Some women would argue 226

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with that.’ A few minutes later, Muldoon’s zombie wife appears chained to the kitchen, Romero’s version of a rural, lower-class Stepford wife instinctually performing her previous domestic role but prevented from enacting posthumous revenge by the chains that bind her to hearth and home, now physical ones as opposed to ideological ones that trapped her in life. Referring to nineteenth-century photographs on the wall showing various past members of his family frozen in time via photographs taken after their death, Muldoon explains his macabre project to Tomboy of ‘doing what has been expected of us’ in performing ‘the Lord’s bidding’ by preserving the living dead in the same fashion. However, his project is by no means humanitarian but economic. Like O’Flynn in his role of Captain Courageous, he is now benevolent saviour. Those living dead who do not conform to ‘earning their living’ (and their keep) on the Muldoon ranch will be speedily eliminated. This applies as much to his own family as to distant relatives. While Tomboy listens to Muldoon’s plans, Sarge recovers from the wound he suffered in the ambush that took Kenny’s life and awakes believing the dead Jane is standing over him. As he recovers, his vision focuses to see that it is really Janet. She informs him not only about the fact that her twin sister is now a zombie but also about her deep-rooted family problems with a father who is equally as ruthless and stubborn as his deadly enemy. ‘My father is a liar—maybe, not a liar. My father sees the world one way. So does Seamus Muldoon. Both of them are as spiteful a pair of fools that the Lord ever made.’ She disapproves of Sarge’s alliance with her father, mentioning her rejection of filial obedience as well as O’Flynn’s dangerous nature. ‘He was never a proper father. And now, he’s back with you and your guns and he’s about to start World War Three.’ When her father appears, Janet reveals that she saved him from Muldoon and condemns his paternal shortcomings and inherent immaturity. ‘I buried your wife when you were nowhere to be seen. And, all the while, it was Jane who was in your heart. She and you were the only children in the house, and me the only grown-up.’ O’Flynn attempts to reach out to her. ‘Of course, I loved Jane. But I also loved you, all the more because you were another me.’ Janet has earlier saved her father from imminent execution at the hands of Muldoon by appealing to his own paternal sensibilities. ‘He’s my dad.’ She suggests putting O’Flynn on a boat if only to prevent further violence occurring between both families, but she refuses to join him in exile. However, this does not stop O’Flynn engaging in further immature acts of violence when he uses the Internet to hook those fleeing from the zombies and send them to a supposed island sanctuary that represents no real escape for them. If Muldoon can be condemned for his ruthless border patrol actions against innocent people trying to save their lives, O’Flynn is equally culpable for his manipulative attempts in exile to ‘annoy’ his rival, having no real concern for those he economically exploits. Two evil father figures oppose each other. While one uses humans like illegal immigrants to annoy his adversary, the other intends using zombies as cheap migrant labour in the same way that he uses Chuck. Humans and zombies are pawns in this deadly game between two dangerous patriarchal capitalists who exploit both the living and the dead. O’Flynn hopes that Sarge’s military group will overcome his enemy by superior firepower. But all players will be disappointed in the end. Janet’s mistaken loyalty towards her father in saving knight of the living dead

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him from death only gives him some more breathing space to cause further violence. O’Flynn’s last act of living violence will ironically prevent the human survivors from learning that a way does exist to control the zombies. In Survival, maturity has nothing to do with age, where added years do not guarantee rational behaviour, as the two warring heads of these clans reveal by their aberrant behaviour and rigid attitudes. Neither side rationally faces the realities of changing situations by discarding inflexible attitudes and old hatreds and trying to move forward. Significantly, although she does not share Cisco’s religion, Tomboy empathizes with her former antagonist by persuading him not to commit suicide and performs her own form of deadly blessing as he kneels before her. She comments, ‘You finally did it, Cisco. You finally changed my life forever.’ Although irritated earlier by his macho Latino sensibilities, she finally feels compassion towards him in his final seconds of life knowing full well that he will incur damnation according to the tenets of his religion if he commits suicide so that he will not be a living dead threat to his associates. Tomboy’s act does not resemble the automatic dispatch of former colleagues who have now become zombies that occurs in the pre-credit sequence. Instead, it is an act of compassion towards someone she realizes has attempted to choose a path of damnation rather than allowing infection to make him a dangerous threat to the living. She understands the lifestyle of somebody different from her in gender and religion and helps him achieve an end to his life that will not cause him emotional pain. Her actions are different in nature from those motivating O’Flynn and Muldoon. The film moves towards its final chapter with the two warring sides confronting each other. Prior to their capture by the Muldoons, Sarge performs an unexpected act of generosity by allowing Boy to escape. ‘Get out of here. Take the money, take the boat, and go live!’ Despite the antagonism he has displayed towards his younger colleague, Sarge really has a sneaking respect and sympathy for him as seen earlier in the truck by allowing him to get away with his ‘magic act’ where Boy has supposedly swallowed the key to the safe containing the million dollars the rednecks appropriated. When O’Flynn’s party reaches the Muldoon border, they see Tomboy used as a hostage and decide to lay down their weapons. She has earlier helped O’Flynn to reach the safety of the Amherst Islander, and he has the decency to reciprocate. ‘I owe something to that girl.’ Muldoon then outlines his perverse philosophy, one intermingling quaint religious dogma with a rational plan for human survival, ‘trying to keep the fallen with us and we can’t do that unless they can eat something that isn’t human. It’s important, not just for us, but the rest of the world or God’s going to send us all to hell and the Devil will send us back again if we don’t do the right thing.’ Yet doing the ‘right thing’ is problematic. Muldoon believes he is doing something for ‘the rest of the world’. But what we have seen from his previous actions makes this doubtful. He shows no concern for anybody outside his limited family circle and appears motivated by the use he can make of this new ‘livestock’ on his farm. Muldoon’s version of doing the right thing is so tied up with his deadly form of national and religious ideology. It echoes contemporary American foreign policy that sees justice and doing the right thing exclusively in terms of national interest. Now that zombies 228

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have taken the place of livestock on his farm, it is also obvious that Muldoon sees them as a future source of unpaid labour similar to how he uses his zombie wife to continue her domestic drudgery in his own kitchen in death as she once did in life. He will colonize others as well as members of his own family into his perverse form of a capitalist work ethic. Again, as in other Romero films, many themes occur beneath the surface of another of his supposedly ‘scary movies’, rendering zombies as redundant components within a complex narrative that far transcends its normal generic representation. Jane is now in the corral with her favourite horse that Muldoon hopes will tempt her appetite. It is to be an educational experiment equally applicable to the dead as well as the living. He orders the other zombies to watch the events. ‘Let the others out of the barn. Maybe they’ll learn something.’ Like the zombie retaining a memory of starting his car on the island ferry transporting Sarge and his group, Jane still remembers her equestrian abilities, but whether she can learn other skills is an open question. Muldoon offers to free his prisoners should O’Flynn admit his heresy concerning this particular form of Papal infallibility. ‘If your daughter takes a bite at that animal, you’ll admit that I was right all along. That’s all I ever wanted from you—to admit that I’m right and you’re wrong. You do that much and you and your men can leave here and be free to go.’ O’Flynn refuses. He knows that his enemy will never offer him absolution and forgiveness. The horse interminably runs around Jane in the corral while she wanders aimlessly. In the meantime, Boy enlists Janet’s help. But his offer—‘What would you do with a million dollars?’—has ominous overtones in the light of the succeeding lap dissolve to zombies in Muldoon’s corral watching Jane’s movements like restrained students in a classroom as well as greedily desiring human flesh. Boy’s reference to money involves another ideological survival from the past, namely, the old world’s major economic structure determining human existence now irrelevant in this new world where zombies are becoming the dominant species. However, money is still an item that instinctually dominates the mind of the living whether vicious rednecks or those in Sarge’s own group when they first discover the loot in the trailer. By offering Janet money, Boy is really trying to gain her help with a device that would normally stimulate human greed in the old system of values. No evidence exists that Janet would be enticed by this offer in any case. But Boy’s offer stirs up old, irrelevant instinctual feelings within her that the lap dissolve to the zombies suggests. No logical connection appears to exist between Boy’s offer of money to Janet and the lap dissolve to the zombies unless we understand it in a particular symbolic nuance. Romero blurs the division between humans and zombies but does so in a significant manner. The offer of money leads to a dissolve that shows the zombies becoming stirred up by something that suggests greed—in their case, access to flesh. Janet’s feelings become stirred up in a different direction, one having associations with the structure of the old society whereby family was an indispensable component of capitalism but one whose exploitative associations was masked by the false ideal of family love. As we have seen, Muldoon’s feelings towards the zombies are far from humanitarian. He really wants to find a way not just to provide the new ‘livestock’ with a safer alternative for their appetites but also to economically employ them as knight of the living dead

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unpaid labour. His ideas concerning family solidarity are little short of barbaric. In his 1884 essay “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” Friedrich Engels documented the inherent barbarism and hypocrisy in a system that conceals its real face within the deceptive façade of family love. It has more than one interesting parallel to the situation presented in Survival. What is good for the ruling class should be good for the whole of society with which the ruling class identifies itself. Therefore, the more civilization advances, the more it is compelled to cover the ills it necessarily creates with the cloak of love, to embellish them, or to deny their existence; in short, to introduce conventional hypocrisy—unknown both in previous forms of society and even in the earliest stages of civilization—that culminates in the declaration: The exploiting class exploits the oppressed class solely and exclusively in the interest of the exploited class itself; and if the latter fails to appreciate this, and even becomes rebellious, it thereby shows the basest ingratitude to its benefactors, the exploiters.3

This quotation is relevant for several reasons. Both O’Flynn and Muldoon economically exploit the living and the dead. Whenever one of Muldoon’s zombies fails to obey a new direction for its appetite, it reveals ingratitude and is therefore put down. Chuck remains with Muldoon because nobody else is hiring, and he becomes rebellious towards his former employer at the end of the film. Janet is still deceived by the ‘cloak of love’ within her own family and perishes in the mistaken belief that she can evoke from her sister family love that never existed in the first place. This explains her last attempt to reach out to her sister, one doomed to failure in death as it was in life. Despite knowing her father’s faults, ‘He’s my dad’ is the appeal that she makes to Muldoon to save his life, one he immediately recognizes. Plum Island’s own version of loving family values results in disaster for both living and dead. Janet shows no interest in the money. She is not dominated by any feelings of economic greed or making money out of a dangerous situation as the two deadly patriarchs are. However, Boy’s offer evokes a different type of desire within her, one that explains her future actions. Despite everything that has happened, she still wishes to restore her family in a manner resembling those adult children of alcoholics who exist in a dysfunctional family relationship that can never be repaired no matter how much the enabling child attempts to repair the breach. Family values, especially those espoused by O’Flynn and Muldoon, have definite economic and violent associations since they belong to an old order soon becoming obsolete but which stubbornly resists extinction. No matter how much Janet attempts to separate herself from such values, she is inextricably caught up in the system and can not divorce herself from it. This is her own form of personal tragedy that Survival documents as poignant as the ultimate fate of Debra in Diary. Janet will make the mistake of being enticed by former instinctual attitudes of family values that will result in her doom. From what we have heard of her past family life, she has been the enabling figure in a dysfunctional family relationship involving her father and sister. She has often attempted to save a family relationship that is constantly falling apart. She saves her father from death at the hands of Muldoon. But she allows him to live 230

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another day and continue his perverse activities by using the Internet on the mainland to entice desperate people to Plum Island, where they will be killed. Although O’Flynn expresses disgust at Muldoon’s treatment of these illegal immigrants, he is also directly responsible for what has happened to them. His expression of regret is really hypocritical. Janet makes one last appeal to her dead sister to heal their relationship. But her actions really reveal that she is as deluded as Barbara in Night of the Living Dead, who finds herself finally reunited with her brother Johnny in a dark embrace where any false feelings of family love play no role. Both sisters experience violence from their respective siblings. Although Janet’s motivations are entirely different from those of the zombies, they are still based on redundant values that will prove dangerous. While the zombies instinctually desire the violent gratification of their appetites, Janet appears to be trapped by a perverse yearning for a family reconciliation that the entire film has shown as being totally impossible to achieve in practice. One can not expect the dead to behave like the family members they were in life, and any attempt at this insane solution causes disaster. Boy may not stimulate her appetite for gain, but the lap dissolve suggests that a thin line divides the living from the dead. Janet may not display any greed for money, but zombies desire human flesh. She attempts to make one last appeal to her sister’s feelings beyond the grave. Her appetite for reconciliation with her sister leads to disaster. Jane is as violent as the zombies and will soon begin devouring her favourite horse. Family love is a deadly blessing. Irrational instincts dominate the living and the dead. Money is the root of all evil, and in the old human world economic avarice usually has associations with violence. Boy’s reference to money evokes instinctual modes of behaviour common to the old world still existing in this new world of the living dead. Not only does it foreshadow the violent battle that will soon erupt in Romero’s perverse version of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) but it also evokes in Janet redundant instinctual feelings that will lead to her destruction. While the zombies perform their instinctual acts of violence, Janet perversely attempts to appeal to feelings within her sister which were not even present when she was alive if we are to take her earlier reference to sibling rivalry seriously. Although Janet appears the most rational character in the film, she also represents another line of development in the Romero heroine seen in Diary of the Dead, revealing that even the most seemingly balanced female is not immune from some form of contamination. Debra Moynihan succumbs to the deadly legacy of Jason Creed at the end of Diary, while Janet makes the fatal mistake of appealing to her sister one last time in an attempt to evoke a family love that never even existed in the first place. She believes that Jane’s supposed feelings for her horse reveal that it is possible for her to respond to a sister’s love. ‘My sister is never going to do nothing to hurt that horse.’ Like the wife of the zombie in the housing project in the earlier scenes of Dawn of the Dead, she makes a deadly mistake. Any attempt at returning to family values that no longer exist is doomed, as Patrick also finds when his appeal to the family honour of Muldoon to allow him some final moments with his dying daughter Janet results in a shot in the back. He even attempts to compromise—‘I’ll admit the error of my ways’—but it is far too late. Muldoon will not even allow his enemy some last loving moments with knight of the living dead

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his dying daughter. Real love does not exist in this structure of dysfunctional family relationships, a total contrast to the final act that Tomboy performed for Cisco that revealed a different type of compassion for a dying human being. When Janet returns weapons to Sarge and Muldoon, a battle commences between the two factions. Chuck releases the zombies in the corral after finding that he is as regarded as disposable by his former employer Muldoon as those zombies terminated for non-compliance. Touched at the fact that Jane has initially not hurt her horse, Janet makes one final appeal only to be bitten by her twin sister. She utters the comment, ‘You bitch,’ now realizing their sibling relationship is identical in death as it was in life. O’Flynn feels that his rival will respect his attempt at compromise and appeal to family honour after he listens to Janet’s final appeal. ‘Dad, I’ve seen enough things die, and me, now I’m dying. I don’t want to think of you as dead too.’ But Muldoon shows that he has no respect for anyone whether living or dead outside his own family circle. Any genuine feelings of family love do not matter. They are as disposable as anyone who does not fit into his economic plans. The two warring fathers shoot each other. Janet witnesses her sister taking flesh from her favourite horse. Before she has a chance to inform Sarge, Boy, and Tomboy that one option does exist to control the zombies, her father decides to fulfil the parental role she once criticized him for lacking. ‘She said I wasn’t strict enough to shoot one of my own. But I did it.’ As in the final ironic scenes of The Crazies, an alternative leading to a solution of a deadly dilemma becomes eliminated by a random accident. Survival of the Dead ends on a sombre note. Plum Island has proven to be no sanctuary. Echoing the roles of the older and younger man from a Hawks professional group, Sarge and Boy know that if they become as ‘grown-up’ as O’Flynn and Muldoon, they could also end up like these dangerous older men. As the survivors depart on the ferry towards another unknown destination, Sarge’s voice-over occurs for the last time. He speaks of siding with O’Flynn at the beginning and regarding Muldoon as the enemy. ‘What if we could teach the dead to eat something that wasn’t us? What if Muldoon was right? I guess we’ll never know.’ Scenes from the dark night of Plum Island reveal the zombies now devouring a horse. But it is not Jane’s but Janet’s since the colour is dark brown. From its initial appearance, we have seen that Janet obviously loves her horse in the same way as Jane loved hers. She calls to it with a loving look before mounting. However, like the human victims of the zombies, it now becomes fodder. Although one solution has occurred, for most viewers this would be as acceptable as Logan’s gratuitous use of dead human flesh in Day of the Dead. The zombies devour the dead horse in the same way they have devoured the living. Although their activities represent a ‘lesser evil’ within the context of Survival, this can not be the final answer. The war will continue on more than one level as long as the ‘us versus them’ ideology remains in human consciousness. Sarge now considers the implications of the events he has experienced. ‘In an “us versus them” world someone puts up a flag and someone else tears it down and puts up his own. Pretty soon no one remembers what started the war in the first place and the fighting becomes all about those stupid flags.’ 232

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The final scene reveals zombie antagonists O’Flynn and Muldoon engaged in another face-off. Normally, Romero zombies do not fight each other, but the instinctual antagonisms buried within these deadly fathers in life ironically re-emerges in death. A long shot shows them firing empty chambers at each other in an empty landscape with an enlarged Moon symbolically framed in the background. One dead planet dominates them, suggesting that the world they inhabit will also become extinct due to deadly behavioural mechanisms and institutional power politics that will eventually destroy everyone. In an era of huge Hollywood blockbusters and multi-million-dollar expenditures, Survival of the Dead is a distinct entity in its modest running time as opposed to the numbing nearly three hour bloated duration of most films today. It is a modest proposal on a relatively low budget by an independent filmmaker who continues to develop and refine his vision today, one far more penetrating than most contemporary films. Its low-key and modest qualities should be recognized since this is another case where ‘less means more’ on many different levels of significant meaning. When speaking of his version of Macbeth (1948), Orson Welles remarked that he hoped that ‘allowances would be made for the modest size of our canvas’.4 The same is true for Survival of the Dead, a film that needs to be assessed according to the form of its independent low-budget premises rather than being compared with the average Hollywood production or dismissed by those who merely want ‘more of the same’.5 At the end of the film, the three survivors will never know how near they were to finding one way out of the dilemma that confronts them, and the film ends appropriately with an instinctual battle between two living dead forces of anachronistic and violent values.

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Epilogue

at the present moment, no conclusion can be written about the work of George Romero, in thankful contrast to the first edition. He has moved to a different location, where he can creatively continue his own type of cinema that reflects not only the best of that independent commercial cinema of the 1970s but also one that reflects unconsciously the influence of many traditions, both past and present. His films reveal the tragic absurdity of a twentieth-century condition recognized in the novel of Joseph Conrad by Thomas Mann, who commented that ‘the striking feature of modern art is that . . . it sees life as tragicomedy with the result that the grotesque is its most genuine style’, one that is appropriate in recognizing the dreadful nature of modern experience since ‘the grotesque is the genuine antibourgeois style’.1 Mann himself left Germany as a refugee from the Nazis, sought sanctuary in America, only to see his supposed safe haven exhibit totalitarian tendencies in the postwar era similar to those he saw in Hitler’s Germany. One does not need to think how he would have viewed Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Rendition, and the torture chambers of the CIA were he alive today. Romero has moved to Canada for entirely different reasons. His zombies represent grotesque metaphorical embodiments for ideas running through his films ever since Night of the Living Dead. It’s about the contradictions of an entire generation, the structure of our society. . . . I struggled to mirror a society on the verge of collapse, the breakdown of a political system and verbal communication between individuals. They were all symbols of what was happening, and the story was a very powerful one.2

Although Romero is an intuitive talent, he does not merely make ‘scary movies’ but rather satirical and tragic observations on the many warring individuals and societies in his films that represent a microcosm of his view of America. It is very much akin to Clark’s analysis of the modern satiric grotesque and the cannibalistic strain he finds in this tradition. Noting how John Gardner’s Grendel slowly transforms into a ‘wayward, neurotic twentieth-century man’ revealing contemporary humans

as monsters, Clark draws the following conclusions that may also be applied to the cinema of George A. Romero. Grendel is such a potentially dangerous and violent man—but without the mask. On the contrary, in much of recent literature, the disguise has been doffed, the false face lifted, only to reveal (and to expose) the bloodthirsty fangs of your commonplace joe, your everyday guy. The beast in the jungle is the man in the street. That is our current mythology. Like any other myth in its flower, it is vigorous and flourishing; it is credible, appalling, and—gustatorily or disgustingly alive.3

Romero’s zombies are more inclusive. They transcend class, racial and gender categories, including both children and senior citizens. Humans may resemble zombies as much as the latter increasingly come to resemble the former as Dawn, Day, and Land reveal in their different ways. But all are products of the system. They often repeat past modes of behaviour, and movement towards different types of being and social development is tentative, at best. Now based in Canada, Romero will continue working in a more assured and consistent manner. But the full extent of his talent still awaits recognition, and one example is a film with which I concluded the first edition of this book, The Amusement Park, a short work still urgently awaiting discovery and release. Despite its current unavailability, this short film significantly illustrates the real concerns motivating Romero’s role as a director throughout his entire career. In the early 1970s, a religious group commissioned Latent Image to make an advertising documentary expressing concern for the plight of American senior citizens. It suggested positive ways to avoid the problem of ageing, but when completed its clients expressed concern at what Romero directed. A prologue and epilogue were later added with actor Lincoln Maazel (who would later appear as Cuda in Martin) appearing alone in a deserted amusement park like a reassuring American salesman. He voiced concern over the events depicted in the film and his role here appeared to parallel reassurance that ‘it can’t happen here’4 similar to many Hollywood and television productions. But he warned the audience to take appropriate measures to avoid the incidents depicted in the film. However, The Amusement Park was never shown. The backers claimed that it was too difficult and would confuse its audience. Since they still own the rights, the film remains unseen today. Despite its length, The Amusement Park is one of the most radical indictments of American callousness towards the most vulnerable members of its society, a callousness now operating in a British society dominated by the material values of New Labour. The film implicitly articulates the need for a social and humanistic revolution, a goal which today appears far more impossible than it did nearly four decades ago. What gives The Amusement Park its edge is its keen combination of fantasy and realism within an allegorical condemnation of selfish materialism. In an era that now rigidly categorizes individuals on purely economic grounds, Romero’s documentary takes on an added perspective. Where fantasy has its greatest power is its relevance to social conditions and the presence of a more realistic utopian dimension totally

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lacking in Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (both 1977). By combining fantasy with realism, The Amusement Park represents another example of that powerful use of cinematic naturalism never far away from the cinema of George A. Romero. The film begins by showing an optimistic-looking old gentleman in a white suit (played by Lincoln Maazel). He encounters his mirror image in a white room. His counterpart is in a bruised, bleeding, and despondent condition. A door leads to the outside. The dishevelled figure warns his spruce counterpart not to venture outside: ‘You won’t like it out there.’ However, the other man ignores the advice of his double and ventures outside into the amusement park. This park is nothing less than America, an America of commercialism and entertainment, a place where the individual is valued only for his purchasing power, and an environment which represents the decadent entertainment world of Zola’s Second Empire, where theatrical spectacles foreshadowing the debased values of the Lucas-Spielberg version of Hollywood now take centre stage. The old gentleman purchases tickets for the various events and begins a journey into humiliation and despair. As he attends the various sideshows, he is economically exploited or patronized and treated like an imbecile because of his age. He attempts to help an elderly couple whose dodgem is attacked by an aggressive driver played by Romero himself (perhaps this is the director’s recognition of the contemporary phenomenon of ‘road rage’ often directed towards senior citizen drivers or those who drive too slowly for others?). The old man is ignored because he has forgotten his spectacles. He is also robbed and assaulted by Hells Angels. When he attempts a kindly conversation with a little girl, a young man violently assaults him thinking he is a child molester. This last incident occurs during a particular section of the film. A young couple goes to a fortune teller to see what their lives will be like in an America fifty yeas into the future. They see themselves aged; living in slum conditions; and regarded as useless members of society. The man suffers a heart attack; his wife attempts to phone a doctor. After problems involving the right coins for the phone box and unsympathetic telephone operators, she finally reaches the doctor, but he is too busy pandering to his rich, pampered clients to come to their aid. The young man leaves the tent horrified at his fate in a future America. He then sees the old man and vents his fear on him by a violent attack; a convenient scapegoat upon whom to vent out internal fears and frustrations. In another section of the film, the old gentleman enters an exhibit where he is assured he will be looked after, but he finds himself in an old people’s home which is little better than a funny farm. The inmates are patronized and humiliated. Finally, the man escapes and becomes despondent. He attempts one last act of kindness by trying to read a story to a little girl, but her parents treat him in an aggressive manner also believing him to be a child molester. His final attempt to realize a kind world of utopian fantasy collapses. The old man becomes a broken wreck, a despised product of an uncaring society. The wheel finally comes full circle when the old man encounters another spruce, dignified alter ego about to venture outside. He warns him, ‘You won’t like it out there . . .’ as the camera dwells on his despondent face. In the added epilogue, Maazel attempts to reassure the audience like an encouraging salesman attempting to promote a product. But it fails entirely. Any attempt 236

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at recuperation has been disrupted by the previous events of the main narrative that resembles a living hell as grim and uncaring as those earthly fates awaiting the old and sick in Zola novels such as L’Assommoir and La Terre. The film is far too powerful for American society then and now. It must remain under lock and key never seeing the light of day. The above was written from memory nearly thirty years ago.5 But, despite its date, it stands as a fitting tribute to the cinema of Romero. The Amusement Park is one among a number of his most accomplished films that uses the cinematic machine to jerk its audience into some form of awareness concerning problems affecting their society. They reveal what society has become and act as a potential spur to action. In this manner, George A. Romero may appropriately be described as a ‘knight of the living dead’. Although his films are misunderstood by most audiences who go for the gore, they have other important social dimensions; they call upon both his fictional characters and audiences to leave the realm of the living dead and change both themselves and the society they belong to. Romero and his films thus continue an important nineteenth-century legacy into the twentieth century and beyond. The title of Ibsen’s naturalist play When We Dead Awaken is one significantly relevant to Romero’s particular cinematic legacy. It is a legacy deeply indebted to the radical aspects of cinematic and literary naturalism that have unconsciously influenced Romero throughout his career. Although Romero has never read Zola, his films indirectly reflect concerns appearing in many of the writer’s novels that take issue with the human oppression and rampant materialism of the Second Empire of Louis Napoléon and beyond. We must remember that both Romero and Stephen King eagerly read those naturalist-inspired EC Comics morality plays during the era of the conformist 1950s in America. That is the essential link between the past and Romero’s contemporary present as a film director. The entire body of his work is an important twentieth-century equivalent to Zola’s pioneering social justice pamphlet J’Accuse, yet Romero’s approach is more subtle. Zola and the naturalist tradition are key cultural components within the textual formation of Romero’s films. As Ken Mogg has argued concerning the influence of Schopenhauer on Alfred Hitchcock in his scholarly MacGuffin website, although the director may not have read the works of this important philosopher, the ideas formed part of a contemporary cultural climate infiltrating the films themselves. The same is true of Zola’s influence on Romero. Zola pioneered a naturalist tradition which moved to America and influenced many writers such as Norris, Dreiser, and London. However, it was more than coincidental that this movement became marginalized in periods of conservative reaction such as the Roaring Twenties and the Cold War era. Even in later times, the academy is often hostile to works articulating issues of social injustice which contrast with fashionable discourses such as globalization and postmodernism. Romero’s works can not be recuperated into any bland apolitical domain. Hence their current marginalization by most areas of the critical AngloAmerican establishment. France presents a notable exception. Robin Wood described Day of the Dead as ‘the last great American horror film’.6 Reynold Humphries acclaimed Romero’s zombie trilogy for its attack on the values of American consumerism.7 Both writers mourn the passing of the radical American knight of the living dead

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horror film and express reservation about the genre’s future. However, Romero has bequeathed an important legacy, one that he still continues today, and one that both he and others may develop in the future. This involves the continuation of the social dimensions of the realist horror film rather than its spectacular associations. Such a tradition has not achieved appropriate recognition until fairly recently and only by a handful of critics struggling against the conservative values of the academic community. During the last few years, several scholars have moved away from concentrating on the excessive aspect of the horror genre towards reconsidering its realist associations. Due to the welcome demise of Screen Theory and recognition of its limited and now obsolescent philosophies, a much broader perspective has emerged involving a broader understanding of realism far beyond Colin MaCabe’s definitions made three decades ago. As Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment argue, ‘Realism is not a single homogenous mode that always works in the same way; on the contrary, it is important to identify the particular strategies at work in any particular text.’8 This is a much more critical and open-ended approach rather than the dogmatic monolithic definition once dominant in academic discourse. Romero’s work belongs in this area. It also has associations with the interrogative aspects of the naturalist tradition. Romero’s cinema is a critical one far removed from the infantile representations of Lucas and Spielberg that dominated Hollywood from the late 1970s onwards. The director’s work has also suffered from achieving appropriate recognition due to the trendy appropriation of solipsistic postmodernist concepts, a discourse now becoming appropriately moribund as well as being irrelevant to understanding the dangers of the new order of the twenty-first century.9 Now that attention is moving back towards understanding the social dimensions of the horror film, Romero’s work may gain better appreciation for its contribution towards a more oppositional form of cinema that employs the radical dimensions of the genre than has been the case for the past thirty years. Work on realist horror and naturalist traditions represents a step in this direction, an area to which Romero’s cinema firmly belongs.10 Now resident in Canada, Romero now has the opportunity of being productive once again and contributing more work to a movement in which he has been a creative founding father.

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appendix one

The Romero Screenplays and Teleplays

romero’s screenplays for the films he did not direct deserve some notice. The same is true for certain of his teleplays. Although they rarely reach the heights of films he had creative control over, they do reflect several ideas occurring in the other films as well as negative industrial constraints affecting his talent. These latter components vary from being highly disappointing to suggestive developments of themes appearing in his other films as director. The projects Romero worked on in a screenplay or producer capacity also appear to be designed to give his collaborators such as Michael Gornick, John Harrison and Tom Savini director credit. Both Creepshow 2 (1987) and Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1991) contain little, if any, redeeming value. They appear contractual products which Romero felt obligated to undertake for the Laurel organisation he left in 1985. Directed by Romero’s cinematographer, Michael Gornick, Creepshow 2 reflects the type of empty Hollywood ‘sequelitis’ product Romero would have found himself forced to direct had he ever made the mistake of relocating from Pittsburgh. Shot for $4 million in association with New World Pictures, this Laurel production appears a tired version of the earlier Creepshow in which none of the original participants appeared to have any interest whatsoever. Richard Rubinstein functioned as executive producer while Romero’s screenplay was based on story ideas provided by Stephen King. Despite acknowledging EC Comic veteran Jack Kamen in the final credits, Creepshow 2 is less satisfactory than its predecessor. Although the three stories ‘Old Chief Wood’nhead’, ‘The Raft’ and ‘The Hitchhiker’ formally reflect EC moral codes, their individual renditions are often glib and perfunctory. Unfortunately, with the exception of Lois Chiles’ erring wife in ‘The Hitchhiker’, the acting performances are uninspiring. Certain Romero’s themes occasionally appear, but they are never developed to any satisfactory degree so that they creatively complement those ideas found in films the director had complete control over. In ‘Old Chief Wood’nhead’, Ray Spruce (George Kennedy) speaks about wishing to contribute to a declining town he had benefited from while the economy was healthy. But, as Nigel Floyd notes, the episode incongruously introduces a banal ‘Spielberg world of cutesy old-timers’ before changing its tone abruptly to end in

three climactic gory scenes.1 The grotesque college students in ‘The Raft’ represent the worst type of cartoon characterisation imaginable so that their demise appears as a welcome relief. Although one of them wears a ‘Horlicks University’ T-shirt from the original Creepshow’s hypocritical academic establishment, nothing further is made of this reference. Finally, although the class and racial components of ‘The Hitchhiker’ episode dealing with a rich, adulteress killing a poor black hitchhiker in a hit and run accident initially appear as the most promising of all three tales, significant implications within the plot remain unrealised. During one point of the story Annie Lansing (Lois Chiles) attempts to engage in a characteristic Romero act of denial after she has killed the hitchhiker by telling herself, ‘There was really nothing at all. There was no hitchhiker.’ But this promising theme is thrown away in a plot which is formulaic and mundane. Virtually all three stories operate on the banal levels of grotesqueness and shock far removed from the original intentions of the EC tradition. Creepshow 2’s screenplay resembles the product of a tired talent forced to contribute to a production that appears totally uninspired. During 1983 Romero wrote the pilot episode, ‘Trick or Treat’, directed by Bob Balaban, which was included in the 1984–85 season of Tales of the Darkside. Overall, Romero’s contributions to this series fell far below his usual standards. The most promising of his teleplays, ‘The Devil’s Advocate’, dealt with bitter talk-show host Mandrake (Jerry Stiller) who appropriately ends up in hell to fulfil the role he has bitterly fulfilled during his lifetime. The story begins with Mandrake entering the television studio and complaining about a dead wino being found in his car. He then begins his sneering performance on his unfortunate listeners who are masochistically drawn to his show. After sarcastic comments made against the wife of a recently unemployed man suffering from the contemporary manufacturing recession and a low-income Afro-American night watchman, Mandrake finds himself promoted. As self-styled ‘devil’s advocate’, Satan has decided to reward a person who has made his job easier by making him listen to anguished calls from all historical eras. Mandrake appropriately finds himself locked into a studio existing in a hell of his own creation. ‘The Devil’s Advocate’ is another of Romero’s social criticisms of an institution designed to use and abuse its listeners. Its attack has much in common with the images of the talk-show apparatus seen in There’s Always Vanilla and Martin. However, the brevity of the running time allows little opportunity to develop its attack further despite the powerful performance by Jerry Stiller of a man who has turned against the whole human race due to misfortunes he has suffered in his own personal life. Romero’s other two teleplays, ‘Baker’s Dozen’ and ‘Circus’, also appear insufficiently developed. Romero’s ‘The Cat From Hell’ screenplay for Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1991) represents another lost possibility. Directed by John Harrison and based on Laurel Entertainment’s problematic and insipid television series, this three-part anthology again resembled the Creepshow format which by now had served its purpose. Romero is a director who never wishes to repeat himself and his screenplay contribution appears to again be another example of something he had to do, rather than wanted to. 240

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The episode begins with a taxi pulling up at an old mansion at night. As its occupant gets out, an old man in a wheelchair welcomes him. They walk into a deserted hallway seen from an overhead perspective shot which resembles a cat’s point-of-view. The wheelchair-bound figure, Drogan, is the head of a pharmaceutical company, who offers his visitor, hitman Halstead, money for the execution of a cat. Despite his supposed wealth and comments such as, ‘Over the years I’ve filled this place with everything you could want, everything you could ever want’, both the present narrative and past flashbacks reveal the mansion as being little better than a frugal version of Citizen Kane’s Xanadu. During the numerous flashbacks, Harrison’s introductory and concluding visual techniques seem reminiscent of the ones used in Welles’ 1941 film in which characters often appear in lap-dissolves while the past events they narrate either begin or end. As Drogan’s first references to the previous occupants killed by the cat states, ‘We were a dull collection of rich and unhappy people.’ Both Drogan and Halstead are mirror images of a deadly capitalist economy. While the former has gained legitimate wealth by manufacturing a ‘remarkably habit forming’ drug combining ‘painkiller, tranquilliser, and mild hallucinogen’ which is ‘one step up from street junk’, the latter has also performed services for businesses. Drogan comments, ‘And you’ve done well yourself ’ in terms of the ‘last two jobs you’ve done for members of the professional community’. A mysterious black cat has murdered Drogan’s sister, companion, and butler at various times on the stroke of midnight. The executive believes ‘It’s been sent to punish me’ as he reveals that his fortune is built upon a four-year series of tests upon the nervous systems of five thousand cats. Drogan then leaves the hitman to perform his service during the night with ‘everything you could want, everything you could ever want’. As the hitman cynically observes, ‘Everything you could ever want! Why is it the rich guys always buy the cheap stuff?’ However, despite his efforts, the feline adversary proves stronger—it kills the hitman. The next morning, when Drogan arrives home, the cat emerges from its opponent’s body to scare its last adversary to death. Ironically, the clock chimes midnight after a night accident has rendered it dysfunctional. Romero’s screenplay has several ingenious touches. It is a horror version of The Magnificent Ambersons meets The Chimes at Midnight. But the direction and performances lack Romero’s magic touch. ‘The Cat From Hell’ obviously represents a screenplay Romero devised for an anthology film from a television series he had little feeling towards (see Gagne 1987: 201–6). Naturally, Tom Savini’s 1990 version of Night of the Living Dead never surpasses the heights of the original version. Like Romero’s screenplay contributions to Creepshow 2 and Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, his involvement again appears to be on the level of helping a collaborator gain a director credit as well as ensuring the sequel rights remained in the hands of the original Pittsburgh associates. However, Romero’s screenplay for Savini’s film is one of his major achievements in relation to a film he did not direct. Like ‘The Cat From Hell’, production circumstances necessitated his involvement. As Kim Newman stated, although a remake appeared ludicrous ‘this enterprise was embarked on partly because a rights quirk meant that if the original production team did not undertake a remake, anyone else could do so’.2 knight of the living dead

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Romero had also agreed to colourisation of the original version as a way of financially reimbursing those who had worked on it.3 However, although Savini’s version naturally suffers in comparison to the original, it is also a significant example of Romero’s authorship as screenwriter rather than director. While Romero did not direct this version, it gave him the opportunity of further reflecting on the original and revising and rewriting several scenes. As Barry Grant (1992) notes, the Savini-Romero text changes Barbara’s character from catatonic victim to feminist heroine making the original’s critique of patriarchy even more explicit. He traces Barbara’s new status to the influence of Fran in Dawn and Sarah in Day and also relates her character to other figures such as Joan Mitchell of Jack’s Wife and the Hawksian professionalist ethos seen in Knightriders. But while Grant astutely notes the new Barbara ‘as a corrective to the narrowness of masculine professionalism, rather than, as in Hawks, having to be measured by it (in that key Hawksian phrase, to be as “good” as men)’, he also loses sight of the exact manner Jack’s Wife relates to the new version. In the earlier film, Joan Mitchell attempts to find a new direction but becomes hopelessly lost in the end. Although Barbara’s situation is different, she, too, finds herself in a blind alley at the climax. Although the ending involving Barbara’s execution of Harry may be read as a ‘woman’s response to patriarchy’ (Grant 1992: 210), it may also have ironic associations by criticising the heroine in the same way as her gaze criticises the hysterical masculinity she sees before her. Romero’s films often operate in an ambivalent manner. Savini’s Night of the Living Dead concludes by interrogating the motivations of its female character in the same way Romero examined those of various male characters throughout his films. It is a measure of his penetrating vision as a director that he recognises problems within feminism as conceived in the 1990s. Barbara puts on military attire like Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens (1986) yet thinks she stands apart from the violence and believes that she is not a guerilla fighter in the Rambo mode. However, she has also become contaminated by that very violence, a characteristic Romero criticises in his various male characters such as Clank in The Crazies and Roger and Stephen in Dawn of the Dead. As Newman recognises, ‘It is ironic that the 1990 Barbara’s anti-zombie violence is seen to be as insane as her 1968 predecessor’s retreat into a psychological shell’ (1993: 52). Romero usually approves of the actions of characters who finally throw their weapons away such as David in The Crazies, Peter in Dawn of the Dead, and John in Day of the Dead. Romero’s revised Barbara is in a much more ambiguous and precarious situation. Like Hitchcock in his various reworkings of earlier films such as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and The 39 Steps (1935), Romero engages in a characteristic screenplay revision of his most well-known film to good effect by developing new implications in the light of changing historical and social conditions. The new version begins with Johnny’s famous line, ‘They’re coming to get you, Barbara’, spoken against a black screen. Most audiences who saw Savini’s version knew Romero’s original thoroughly. The reference to Johnny’s scary comment evokes both audience familiarity with the original as well as suggesting how Romero’s screenplay will differ by emphasising and reworking well-known aspects of the narrative by citing an already well-known line in the opening shot. Savini begins the 242

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film with long shots of a car driving along a deserted rural Pennsylvania road. As the credits roll, Romero’s screenplay emphasises the family tensions between both siblings implicit in the original version. Various lines place the opening scene firmly within the tradition of the American family horror film. Barbara (Patricia Tallman) asks Johnny (Bill Mosley), ‘Why do you have to be so mean?’ He replies, ‘I’m your older brother. Being mean and heartless is part of my job’, articulating the vicious sibling rivalry endemic within the patriarchal family. However, unlike the original, it is now the mother’s grave they visit rather than the father’s. Clearly, the visit is an act of posthumous revenge from beyond the grave by a mother both siblings had no real feeling for when she was alive. As Johnny remarks, ‘This is the fourth time I’ve been up here in the three months since she died. I’m spending more time with her now than when she was alive.’ He correctly sees this empty ‘charade’ as another means of maternal control since she knew Johnny would have to accompany his sister on a trip to a deserted area ‘two hundred miles away from the next glass of beer’. Johnny also attacks Barbara’s denying the real ‘truth’ affecting their family life. ‘She drove our father crazy ... and she damn near drove you into a convent. When was the last time you had a date? ... The one thing she never did was to drive two hundred miles to visit anybody.’ When the vehicle finally stops, the audience sees Barbara and Johnny for the first time. Like the original character, Tallman’s Barbara is also afraid of the cemetery and Johnny plays on these fears. But unlike Judith O’Dea’s earlier version, Tallman’s character appears more repressed as seen by her spectacles, neckerchief, tightly buttoned high-neck blouse, brooch and demure skirt. By contrast, Johnny is more ‘scary’ than the original character played by Russell Streiner. Portrayed by Bill Moseley, wellknown for his Chop Top character in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986), this new Johnny is already a monster created by the patriarchal family. He also already resembles a zombie by his exaggerated gestures and semi-grotesque make-up. Romero then displays the conventions of the family horror film to good effect. After showing mother’s tombstone, Johnny plays around crying, ‘There’s no escape. No mother! ’, as he drops behind the tombstone. Ironically, the first zombie will emerge from this very same area to frighten Barbara. However, unlike her predecessor, she immediately fights back using mother’s bouquet wreath to impale an opponent who has now killed her brother. Although indebted to the original version, the sequence differs from it in several ways rebutting those inaccurate critical perceptions describing the entire film as one which ‘copied the original version practically scene-by-scene’.4 Unlike her earlier counterpart, Tallman’s Barbara at least has the option of knowledge about a feminist movement which has been active for at least three decades. As in the original, Barbara escapes to the farmhouse and encounters its living dead owner, Uncle Rege (Pat Logan) with the severed hand of his son, Satchell, who has committed suicide. Ben (Tony Todd) then arrives. Unlike the original, both Ben and Barbara battle with the zombies as complementary equals in the combat. Romero intercuts Ben’s fight with Barbara’s. Although they utter the same word, ‘Die’, as they kill their opponents, it is Barbara who is fighting the largest zombie, knight of the living dead

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Rege, with a poker. Although upset by what she has seen, Tallman’s Barbara does not collapse into a state of useless catatonia. Also, although Todd’s Ben does take over, he also attempts to communicate with her and urges that she rally round: ‘I don’t need you falling apart on me. Fight what you’re feeling. Fight what you’re thinking about. Keep strong.’ Like Peter in Dawn of the Dead, he realises she needs survival skills. However, unlike Peter, Todd’s Ben is already compromised by negative masculine traits like Roger and Stephen in the earlier film. When Ben describes his experiences to Barbara, he refers to two Romero critiques concerning talk shows and redneck violence. He tells her, ‘All I heard was trash talking. Same as always, people making out they knew what it was all about.’ As in Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, survivors have much more to fear from rednecks than zombies. Ben tells Barbara about witnessing ‘assholes trying to round them up and put them in the back of trucks as if they knew what they were going to do with them’. He also mentions being in a diner when a ‘good ol’ boy’ began chasing after zombies and firing at random making no discrimination between the living dead and any unfortunate minorities. Ben also caustically dismisses media explanations: ‘It wasn’t no prison break. It wasn’t no chemicals. This is hell on earth.’ When he finds the farmhouse telephone dead, he remarks to Barbara, ‘It doesn’t take long for the world to fall apart, does it?’ But Ben’s comment will also apply to the small remnants of human society hiding within. After discovering others in the cellar, Ben enquires as to why they remained below. This time Tom (William Butler) offers the real reason which Harry (Tom Towles) is reluctant to admit when he mentions that they were ‘scared to hell when they heard banging’. As in the 1968 version, Ben and Harry take an instant dislike to each other. But while they argue, Savini shows Barbara acting fully aware of the dangerous situation affecting them. She also goes immediately to the toolbox looking for items to board up the windows. But she suggests an alternative strategy which both Ben and Harry reject: ‘We could walk right past them. We wouldn’t even need to run. If we’re careful, we could get away. This place is not safe, upstairs or down. You told me to fight [to Ben]. Well, I’m fighting. I’m not panicking. We should get out before it’s too late.’ This version affirms her strategy as being the correct one. Barbara’s development and intelligent awareness of the dangerous situation threatening everyone makes her, as Grant recognises, ‘the film’s one true Hawksian professional’ (1992: 206). However, Ben’s decision to board up the farmhouse proves disastrous. Savini shoots two scenes showing zombies attracted towards the humans by the sound of hammering rather than an instinctive awareness of live human flesh. The tensions between all human characters become more explicit in this version. Harry both verbally and physically abuses his wife, Helen (McKee Anderson). Judy (Kate Finneran) is less sympathetic than her 1968 counterpart. Since Tom’s uncle owned the farmhouse, she immediately asserts family and property rights at one point when Ben and Harry argue: ‘Where’d you be if we kicked you the hell out?’ Tom then intervenes telling his girlfriend, ‘We’re not going to kick anybody out, Judy Rose.’ Although Judy is not yet married, she behaves in a manner reminiscent of Zola’s property-conscious grasping bourgeois heroines such as Félicité Rougon of La Fortune des Rougon and Lisa Queneu of Le Ventre du Paris. She later indirectly causes the 244

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petrol-pump explosion by driving in a reckless manner resulting in Ben falling off the truck. Lacking Ben’s guidance and finding they took the wrong key, Tom shoots the lock off and causes disaster. However, unlike the original version, Savini does not dwell on the gory banquet the barbecued lovers supply for the zombies. Indeed, the film is curiously muted in terms of spectacular gory effects. The real violence goes on inside a house divided by patriarchal violence and the adherence to now redundant ideological behavioural patterns. Family values are now bankrupt in more than one sense. New patterns of behaviour have become necessary, patterns Barbara seems to embody as a heroine different in certain ways from her 1968 counterpart. Tom admits that he could never have killed Uncle Rege even though he changed into a cannibalistic zombie. When the Cooper daughter, Sarah (Heather Mazur), turns into a zombie, Harry cannot bring himself to kill her. Barbara immediately does so. Judy freaks out when Barbara kills the now living dead next-door neighbour, Mr Magruder. Since Barbara has no real love for a family system which made her life miserable, she appears to move towards a new set of values. She becomes more rational and self-controlled demonstrating to the hysterical Judy that the attackers are really dead by shooting one several times. When Ben accuses her of ‘losing it’, she responds, ‘Whatever I lost, I lost a long time ago and I won’t lose anything again. You can stop talking to me about losing it when you stop screaming at each other like a bunch of three-year-olds.’ Her comments also relate to Harry as well as Ben. They later fight over a television set and destroy an important means of communication with the outside world. Barbara makes her second attempt to persuade Ben to walk away but to no avail. After the death of Tom and Judy, Barbara witnesses Ben and Harry more interested in fighting each other than repelling the zombie invasion. The wounded Ben tells her to go while he escapes to the basement and Harry hides in the attic. The last image viewers see of the still-living Ben reveals him laughing when he hears the media finally giving up its lying explanations. A radio commentator admits that the previously broadcast rescue stations are ‘no longer in operation’ and affirms the existence of the living dead. At this point in the film, male values have proved absolutely irredeemable. The resilient Barbara thus appears as the film’s feminist heroine who ‘takes back the night of the living dead’. But Romero’s perspectives towards his heroine are often more ambiguous and complex in the film. Barbara’s attitudes are certainly more positive than the rest of the humans in the farmhouse. The film also reveals her strategy as being the correct one under the circumstances. But Harry Cooper in Romero’s original version also had the right idea despite the repugnant nature of his personality. Characters and ideas do not necessarily cohere in Romero’s cinema. Barbara survives. But the nature of her survival also involves some degree of personal cost. Her rationality has its limits. She exhibits Hawksian professionalism at its best by adjusting to changing situations and being aware of other alternatives. In this manner, she resembles Matthew Garth in Red River. However, she also becomes as contaminated by violence as Tom Dunson in the same film. Barbara does recognise how she can get past the zombies waiting outside; she uses violence to defend herself and others in life-threatening situations, but two significant scenes knight of the living dead

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in the film reveal her submitting to irrational violence. After witnessing the futile struggle over the television set, she goes outside with the others. Recognising the zombie who killed her brother, she immediately shoots it. By this action, she acts in a contradictory manner and resembles an avenging heroine in a family melodrama rather than recognising that the zombie operated according to instinctual rather than rational motives. The opening scenes revealed Barbara’s personal entrapment in a family situation when her brother tormented her. Johnny’s demise was no real loss to her. Also, the zombie is too far away from the house to do any real harm. Barbara’s gesture is both unnecessary and contradictory in nature. Secondly, when she returns to the farmhouse, she finds Harry still alive and shoots him through the head. She believes correctly that her redneck companions will assume Harry to be just another zombie like Ben. Again, Barbara’s action appears justified under the circumstance; is she not taking vengeance upon a horrible patriarch? However, the gesture is also unnecessary and animated by arbitrary personal desires for revenge. Harry is also in a state of shock as his traumatic response, ‘You came back. You came back’, reveals. Barbara afterwards, ironically, utters the line spoken by the redneck sheriff in the original version when her companions appear: ‘There’s another one for the fire.’ Although Grant believes the line endorses Harry’s fate as ‘a woman’s response to patriarchy as defiant as the killing of the salesman in Marlene Gorris’ militantly feminist A Question of Silence (1982)’ (1992: 210) the real implications are far more questionable. Although female, Barbara has once again operated according to the behavioural modes of male violence Romero criticises within his films. The director takes a much less violent view of his zombies than many of his screen characters: ‘You have to be sympathetic with the creatures because they ain’t doin’ nothin’. They’re like sharks: they can’t help behaving the way they do’ (quoted in Yakir 1977: 62). The zombie who killed Johnny certainly could not help his behaviour. No love was ever lost between brother and sister. Also, on her flight from the farmhouse, Barbara became upset at seeing a zombie mother carrying a baby doll. But rather than walk away, she shot a figure who really was not ‘doin’ nothin’’. The repugnant Harry also cannot help the way he behaves but does this excuse shooting every abusive husband on this planet rather than trying to find alternative ways of healing? Romero once asked, ‘Have we conjured up creatures and given them mystical properties so as not to admit that they are actually of our own race?’5 Unlike Fran in Dawn of the Dead, who sympathetically allows a trapped zombie nun to escape and frequently silently recognises the relationship she has to the living dead outside the mall’s glass door, Barbara can not admit this. Barbara’s climactic lines, ‘They’re us. We’re them and they’re us’, apply as much to her as the rednecks she sees taunting captured zombies and consuming the hot sausages and spit-roasted pork supplied by a truck. Although Barbara is no frightened and helpless woman like the independent female of most horror films,6 she still reacts like her generic prototypes in her encounter with the mother zombie. She denies the relationship she has to a once-living being in very much the same manner Joan Mitchell denies her involvement in sexual promiscuity and witchcraft in Jack’s Wife. The concluding images of Savini’s version are thus more ambiguous. 246

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They do not merely represent Barbara’s perspective concerning a repugnant and monstrous patriarchy (see Grant 1992: 209) since they are also critical of her very motivations. The camera zooms in to her face, intercutting it with still shots of rednecks, zombies and funeral pyres. Then the final image zooms in to a huge close-up of her eye. It interrogates her as much as it does the spectacle she witnesses. Romero’s screenplay for the new Night of the Living Dead thus contains several significant ideas. Yet it also interrogates the female character in a similar manner to the director’s earlier investigations of male behaviour. This change is not accidental. In an era which has successfully co-opted feminism, allowed women into the military to kill and press buttons of technological destruction as easily as any man Romero now challenges his female characters, as well as their male counterparts, to recognise the dangerous nature of ideological entrapment. They, too, may easily join that growing army of the ‘living dead’ present on cinema screens as well as in everyday life. Males such as David, Peter and John previously relinquished their weapons in Romero’s films. In an increasingly dangerous world where certain women avidly wish to prove they are ‘deadlier than the male’, Romero now challenges Barbara to arrive at the same awareness characterising her female, as well as her male, predecessors.

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appendix t wo

Chronolog y

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1956 1958

1960 1962

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Born in the Bronx, New York City, on 4 February. Began filming on 8mm in the Scarsdale area of New York. Arrested for throwing a burning dummy from a roof while shooting 8mm short Man from the Meteor. Education at Suffield Academy, Connecticut. 8mm short productions, Gorilla and Earthbottom. Wins Future Scientists of America award for Earthbottom, a geology documentary made at Suffield. Begins studying art, design and drama at Carnegie-Mellon Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Shoots 8mm short Curly and 16mm short Slant. Both are co-scripted with Rudolph J. Ricci who described the latter blackand-white film as ‘a Bergmanesque study of a lonely girl’s fantasies during a Pittsburgh winter’. Begins work as an actor, director and set painter in Pittsburgh. Completes work on first envisaged ambitious feature Expostulations, coscripted with Rudolph J. Ricci. This was an anthology comprising several unrelated vignettes and satirical shorts such as ‘The Froomistan’ about a mad scientist building a contraption in his backyard; ‘The Rocket Ship’ dealing with a spaceship landing in an ice-cream cone; ‘The Trilogy’ viewing the experiences of a black in the ghetto; and ‘Door Against the Rain’ about a boy finding his fantasy world outside his back door. Although Romero shot some two to three hours of silent 16mm colour footage, it was never edited into a finished film. Established TV production company ‘Latent Image’ for industrial and commercial films. Shot Latent Image Promotional Reel. This was a 16mm compilation short running six to eight minutes promoting the company and featuring fast-motion scenes of the crew at work. (During 1962–73 the Latent Image shot 30-second and 60-second commercials for companies such as US Steel, Calgon, Westinghouse, Koppers Inc. and H. J. Heinz. It also worked on political campaigns film such as Lenore Romm.) Co-directed and scripted Screen Test with Rudolph J. Ricci. This was a 16 mm black-and-white short which anticipated the theme of There’s AlwaysVanilla and was designed to demonstrate the talents of Ray Laine who would later play the lead in the future film.

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Directed, photographed and edited Night of the Living Dead, co-scripted with John A. Russo, based on a story by Romero. Alternative titles Night of the Flesh Eaters/Night of Anubis. Image Ten Company formed for feature production. Begins extensive work as TV director. Directed, photographed and edited There’s Always Vanilla (aka The Affair for Southern drive-in circuits), scripted by Rudolph J. Ricci. The film was shot on 16mm colour and blown up to 35 mm. Working title, At Play with the Angels. Directed, photographed, edited and scripted Jack’s Wife. This 16mm colour film was blown up to 35 mm but reduced from its original running length of 130 minutes to 89 minutes by Jack Harris Enterprises for general distribution under the title of Hungry Wives. It also circulated as Season of the Witch. Directed, edited and scripted The Crazies (aka Code Name Trixie) from an original script by Paul McCollough titled The Mad People. Enters into partnership with Richard P. Rubinstein to form the Laurel Group. Directed O.J. Simpson/Juice on the Loose for The Winners series with Richard P. Rubinstein as producer and executive producer. Aired on ABC TV during December. Directed the following titles for The Winners ‘sports profile films’ with Richard P. Rubinstein as producer and executive producer: Reggie Jackson/ One Man Bunch; Franco Harris/Good Luck on Sunday; NFL Films/The 27th Team; Bruno Sammartino/Strongman; directed and produced Tom Weiskopf/ On Tour; Willie Stargell/If I Didn’t Play Baseball; Johnny Rutherford/ Eleven Year Odyssey. Co-executive producer with Richard P. Rubinstein of Magic at the Roxy directed by Michael Gargulio on videotape. Producer/executive producer/co-producer and co-executive producer of the following ‘sports profile films’ for the ABC TV syndicated series The Winners during Autumn 1975 following Monday Night Football: Kareem Abdul Jabbar/Nobody Roots for Goliath directed by Richard P. Rubinstein; Driver: Mario Andretti directed by Richard P. Rubinstein; Lou Brock/ The Thief directed by Michael Gornick and co-produced with Richard P. Rubinstein; Pittsburgh’s Front Four/ The Steel Curtain directed by Michael Gornick and co-produced with Richard P. Rubinstein; Rocky Blier/I’m Back directed by Michael Gornick with Richard P. Rubinstein as co-executive producer; Terry Bradshaw/Thank God I’m a Country Boy directed by Michael Gornick with Richard P. Rubinstein as co-executive producer. Directed, scriptexd and edited Martin. Photographed by Michael Gornick in 16mm colour with sepia inserts and blown up to 35mm. This film marked Romero’s first collaboration with make-up and special effects artist Tom Savini. Directed, scripted and co-edited Dawn of the Dead (UK title, Zombies— Dawn of the Dead). Produced by Richard P. Rubinstein, a different version lacking four minutes with slight re-editing agreed upon by Romero was accomplished by Dario Argento. the cinema of george a. romero

1981 1982 1983

1985

1986

1987 1988 1990

1993 2000 2004 2005 2007 2009

Directed, scripted and co-edited Knightriders. Produced by Richard P. Rubinstein. Directed Creepshow. Produced by Richard P. Rubinstein with screenplay by Stephen King. Original teleplay ‘Trick or Treat’ for pilot episode of Tales from the Darkside included in 1984–85 season, directed by Bob Balaban. Romero was executive producer for this series. Directed and scripted Day of the Dead. Produced by Richard P. Rubinstein. Original teleplay ‘The Devil’s Advocate’ for 1985–86 season of Tales from the Darkside directed by Michael Gornick. Laurel Group partnership dissolves. Teleplay ‘Baker’s Dozen’ adapted from ‘The Gingerbread Witch’ by Scott Edelman for Tales from the Darkside directed by John Sutherland. Teleplay ‘Circus’ adapted from a story by Sidney J. Bounds for Tales from the Darkside directed by Michael Gornick. Produced and scripted Creepshow 2 directed by Michael Gornick. Stories by Stephen King. Directed and scripted Monkey Shines. Produced by Charles Evans. Directed and scripted ‘The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar’, episode in Two Evil Eyes, a two-part anthology with Dario Argento. Produced by Achille Manzotti for ADC Gruppo Bema Production. Executive producer and scenarist on Night of the Living Dead directed by Tom Savini. Produced by John A. Russo and Russ Streiner. Released by Twentieth Century Fox as a Menahem Golan production. Scenarist for ‘The Cat from Hell’ episode of Tales From The Darkside: The Movie. Directed by John Harrison. Producer: Richard P. Rubinstein. Directed, scripted and executive produced The Dark Half based on the novel by Stephen King. Produced by Declan Baldwin for Orion Pictures. Directed and scripted Bruiser. Romero relocates to Toronto, Canada. Universal Studios releases Land of the Dead. Diary of the Dead. Survival of the Dead.

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NOTES

chapter one 1

2

3

4 5

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See Jim Hillier (1992) The New Hollywood. New York: Continuum; Jon Lewis (ed.) (1998) New American Cinema. Durham: University of North Carolina Press. For an interesting perspective on Hollywood corporate development see also Dennis McDougal (1998) The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and The Hidden History of Hollywood. New York: Crown Publishers. Andrew Britton (1986) ‘Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment’, Movie 31/32, 1–42; Robin Wood (1985) ‘80s Hollywood: Dominant Tendencies’, cineACTION! 1, 2–5; Wood (1986) Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan; Tony Williams (1996) ‘Trying to Survive on the Darker Side: 1980s Family Horror’, in Barry K. Grant (ed.) The Dread of Difference. Austin: University of Texas Press, 164–80. For the history of this specific form of cinematic mechanism see Tom Gunning (1990) ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.) Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. London: BFI, 56–60 Robert Singer, personal correspondence. See Zola (1964) ‘The Experimental Novel’, in The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Trans. Belle Sherman. New York: Haskell House, 28. The studies he refers to are June Howard (1985) Form and History in American Literary Naturalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; Walter Benn Michaels (1987) The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press; and Lee Clark Mitchell (1989) Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Howard 1985: 36–8. See Louis J. Budd, ‘The American Background’, and Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, ‘The Call of the Wild and The Jungle: Jack London’s and Upton Sinclair’s Animal and Human Jungles’, The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism, 21, 47–71, 238. See The American Film Institute Catalog, Feature Films 1911–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Surviving footage from Hobart Bosworth’s Jack London adaptations such as Martin Eden (1913) and An Odyssey of the North (1914) reveal the presence of a distinctively cinematic naturalist style particularly in the former’s use of location in the industrial districts of Oakland. Photographic evidence from non-extant Jack London films such as The Sea Wolf (1913), John Barleycorn, and The Valley of the Moon (both 1914) testify to the naturalist influence. Destruction (1915), The Marble Heart (1916), and A Man and the Woman (1917) were respectively based on Zola’s Labor, Thérèse Raquin, and Nana. D. W. Griffith’s Biograph films such as A Corner in Wheat (1908), The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and ‘The Mother and the Law’ episode from Intolerance (1916) reveal that such imagery was inescapable during an era which also witnessed the filming of works by American naturalist novelists such as Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair. Examples include The Pit (1914), The Jungle(1914), Life’s Whirlpool (1916), The Adventurer (1917) and The Money Changers (1920).

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Griffith’s last film, The Struggle (1931), appeared during the last years of Prohibition. Despite its historically inappropriate box-office appeal, the film has connections with both literary naturalism (especially L’Assommoir) and late nineteenth-century critiques of the menace of alcohol on everyday life. Furthermore, naturalist depictions of consumerism, the commodification of female bodies, and spectacular displays in works such as Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, occupied a prominent role in American cinema of the 1920s. See Sumiko Higashi (1994) Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 89–92, 104. For an example of 1960s reactions against the reductive nature of naturalistic reproductions in television still dominant in PBS Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery productions today see Don Taylor (1990) Days of Vision: Working with David Mercer: Television Drama Then and Now. London: Methuen. As the novels of Brett Easton Ellis depict, not everyone is capable of either escaping damaging psychological mechanisms of materialism let alone understanding the real implications of Dawn of the Dead. Trapped within mindless consumer-culture gratification victims become little better than Romero’s zombies. They may also develop into future versions of Patrick Bateman, the ‘hero’ of American Psycho. See Ellis (1987) The Rules of Attraction. London: Penguin, 40, 58; Ellis (1991) American Psycho. New York. Vintage. See also Linda K. Kaufman, ‘American Psycho’, Film Quarterly, 54.2 (2000): 41–5; Tony Williams, ‘American Psycho: A Late Twentieth-Century Naturalist Text’, Excavatio, 17.1–2 (2002): 403–20; Steven Schneider, op. cit.: 421–32. Lehan (1995), ‘The European Background’, The Cambridge History of Realism and Naturalism, sees the crowd theme as characteristic of naturalism. He describes Germinal in terms of Zola’s ideas of biological determinism, ideas we may also read in a different manner as noted above: ‘The murderous nature of Etienne in Germinal takes us close to Zola’s belief in the atavistic, and grounds the industrial conflict between mine owners and workers in a kind of animalistic struggle, a theme that is clearly established when the brutal crowd is described as an uncontrollable animal’ (58). See also Naomi Schor (1978) Zola’s Crowds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, whose mythical reading of Zola’s fiction sees the operation of both repression and the return of the repressed involving the buried dead in The Fortune of the Rougons. She also comments that ‘The invisible dead, Homer’s “silent majority”, are familiar characters in Zola’s works. Not only his cemeteries, but his gardens, his rooms, his very cities (see Rome), are strangely animated by the palpable presence of the dead. The invisible crowd of the dead is one of the most active in Zola’ (120). Rachel Bowlby notes that Au Bonheur des Dames contains the theme of the reduction of women to dead bodies as well as their repression. See Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreisser, Gissing and Zola. New York: Methuen, 1985, 76. Fran escapes from both in Dawn of the Dead. See Richard Wight Fox and T. Jackson Lears (eds) (1983) The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History 1880–1980. New York: Pantheon—an important collection of essays dealing with the consumerist mentality within American society. Romero’s films employ the concept both literally and metaphorically. See Wade Davis (1988) Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press; Davis (1985) The Serpent and the Rainbow. New York. Simon and Schuster. Davis also cites Zora Neale Hurston’s belief that zombies were not created by magic and mentions the use of drugs which parallel the methods used in both White Zombie and Revolt of the Zombies. See Davis 1988: 66–7. See Tony Williams (1981) ‘White Zombie—Haitian Horror’, Jump Cut, 28, 18–20; Gary D. Rhodes (2001) White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film. Jefferson: McFarland. Howard (1985: 53) notes an interesting opposition between nature and culture in the early chapters of Jack London’s White Fang, where humans lose their traditional privileges by dominating animals and now become the hunted species rather than the hunter. She views this reversal as one of the particular forms of antinomy characterising American literary naturalism. See also Diane M. Smith (1989) ‘Confronting Socialism: The Naturalist Novel and its Reception in Europe’, Works and Days 7.2, 86. She notes Zola’s description of the rioting Montsou miners in Germinal as having ‘jaws of wild animals’ and Gissing’s rebellious crowd in Demos bellowing with a ‘wild beast roar’. As Walter Benn Michaels astutely demonstrates in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, the naturalist novel has an intrinsic connection to capitalism whatever the mode of expression. The

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beast imagery within many naturalist novels is a key example. During his early life Jack London feared becoming little better than a ‘work beast’ and adopted the symbol of the wolf as his emblem. In Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, the downwardly mobile Hurstwood finally merges into the mass of pitiful drifters who have ‘ox-like stares’ and wait patiently ‘like cattle’. See also Howard 1985: 101–2. Robin Wood (1989) Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press, 288–302. Similarly Howard (1985: 71) notes that naturalist novels contain many ideological discourses. She further states that naturalist fiction generally incorporates conventional elements from popular literary genres like the adventure story and the domestic novel in terms of their complex relation to mass culture. She also notes that naturalism exists in constant dialogue with realism (142). If Walcutt (1956: 22) recognised American naturalism as involving a ‘continual search for form’ there is no reason why it may not find expression in the cinematically different form of Romero’s specific appropriation of the horror genre. Howard (167) also sees affinities between naturalism and mass cultural popular social melodramas such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Frank Norris’ The Pit, Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street, and even Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. For the horror film’s relationship to the Hollywood melodrama see Tony Williams (1996), Hearths of Darkness. New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 24–6. Donald Pizer (1966) Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 63. See also Pizer (1982) Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, and James R. Giles (1989) Confronting the Horror: The Novels of Nelson Algren. Kent State University Press, who relates Algren’s work to the grotesque excessiveness in the novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and other French existential writers. See also Giles (1995) The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press; Herbert Selby (1997) ‘John Rechy, and Latter-Day Naturalism’, Excavatio, 9, 167–71; Robert Singer, ‘Only the Dead: Urban Milieu in the Contemporary Naturalist Film’, op. cit. 194–203; ‘The Impulses of Humanity: Naturalism and the Contemporary American Film’, Excavatio, 11, 143–8; and Carl Rollyson, ‘Susan Sontag: A Postmodern Naturalist’, op. cit. 119–23. Howard 1985: 63–4. Eric J. Sundquist notes that in certain naturalist texts ‘the abnormal becomes the barely submerged norm’ resulting in a ‘Gothic intensification of detail that approaches the allegorical’. See ‘Introduction: The Country of the Blue’, in Sundquist (ed.) (1982) American Realism: New Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 13. This interesting association of Gothic excess and allegorical readings also parallels features in Romero’s films. Commenting on some elements also relevant to the temptation of rigid definitions concerning literary and cinematic texts, Mitchell notes, ‘We need, if only for the moment, to relax the stranglehold of literary “standards” in order to fully appreciate how fully any enacted philosophy depends on its style – or rather, to recall that the two are one and the same, and that an extreme philosophy can only be realised in correspondingly extreme styles. Inquiring this into the sometimes awkward, invariably disruptive styles of determinism may well compel us into a larger reconsideration of narrative standards themselves. In any event, we will discover how much a larger pattern to grammatical improprieties can alter some of the deepest assumptions we bring to bear on the world around us’ (1989: x). See Howard 1985: 104–41 for her interesting discussion on naturalism and the spectator in Sister Carrie, Stephen Crane’s Maggie, Jack London’s The Sea Wolf and Frank Norris’s The Octopus. Witek’s first chapter contains a useful comparison of the conformist imagery of comics produced by the Gilbertson Company, which marketed the Classics Illustrated series, with the more dynamic style of EC comics. See the biographies provided in both the EC Comics reprints by Gemstone Publishing and the Internet site www.gemstonepub.com/ec/bios. Les Daniels has significantly noted the debt these comics owed to an American cultural tradition represented by both Edgar Allen Poe and Ambrose Bierce. He sees Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear as possibly owing their success ‘to the theories and practice of Poe, who had called for short stories planned to achieve a single effect and ceasing when the effect had been achieved.’ Daniels also notes that the hosts introducing each story and commenting upon conclusions ‘had a significant function in providing a sense of aesthetic distance between

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the shocks they presented and the readers to whom they presented them’ in a manner ‘reminiscent of the works of that master of sarcasm and satire, Ambrose Bierce, contained in the articulations of radio announcers on programmes such as Inner Sanctum and The Hermit’s Cave’ (1971: 63–4). Jack Davis’ ‘A Stitch in Time’ certainly resembles an EC Comics version of themes common to both literary naturalism and Zola’s fiction. Unlike most EC stories, the setting is a late nineteenthcentury sweatshop where female employees exact a militant feminist revenge (in the best traditions of Zola’s Germinal ) on their bullying slave-driver boss, appropriately named Mr Lasch, for causing the death of an elderly worker. Lasch repeatedly utters the word ‘production’ and the story contains Marxist overtones usually absent and unthinkable in that era of American Cold War hysteria. This may explain its ‘unusual’ setting in the safe confines of a historically distant past. See The Vault of Horror 12 (1995) reprint of the 1952 issue. Other EC retribution themes occurred in the present and used supernatural elements for their realisation. According to Steve Bissette in a 9 March 1999 telephone conversation, two non-fantasy EC stories criticised prevalent Southern 1950s tendencies of lynching Negroes while another condemned a mob who lynched a soldier who did not salute the American flag by revealing that the victim was blind! For cultural parallels see M. Thomas Inge (1990) Comics as Culture. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 117–27; Robert M. Stewart (1980) ‘George Romero: Spawn of EC’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 47, 40. Several critics have noted that some of the better crime and horror comics ‘took a stand on social issues of the day. By condemning all references to race as being racist, for example, reviewers effectively closed off any discussion of racism.’ See here Amy Kiste Nyberg (1998) Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 30, 63–5, 73. EC comics also adapted ideas from Gothic films such as Gaslight (1944) and The Beast with Five Fingers (1946). See, respectively, Johnny Craig’s ‘Madness at Manderville’, Tales from the Crypt 2 (1992) reprint of Crypt of Terror 1950 issue and Al Feldstein’s ‘The Maestro’s Hand’, op. cit. Furthermore, Johnny Craig’s ‘Mute Witness Murder!’, op. cit., forms an interesting link between Cornell Woolrich’s 1942 short story ‘It Had to be Murder’ (better known as ‘Rear Window’) and Hitchcock’s 1954 film. Johnny Craig also used the basic plot of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) to feature a female protagonist which anticipated the disastrous 1962 American version starring Glynis Johns. See ‘Whirlpool’, The Vault of Horror 6 (1991) reprint of the 1953 issue. For the proletarian grotesque concept see Michael Denning (1995), The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 118–23. Tales from the Crypt 5 (1993) reprint of December 1950/January 1951 issues. See also Graham Ingles (1996) ‘We Ain’t Got No Body!’, The Vault of Horror 17, reprint of January 1953 issue; and Ingels’ (1995) ‘Horror! Head It Off ’, Tales from the Crypt 11, reprint of 1951/52 issue. Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to the Gemstone Publishing reissues. Tales from the Crypt 3 (1993) reprint of 1950 issue; The Vault of Horror 17 (1996) reprint of December 1952 issue. Witek also notes that ‘the critiques of American society in the EC’s were oblique and implicit’ (1989: 70). See The Vault of Horror 13 (1995) reprint of 1952 issue; Tales From the Crypt 11 (1995) reprint of 1951/52 issue. ‘Madame Bluebeard’ also anticipates family horror films of later decades since the title character does not just murder her husbands to gain a rich lifestyle but also abandons them as sacrificial victims for the death of her mother whose husband adored her. Like Mrs Edgar in Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) she teaches her daughter that men are nothing more than ‘beasts’ and only good for money. Decaying corpses also return from the grave to take revenge on two unscrupulous car dealers in Jack Davis’ ‘The Death Wagon!’, The Vault of Horror 13 (1995) reprint of 1952 issue. Another returns from the dead in Graham Ingels’ ‘Funeral Disease’, The Vault of Horror 6 (1991) reprint of 1953 issue, and a deceased husband and wife similarly return to take vengeance on his second gold-digging wife in Ingels’ ‘Staired in Horror’, The Vault of Horror 12 (1995) reprint of 1952 issue. The cover illustration illustrated Jack Davis’ ‘Out of His Head’, The Vault of Horror 6 (1991) reprint of 1953 issue. See Kurt Anderson, ‘A perfect mad man’, Time (15 June 1972), 139, 24, 63. ‘Gaines’ magazine was the only place for children to have an uncensored glimpse behind the perky façade of 1950s bourgeois life. It was where they could get clued in to the fatuousness of civics-books sanctimony,

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to the permutations of suburban phoniness, to grown-up dissembling and insincere hucksterism of all kinds. Mad infected children with a healthy degree of antiestablishment scepticism, a Dadadissectionist attitude toward all media.’ This last sentence ironically echoes the opening scenes of Dawn of the Dead, set in a television studio. Even 1990s conservatives expressed their debt to Gaines. See ‘Editorial’, National Review (6 July 1992), 44, 13, 18: ‘Many upstanding conservatives including some on NR’s editorial board will confess under mild torture that Mad was an early influence and source of malicious pleasure at the expense of parents, mass culture, and other institutions of our society.’ For King’s relationship to the American cultural tradition see Douglas Winter (1986) Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. New York: Signet, 23–4; Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne (eds) (1987) The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscapes of Nightmares. Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press; Anthony Magistrale (1988) Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic. Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press; Jeanne Campbell Reesman (1991) ‘Stephen King and the Tradition of American Naturalism in The Shining’, in Anthony Magistrale (ed.) The Shining Reader. Washington: Starmont House, 121–38; and Jonathan P. Davis (1994) Stephen King’s America. Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press. For King’s connections to European naturalism in The Shining see Tony Williams (1997) ‘Stephen King, Naturalism, and The Shining’, Excavatio 9, 156–65.

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See Maria Reidelbach (1991) Completely Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine. Boston: Little, Brown, 187–8. Although concentrating on Mad, Reidelbach’s book is fully aware of the links it had with EC Comics. The various biographies of the illustrators as well as her second chapter provides a wealth of relevant information. Reidelbach notes the insidious role of the Comics Code Authority after the demise of EC comics which ‘had virtually eliminated representations of ethnic groups in comics’. She quotes historian Pamela B. Nelson who comments that Code restrictions had ‘intimidated many cartoonists into avoiding ethnic images altogether’. Reidelbach also quotes Joe Orlando’s recognition of the Code’s more insidious consequences which echo the 1980s and 1990s: ‘It reflected the society. Look at the advertising, the magazines like Saturday Evening Post, the kind of people they represented were certainly not a melting pot, they all looked like WASPs, and they were hairless, and they didn’t sweat, and the women all wore white gloves. Feldstein and Gaines had been severely burnt enough by the code to avoid the kind of pointed racial and religious morality tales that had been the suspense comic’s redeeming feature, but in Mad they reveled in contrariness, exalted in pointing out skeletons in closets and dirt swept under the rugs.’ For a colour reproduction of this illustration see Reidelbach 1991: 7. Barbara mentions this in her account to the occupants of the farmhouse. It may have been on her mind but the actual event shows her embarrassed and wishing to avoid the zombie. Paul R. Gagne (1987) The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh: The Films of George A. Romero. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 38. This is an invaluable resource book for Romero’s films to date. The film has also stimulated several other intelligent readings. See Jane Caputi (1988) ‘Films of the Nuclear Age’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 16, 3, 100–10; Richard Dyer (1988) ‘White’, Screen, 29, 4, 59–63. While the first essay relates Night of the Living Dead to the apocalyptic climate of the nuclear age, the second significantly stresses its racial and political context. Dyer concludes his treatment of the film’s relationship to both Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead by noting certain particular connotations: ‘The hysterical boundedness of the white body is grotesquely transgressed as whites/zombies gouge out living white arms, pull out organs, munch at orifices. The spectre of white loss of control is evoked by the way the zombies stumble and dribble in their inexorable quest for blood, often with intestines spilling out or severed limbs dangling. White over-investment in the brain is mercilessly undermined as brains spatter against the wall and zombies flop to the ground’ (1988: 63). Dyer concludes his examination by noting that the fear of control of one’s body ‘and the fear of not being able to control other bodies, those bodies whose exploitation is so fundamental to capitalist economy, are both at the heart of whiteness. Never has this horror been more deliriously

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evoked than in these films of the Dead. For further insights into the racial aspects of this film see also Robert K. Lightning, ‘Interracial Tensions in Night of the Living Dead ’, cineACTION, 53 (2000): 22–9; Stephen Harper, ‘Night of the Living Dead: Reappraising an Undead Classic’, Bright Lights 2005/ http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/50/night.htm. Harper also intuitively regards the film as being an intuitive counterpart of the main argument made by Raymond Williams in Modern Tragedy (1966), namely, ‘that tragedy consists not simply in the deaths of great leaders, but in the heroic and pointless destruction of “ordinary” people in their struggles for democracy’. Romero has constantly insisted in many interviews that his films are really about lack of communication and the failure of people to unite against a common enemy. Despite Romero’s assertions that Night of the Living Dead did not consciously reflect the political and racial ‘signs of the times’, enough evidence exists in the film to show its contemporary relevance. For an exemplary reading of Night, The Crazies, Martin, and Dawn of the Dead representing dark allegorical inversions of John Winthrop’s ‘city on a hill’ mythology see Linnie Blake, ‘Another One for the Fire: George A. Romero’s American Theology of the Flesh’, in Xavier Mendik (ed.) Shocking Cinema of the Seventies. Hereford, England: Noir Publishing, 2002, 151–65.

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See Dan Yakir (1979) ‘Morning Becomes Romero’, Film Comment, 15, 3, 60, 64–5; Paul R. Gagne (1987) The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh: The Films of George A. Romero. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 41–6. See Gagne 1987: 44–6 for a description of the creative and production problems which affected the original Latent Image production group over the making of this film. See Gagne 1987: 41, 43. When interviewed in 1973, Romero stated that the premise of There’s Always Vanilla ‘was going to be what happens to the youth culture in five or ten years’ when it experienced ‘a full cycle back-around’ to parental values. Despite his reluctance to discuss this film further it is remarkable how much it still contains this very relevant idea. See Fran Lebowitz et al. (1973) ‘George Romero: From Night of the Living Dead to The Crazies’, Andy Warhol’s Interview, 3, 31. According to an earlier interview Romero stated that the film had the working title of At Play with the Angels and was to be a work ‘looking at “the American hippie” four or five years from now and where he is going to be and where the people are going to be around him and what happens to their whole communication’. See William Terry Ork and George Abagnalo (1969) ‘Night of the Living Dead—Interview with George A. Romero’, Andy Warhol’s Interview, 1, 4, 22. Ironically, these comments are juxtaposed editorially with Chris’s remarks to the camera in a similar manner to the later studio production inserts. When Lynn later decides to seek help for an abortion from Michael Dorian after learning about Chris’s selfish desire to want to be a father to his abandoned son, Chrissie, an insert showing a studio dial, ‘Turn to Clear Vision’, follows a shot of her upset on the sofa. This is the first example of Romero’s fascination with montage which will reach its stylistic culmination in The Crazies.

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For relevant information concerning Harris’ similar marketing strategy for Larry Cohen’s first film Bone (1972) see Tony Williams (1997) Larry Cohen: Radical Allegories of an American Filmmaker. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 302–3. See Thierry Kuntzel (1978) ‘The Film Work’, Enclitic, 2, 1, 38–61; Kuntzel (1980) ‘The Film Work 2’, Camera Obscura, 5, 7–69. Over thirty years ago, I attended a lunch organised by Manchester University’s Department of Biblical Studies. When Professor John Allegro remarked to a female student that Catholicism was

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generally understood as a religion of fear, the woman replied that the fear generally resulted from knowing what would happen if one did not believe!

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Robin Wood (1986) Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press, 116; Robin Wood and Richard Lippe (eds) (1979) The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 93. The first work duplicates the second and will be referred to in terms of its easier accessibility from this point onwards. Mark Walker (1991) Vietnam Veteran Films. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 90–3; Tony Williams (1996) Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 143. For the relationship of the Vietnam War to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead see Robert C. Cumbow (1994) ‘Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead ’, in Jean Jacques Malo and Tony Williams (eds) Vietnam War Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 105–6. For some revealing parallels between other wars in American history as well as Vietnam see Reynold Humphries, ‘The Crazies (1973)’, in Frank Lafond (ed.) George A. Romero: Un cinéma crépusculaire. Paris: Michel Houdiard Editeur, 2008, 56–67. The continuing relevance of this film to American military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of George W. Bush’s quarantine role for the military at the time of the avian flu threat in his first term of office, goes without saying. For further examination of this film see Tony Williams (1998) ‘FEKS, New Babylon, and Zola’, Excavatio, 11, 137–42. The one exception to this rule is David for reasons noted above. Despite Romero’s citation of Howard Hawks, Orson Welles and Michael Powell as major influences on his work, the Hitchcock association appears more strongly in his films than he actually admits. Romero has admitted that traces of Hitchcock do occur in Night of the Living Dead and Martin but was ‘totally unimpressed’ when he saw the director working on North by Northwest. See Gagne 1987: 7, 13. Wood notes that Night of the Living Dead’s ‘debt to The Birds goes beyond the obvious resemblances of situation and imagery’ (1986: 115). Hitchcock defined the ‘MacGuffin’ as a mere plot device or gimmick which has no relevance to the director. Romero’s zombies and the formally sensationalist aspects of the horror genre involving gore and violence operate in a similar manner. They are less important than Romero’s key narrative interests which involve issues of everyday life rather than pure fantasy. See Francois Truffaut (1968) Hitchcock. London: Panther, 157–8.

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Romero commented that his production team wanted the colour in Martin to be ‘seedier’, resulting in little difference existing between certain scenes set in Braddock and Martin’s black-and-white fantasy visions: ‘In fact, we had to push the black-and-white sequences further to make them grainier and grittier than the colour ones.’ See Yakir 1977: 64. See R. D. Laing (1965) The Divided Self. London: Pelican; Laing (1967) The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. London: Pelican; Laing (1971) Self and Others. London: Pelican; R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson (1964) Sanity, Madness and the Family. London: Heinemann; Aaron Esterson (1972) The Leaves of Spring: Schizophrenia, Family and Sacrifice. London: Pelican; and David Cooper (1971) The Death of the Family. London: Penguin. Martin may also be retreating from recognising the full implications of his family situation similar to Daniel Schreber’s disavowal of his father’s sadistic educational practices by ascribing them to supernatural forces. See here Morton Schatzman (1976) Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family. London: Penguin, 81–92. For a defence of the continuing relevance of Laing’s work see Tony Williams (1996) Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 283, n.9.

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Lippe (1979) ‘The Horror of Martin’, in Robin Wood and Richard Lippe (eds) American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Toronto: Festival of Festivals, p. 90. For a recent reading exploring Romero’s revisionist approach to the modern American cinematic vampire myth see Stacey Abbott, Celluloid Vampires: Life and Death in the Modern World. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2007, 89–106.

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See Dieter Meindl (1996) American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 5: ‘The grotesque is thus seen as representing the fragmented American psyche.’ See Meindl 1996: 12 for his recognition of grotesque representations in Ellis’ novel which he regards as a ‘satire of the yuppie mentality’. For confirmation of this feature see the informative interview with director Mary Harron of the 2000 film version: ‘The book just had a real sociological analysis that I’ve never seen anywhere else.’ See Emma Forrest (2000) ‘Laugh till you die’, The Daily Telegraph, 1 April. See Brett Easton Ellis (1991) American Psycho. New York: Vintage, 308–9. Ellis concludes the description in an appropriate manner listing naturalist-influenced forms of description as well as denying the relationship of the animals to his own perverted sense of values: ‘while I sit in the kitchen thinking of ways to torture girls with this animal (unsurprisingly I come up with a lot), making a list that includes, unrelated to the rat, cutting open both breasts and deflating them, along with stringing barbed wire tightly around their heads’. The latter imagery may come from Bateman’s forgotten viewing of Elsa—She-Wolf of the SS, one of the many videos he has looked at. For a significant examination of American Psycho’s relationship to popular horror and Gothic narratives see Philip L. Simpson, Beyond All Boundaries: Postmodern Narratives of Multiple Murder, Doctoral Disseration: Department of English, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 125–38. He also quotes Ellis, who states that ‘American Psycho is partly about excess’, particularly the capitalist excesses of the Reagan era. Ellis has stated that the novel is not ‘a book about violence’ but rather ‘a satire of American consumerism’. Simpson’s excellent dissertation was published in a revised version under the title Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. His treatment of American Psycho is to be found on pp. 148–55. See Tim Lott (1998) ‘The Brat Trap’, The Daily Telegraph, 11 July. See Meindl 1996: 15, where he points out that although ‘the grotesque is usually conceived as subverting the natural order . . . it can also serve to evoke the nonrational dimension of life as such, a dimension that, in principle, is both alluring and sinister, benign and devouring, and that defines itself against ideas of pattern and order’. He quotes from Wolfgang Kayser’s The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Trans. Ulrich Weistein. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith 1968: 37 who emphasises the horror-provoking potential of the grotesque: ‘The grotesque world is—and is not—our own world. The ambiguous way in which we are affected by it results from our awareness that the familiar and apparently harmonious world is alienated under the impact of abysmal forces, which break it up and shatter its coherence.’ For Mann’s comment and its relationship to Edgar Allan Poe’s role as a writer of grotesque fiction functioning as ‘the archetype of the antibourgeois artist’, see Meindl 1996: 26. See also 1996: 79–84 for Meindl’s analysis of a figure who is both physically and psychologically associated with death. After commenting upon the use of grotesque imagery in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Meindl makes the following important observation, one relevant to both Romero’s films and the EC comic tradition he draws upon: ‘The grotesque is thus made to serve satire, which relates it to realism. Nineteenth-century realism, which reacted against and superseded romanticism, encouraged a shift of emphasis from concern with the psyche and the past to an orientation toward society and the present. Satire, which utilizes mocking distortion, is not, strictly speaking, realistic but tends rather to ally itself with realism as a society-oriented referential literary mode. In enrolling the services of the grotesque for demonstrating derision and disgust, satire assimilates the grotesque

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and links it up with realistic ends’ (106). See also where Meindl cites the significant interactions between the realist form of narration used by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (106–8) and the grotesque leading towards the following important insight: ‘Naturalism is a literary movement on the periphery of realism’ (109). See also Robin Wood, The American Nightmare, 93; and Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, 292: ‘One of the greatest obstacles to any fruitful theory of genre has been the tendency to treat the genres as discrete . . . at best, they represent different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions.’ This is certainly so where circumstances allow for the creative interaction of authorship and the appropriate cultural and industrial circumstances for its realisation. Meindl 1996: 111–15, 142–5. Meindl also refers to Allbee in Saul Bellow’s The Victim (New York: New American Library, 1965) as another one of American fiction’s ‘grotesque death-in-life figures’ (177). She makes an astute parallel between capitalism and human slavery here which relates both to Romero’s films and contemporary society: ‘The reverse side of the dream of democratic luxury shows a mechanical parody of equality, with the individual becoming simply a numerical unit, quantitatively identical to every other worker’ (76). The zombies, of course, are quantitative forces. For two detailed articles examining the question of consumerism in Dawn of the Dead see Stephen Harper, ‘Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead ’, http://www.americanculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/hm, and A. Loudermilk, ‘Eating “Dawn” in the Dark: Zombie Desire and Commodified Identity in George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead”,’ Journal of Consumer Culture, 3.1 (2003): 83–108. Although Harper believes that the ‘SWAT scene is hardly mentioned in academic analyses of the movie’, he is mistaken. See Tony Williams, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film. Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, 150. Zola’s novel certainly represents consumerism as a form of living dead existence: ‘For this section of his enterprise Mouret creates a Darwinian world without illusions, where the big beasts eat the little ones and fraternization is discouraged . . . Whereas the image of the store as a “dream palace” relies on its seductive projection of a commodified sexuality, the equally mediated, non-natural jungle behind the counter subsists in the loss of the sexual and social identities current in the world outside.’ See Bowlby 1985: 77. Naomi Schor (1978) Zola’s Crowds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 13–15. She also comments perceptively elsewhere about the dead dominating the living within Zola’s fiction due to his belief in animism: ‘One of the obvious consequences of this belief is that the dead never really die; they are always with us, about us. Hence the prominent role played by the dead in Zola’s fiction: the dead buried in the Aire Saint-Mittre, those “invisible beings” (“etres invisibles”) who urge Miette and Silvère to consume their passion ... the dead women whose spectres haunt La Faute de l’abbé Mouret, Le Ventre du Paris, Au bonheur des dames, Le Rêve and Le Docteur Pascal; the dead men whose cadavers, real or hallucinated, insistently return to separate the lovers in Thérèse Raquin and Germinal. The invisible crowd of the dead is one of the most active in Zola’ (120). For Zola’s understanding of the family as the prime mediating group situated between the individual and society see Schor 1978: 136–9. Despite the supposed spirituality of this group, they are also contaminated by consumer practices as anyone encountering their various cunning methods of begging for money will understand. Is this another of Romero’s ironic touches? What is the Hare Krishna disciple doing in the mall in the first place? Peter’s decision to survive may also reflect Romero’s appropriation of Howard Hawks’ attitude towards suicide. See Tod McCarthy (1997) Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. New York: Grove Press, 223, where he comments that Hawks regarded suicide ‘as the coward’s way out of problems, and a simplistic and dramatically expedient way to conclude complicated, high pressure scenarios’. Dawn of the Dead ’s ending certainly benefits from this as opposed to the original climax contained in screenplay and novelisation. Sigmund Freud (1984) ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’, in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. The Pelican Freud Library Volume 11. London: Penguin, 126. Freud 1984: 130; see also 131–8.

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This scene is missing from the Dario Argento European cut of Dawn of the Dead along with other important scenes such as Fran’s realisation of how the mall affects human relationship after the quarrel over the television set. Argento’s cut relinquishes Romero’s significant use of music library tracks to provide more Goblin soundtrack music, thus making the European version of Dawn of the Dead little better than a spectacle of gratuitous violence.

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See, for example, Pauline Kael (1981) ‘Knightriders’, New Yorker, 18 May, 147–51; Michael Sragow (1981) ‘Knightriders’, Rolling Stone, 344, 28 May, 52. For other opinions see Paul R. Gagne 1987: 117–19. See Michael Anderegg (1999) Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 63. See also p. 177 n.15 for his relevant quotation from Adorno’s essay ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’: ‘Certainly every finished work of art is already predetermined in some way but art strives to overcome its own oppressive weight as an artefact through the force of its very construction. Mass culture on the other hand simply identifies with the curse of predetermination and joyfully fulfils it.’ The present status of contemporary Hollywood cinema certainly demands a re-evaluation of the much maligned Frankfort School despite the previous euphoric celebrations of certain cultural studies critics. Arguing against critical interpretations viewing Chimes at Midnight as a lament for the death of Merrie England, Anderegg notes the melancholy nature of the film: ‘The several references to the youthful activities of Falstaff and Shallow cannot be taken at face value, and they do not, in any case, add up to anything that might be described as a medieval paradise’ (1999: 125). This is also true of the inner and outer worlds depicted in Knightriders. Romero also refers to the fact that ‘the underbelly in all my movies is the longing for a better world, for a higher plane of existence, for people to get together. I’m still singing these songs.’ See Dan Yakir (1981) ‘Knight after Knight with George Romero’, American Film, 6, 43. See Jean Douchet (1996) ‘Hatari! ’, in Jim Hillier and Peter Wollen (eds) Howard Hawks: American Artist. London: British Film Institute, 82, who sees Hawks’ film as one ‘that bears an extraordinary resemblance to the shooting of a film (with the communal life of its crew, its plan for the next day’s work improvised every evening, its idle periods and bursts of effort), perhaps even to a cineaste’s life’. For Barry K. Grant, Knightriders ‘is an unabashed homage to the Hawksian code of professionalism’. See ‘Taking Back the Night of the Living Dead: George Romero, Feminism, and the Horror Film’, in Barry K. Grant (ed.) (1996) The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 204. Ed Sikov (1981) ‘Knightriders’, Cineaste, 11, 3, 33. For the circumstances leading to Knightriders see Gagne 1987: 103. See Gagne 1987: 65, where Rubinstein comments about his ruthlessness in slashing the staff and overhead back to a manageable level. Romero was generously attempting to keep as many people with him as possible despite the economic problems involved. Pauline Kael, ‘Knightriders’, New Yorker, 57, 18 May, 148. See John Hanners and Harry Kloman (1982) ‘“The McDonaldization of America”: An Interview with George A. Romero’, Film Criticism, 6, 1, 69–81.

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See Michael Sragow (1982) ‘Stephen King’s “Creepshow”: The Aesthetics of Gross-Out’, Rolling Stone, 383, 25 November, 48. See Robert M. Stewart (1980) ‘George Romero: Spawn of EC’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 47, 553, 40; Gagne 1987: 124. See Ron Hansen (1982) ‘Creepshow: The Dawn of a Living Horror Comedy’, Esquire, 97, 76. Sragow emphasises the ‘gross-out’ effect in Creepshow episodes such as ‘Father’s Day’, ‘The Crate’ and ‘They’re Creeping Up On You’, following King’s comments concerning EC’s ‘gag reflex of

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revulsion’. He begins his article by noting King’s other qualities as a writer: ‘Despite King’s plodding prose and facile characters, he’s managed to concoct plots multilayered enough to sustain the length, and sometimes the scrutiny, a feature film demands. At his best, he puts everyone in touch with the nightmare anxieties of youth’ (1982: 48). Tom Milne (1982) ‘Creepshow’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 49, 261. Hansen quotes King as follows: ‘The comic book form allowed us to pare the motivations and characterizations down to a bare minimum and let us just go for scares’ (1982: 73). For the role of exaggerated performance style in cinema and the Delsarte influence see James Naremore (1988) Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 34–67. Despite Romero’s stated lack of interest in Hitchcock’s films, several works, such as Night of the Living Dead, certainly reveal traces of influences such as The Birds, as Wood has noted (1986: 115). Although Romero’s references in Creepshow are more jocular, like his citation of ‘Amberson Hall’ in ‘The Crate’, they are not entirely ‘extraneous’ to the narratives, as Tom Milne believes. See Milne (1982) ‘Creepshow’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 49, 261. They represent the tongue-in-cheek comedic attitudes displayed by both Hitchcock and Welles in their public appearances, when they gave ‘performances’ which were designed to mislead spectators as to the real nature of both their lives and art. In ‘Something To Tide You Over’, the name of Gaylen Ross’ character consciously evokes the name of the title character in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1941). Like her namesake, she returns from a watery grave to avenge herself on an authoritarian husband. Again, Romero may not be entirely making an in-joke reference to a film by his favourite director. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) deals with a once noble institution facing terminal decline. The same is true of Horlicks University if the activities of two of its prominent faculty are anything to go by. According to Gagne (1987: 138), Romero came up with the idea of making Pratt resemble Howard Hughes. Although Gagne (1987: 147) states the music is sweet jazz from the 1930s era, it is more reminiscent of the previous decade.

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Gagne also points out that ‘Anubis’ was inspired by Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, which dealt with the last surviving human in a world taken over by zombie-like vampires. Gagne’s synopsis of the original version in his book derives from the second draft, which ran 104 pages as opposed to the original length of 204. See Robin Wood (1985) ‘80s Hollywood: Dominant Tendencies’, cineACTION!, 1, 2–5; Andrew Britton (1986) ‘Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment’, Movie, 31, 31, 1–42. Personal conversation during The Society for Cinema Studies Conference at Pittsburgh, 1 May 1992. Such associations appear in the short documentary following the recently released letterbox version of Day of the Dead. When interviewed on screen preparing for his role as Captain Rhodes, Joe Pilato jokes about being the ‘good guy’ because of the Reagan era’s ideological re-evaluation of the military before taking a more serious perspective. See Ethel Spector Person (1980) ‘Sexuality as a Mainstay of Identity’, Signs, 5.4, 527.

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According to Kim Newman, Romero was interested in adapting Mummy’s Boys by British writer Bernard Taylor during this period. See Newman (1990) ‘Monkey Shines’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 57, 673, 46. For this relationship to Godard’s films such as Weekend, see Brian Henderson (1970/71) ‘Towards a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style’, Film Quarterly, 24, 2, 2–14.

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See Kim Newman (1993) ‘The Dark Half ’, Sight and Sound, 3, 11, 40. Andrew Britton (1979) ‘The Devil Probably: The Symbolism of Evil’, in Robin Wood and Richard Lippe (eds) The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 39, 41. For the complex issues surrounding any definition of film noir see, for example, Ginette Vincendeau (1993) ‘Noir is Also a French Word: The French Antecedents of Film Noir’, in Ian Cameron (ed.) The Movie Book of Film Noir. New York: Continuum, 49–58, and the special issue of Iris edited by Janice Morgan and Dudley Andrew, ‘European Precursors of Film Noir’, Iris, 21, 1996. The character’s surname may refer to Romero’s favourite Powell and Pressburger film, The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), the title character of which is played by Robert Rounseville. Before the climax Liz reveals her fears about Thad to Pangborn and during the novel’s epilogue, Pangborn’s thoughts express his rebuttal of Thad’s presumed understanding of past events. See Stephen King (1989) The Dark Half. New York: Viking, 405, 428. Newman (1993) notes that ‘in tidying up King’s confusion about where Stark comes from, the film version tends to exonerate Thad by making the villain an “other” rather than a manifestation of the writer’s unhealthy impulses’. Liz does articulate this knowledge in the film when she speaks about Thad’s continuing awful moods. Thad does affirm this when he replies, ‘Even the ugliness is part of me.’ But, except for a few isolated instances, the film falls into predictable generic patterns. See Tania Modleski (1988) The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York, Macmillan. Again, the sparrows of The Dark Half evoke The Birds in terms of their external representation of the psychological battle within Thad’s own mind.

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See the 2003 Blue Underground DVD version of The Crazies. The recent closure of New Yorker Films and Kim’s Video in New York are further disturbing examples of this negative monopolistic tendency begun by the Reagan administration and continued by its successors. In Carbondale, Illinois, AMC Theatres controls all films that may be shown in the area after having successfully closed down smaller cheaply priced cinemas. Any former theatres that are sold are not allowed to screen any recent films. Thankfully, the DVD and Internet revolution has challenged this type of cultural totalitarianism—at least for those who wish to take advantage of such alternatives. See Alex Ballard (2008) ‘Revolution Undead: An Interview with George A. Romero’, Penny Blood, 10 (2008): 29. Theodor Adorno (1984) ‘Loss of Certainty’, in Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (eds.) Aesthetic Theory. Trans. C. Lenhardt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2–3. Florent Christol recognizes this aspect of Bruiser in his perceptive analysis of the film and quotes Romero’s comments on the audio-commentary of the 2002 Studio Canal DVD version, where he describes the location of Toronto as an ideal ‘anonymous city for an anonymous hero’. See his excellent contribution to Frank Lafond’s collection of essays in George A. Romero: Un cinéma crépusculaire. Paris: Michel Houdiard Editeur, 2008, 164, 208, n.218. He notes that Romero compares America to a giant concentration camp whose victims more or less acquiesce to their status since they are unconscious of their condition and views the film as a cynical rewriting of Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life, where Mr. Potter’s values are now in total control. John R. Clark (1991) The Modern Satiric Grotesque and Its Traditions. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 22, 107. See also the various amazon.com reviews of the film as well as the ‘Bruiser’ website available on http://www.bruiserthemovie.com. See here Sumiko Higashi (1994) Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 89–92, 104. This is a significant work relating Zola’s examinations of nineteenth-century consumerism and spectacle in works such as Au bonheur des dames to the post—World War One films of DeMille. John R. Clark notes the relevance of old traditions to

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supposedly new developments in a manner that parallels how Zola is important in understanding Romero’s films. Hence although ‘the term counterculture might appear to be new in the last decade or so . . . the concept and what it stands for are as old as the hills, for a counter-culture is a deliberate opposite, a negative mirror-image in the sense that Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal grow in the rotting garden plot across from the bed of Christian lilies . . . Because such a deviant culture takes its definition and being from the accepted society but constitutes a wild divagation, it tends to flourish with a kind of deadly zeal and serves (often even unconsciously) as purgative saturnalia for the civilized soul.’ Clark, 29. Romero grew up in the counterculture of his own era and the role of EC Comics with its Zola-grotesque tradition is a key influence on his work. Ballard 2008: 30. See Loren Baritz (1998) Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 26–30; Richard Slotkin (1973) Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600–1815. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 38, 57, 70, 121–3, 147, 562–4; Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America. New York: Athenaeum, 1992, 489–660. See ‘Fiddler’s Green’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddlers_Green.com. See Tony Williams, ‘Land of the Dead’, http://www.rouge.com/au7/land_of_the_dead.html.com. Slotkin 1973: 123–9, 286, 289–91. Significantly, the Puritans regarded any contact with the forces of the wilderness as an ‘infection’. See also, Slotkin 1973: 143. He also points out that ‘cannibalism had traditionally been associated with the Indians of America since the discovery of the New World by the men of the Renaissance’ (90). It is thus not surprising that alternative challenges to the status quo including feminism and an industrial proletariat were also aligned with the ideological and mythological conception of the savage Indian during the late nineteenth century. See here Richard Slotkin (1985) The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800– 1890. New York: Athenaeum, especially, 301–70, 477–532. Adrian Martin (2007) ‘The Turning Point: le moment décisif ’, in Jean-Baptiste Thoret (ed.) Politique des zombies: L’Amérique selon George A. Romero. Paris: Ellipses, 121–9. They are played by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, who appeared in the British spoof of Night of the Living Dead—Shaun of the Dead (2004). In his essay reappraising Night of the Living Dead in relation to recent zombie films that do not contain ‘the oppositional potential of popular culture’, Stephen Harper comments that ‘the comic parody of Shaun of the Dead (2004) seems hollow, as there is never a sense of menace or of any human value being at stake’. See his ‘Night of the Living Dead: Reappraising an Undead Classic’, http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/50/night.htm. Perhaps this may explain Romero’s casting of these two actors in Land of the Dead that occurs in a doubleedged sense. The first scene is a tribute to the humour of Shaun while the second shows that zombies are no laughing matter. By contrast, Michael Sicinski compares the scene to Abu Ghraib ‘with chained zombies arranged in humiliating poses while guilelessly cruel Americans get their pictures taken with them’. See Sicinski, ‘Land of the Dead’, http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs24/ cur_sicinski_dead.htm. For other key associations linking Native Americans partaking in a cannibalistic version of the Eucharist see Slotkin 1973: 124–5, 241, 249–50, 328–9, 543–4. On parallels between the emerging proletariat and savage Indians as well as racist interpretation of class relations in the nineteenth century see also specifically Slotkin 1985: 234–6 297–9, 338–44, 480–5. Again, such parallels are more intuitive than deliberate on the part of Romero, very similar to his feelings concerning critical interpretations of Night of the Living Dead. See Martin 2007: 25–8. Timothy Roberts regards Land of the Dead as a failed racial allegory. Despite the fact that he sees this zombie society as ‘considerably more developed’ than in other Romero films insofar as they form ‘a coherent resistance group’, he regards this allegory dissolving from the time of Dead Reckoning’s appearance, making this group represent a ‘denigration of the proletariat’. However, I also see the zombie group paralleling Riley’s core group in many ways and that the divisions Roberts sees are not too rigid as he supposes. However, his essay is essential reading in terms of its suggestions for a way forward for the zombie film. See Timothy Roberts (2006) ‘Dead Ends: The Spectre of Elitism in the Zombie Film’, Philament LIMINAL, December.

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During the DVD audio-commentary accompanying this scene, Romero reveals that he is certainly aware of its ironic overtones. Land of the Dead. Original screenplay by George A. Romero. August 24, 2004. Atmosphere Entertainment. Romero-Grunwald Productions, 86. Land of the Dead is a film consciously aware of the historical and political associations surrounding its production in the same way as Romero’s first film. Stephen Harper’s comments on Night can equally be applied to Land. Like its predecessor, Land ‘is one of the most important cultural records of its era. Romero himself as explicitly commented that the film is a document of contemporary social changes. We don’t have to take the director’s word for this, since the film’s political themes are hardly hidden from the audience’. ‘Night of the Living Dead: Reappraising an Undead Classic’. Dennis Hopper’s lines and his reincarnation of George W. Bush need no further explanation. J. Hoberman sees past parallels not only to 9/11 and the Iraq War but also to imminent disasters such as Hurricane Katrina that occurred two months after the film opened. ‘Watching CNN, it was impossible not to appreciate Romero’s warning that the fantasy of social cohesion is the first victim of catastrophe.’ See J. Hoberman (2006) ‘Unquiet Americans’, Sight and Sound, 16.10: 22. J.B. Thoret also notes this parallel in a film he describes as ‘le premier grand film politique américain des années 2000’. See ‘New Orleans: Land of the Dead?’ in Politique des zombies, 209. Michael Sicinski also sees contemporary parallels, noting that ‘the combination of intra-American antagonisms with clear echoes of Iraq makes perfect sense’ and that the conclusion brings us back to a future era that saw the appearance of his first film. ‘Suitably enough, the conclusion of Land of the Dead brings us full-circle. Gulf War 2005, like Vietnam 1968, leads Romero to propose the most logical solution for those eager to remain human: head for Canada.’ See also Brian Wilson (2006) ‘Edifying Horror: Brief Notes on Land of the Dead’, The Film Journal, 13, http:///thefilmjournal.com. It concludes, ‘Romero’s cinema continues to argue for the importance of human value and radical political change. Land of the Dead may be seen as among the greatest examples of this tradition.’ Benjamin Thomas also sees associations with 9/11 in a section of his essay that appropriately begins with the title ‘Politique du spectacle’ and notes the film’s stylistic opposition to the illusion of spectacle and its associations with an earlier more socially conscious silent cinema tradition represented by D.W. Griffith’s Biograph short films. See ‘Land of the Dead’ in Lafond 2008: 173–81.

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This appears in the DVD release along with fuller versions of scenes trimmed down for general theatrical release mostly involving gore sequence the Fangoria fan element expected to see. Cholo’s house-cleaning role does occur with some significant variations in the 24 August 2004 version of the screenplay. See Land of the Dead. Original Screenplay by George A. Romero. Atmosphere Entertainment: Romero-Grunwald Productions. See Thomas Doherty (2008) ‘Diary of the Dead ’, Cineaste, 33.3, 58–60, and Adam Nayman (2007) ‘Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero US)’, Cinema Scope Magazine, 34, http://www.cinema-scope/. com/cs34/cur_nayman_diary.html. Ethan Alter, Shane M. Dallmann, and Brian Wilson represented notable exceptions to this type of condescending and dismissive review all too common in fan circles. By contrast, Alter describes it as ‘an apocalyptic road movie that owes more to an end-of-times epic like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road than any of his own zombie movies’. Dallmann engaged in a very sympathetic reading of the film and defended the character of Professor Maxwell, whom many criticized as being unbelievable since he saw him based on many types from his film school experience, while Brian Wilson recognized Diary’s relationship to the socio-political criticism inherent in Romero’s particular brand of cinema. See Ethan Alter (2008) ‘George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead ’, Film Journal International, 111.4, 156–7; Shane M. Dallmann (2009) ‘Diary of the Dead ’, Video Watchdog, 148, 47–52; and Brian Wilson (2008) ‘Diary of the Dead ’, Film International, 6.6, 94–5. Robin Wood’s intelligent review in Film Comment acclaimed this new episode in the zombie series in a manner very similar to that of his earlier article on Day of the Dead over twenty years ago that defended it against the same type of virulent criticism now affecting Diary. Comparing the film to its predecessors, he

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believes it ‘may prove to be the series’s supreme achievement’ (29). See Wood (2008) ‘Fresh Meat’, Film Comment, 44.1, 28–31. Frank Lafond sees the film as an interrogative examination of both the mock documentary and new media technologies. See Lafond (2008) ‘Diary of the Dead ’, in Frank Lafond (ed.) George A. Romero: Un cinéma crépusculaire. Paris: Michel Houdiard Editeur, 182–92. See Romero’s comments on the DVD audio-commentary to Diary of the Dead. See Andrew Britton’s exploration of Tout va bien (1972) in ‘Living Historically: Two Films by JeanLuc Godard’, in Barry K. Grant (ed.) Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2009, 348–65. This article first appeared in Framework 3 (1976): 4–15. Godard’s film has a scene involving an attack on a supermarket, the symbol of commodity capitalism, evoking a major theme of Dawn of the Dead. Weekend (1968) concludes with its heroine participating in the cannibalistic rites of the revolutionary hippie community who deal with the bourgeoisie in very much the same way as Big Daddy’s zombies do with the privileged inhabitants of Fiddler’s Green. These parallels are more intuitive than conscious in the mind of Romero. See Robin Wood’s judicious analysis of this film in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, 298–317. Diary of the Dead. Feature Commentary. Dimension Extreme DVD Version. One can imagine the concern that would be raised by studio executives concerning the cost of these voices. Did they all generously do it ‘on scale’ for this Canadian production? See Marc Leepson (1994) ‘84 Charlie Mopic’, in Jean-Jacques Malo and Tony Williams (eds.) Vietnam War Films. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 129–30. Alter also believes that Diary of the Dead is a distinct improvement on both Cloverfield and Redacted, neither of which Romero saw when he made Diary. ‘It’s less of a chore to sit through than Redacted and it doesn’t suffer from some of the logistical questions that nagged at you once Cloverfield ’s intense thrills wore off.’ See Alter 2008: 156. In a perceptive reading of this opening sequence, Reynold Humphries believes that ‘the family is clearly from the Middle East, suggesting that Romero is also raising the question of the repressive and murderous implications of the post-9/11 “war on terror” and the war in Iraq’. By contrast, I think that Romero ‘leaves the issue of their ethnicity deliberately open’ since the family could be Arab, Hispanic, or African-American’. (Haitian refugees?) However, we both agree that Romero has the war on terror clearly in mind as well as media complicity in audience manipulation. See the letters commenting on Hiram Lee’s 28 June 2008 World Socialist Web Site article ‘You Can’t Go Home Again: George Romero’s Diary of the Dead ’ that appeared in the correspondence section, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jul2008/corr-101_prn.shtml. See the DVD audio-commentary of Diary and David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2008, 32–43. This is another Romero inside joke since he originally intended to direct the first Mummy film of that recent ignominious series before scheduling conflicts occurred. See Tony Williams (2001) ‘An Interview with George and Christine Romero’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 18.4, 397–411. According to the DVD audio-commentary, Tom Savini’s voice is combined with actual police car radio broadcasts during 9/11. See William Rothman (1982) Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press. The implications of this reference and its relevance for the occupants of the Bush White House are obvious. Humphries, ‘Letters from Our Readers’, on ‘You Can’t Go Home Again: George Romero’s Diary of the Dead ’, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/corr-j01_prn.shtml. In the DVD audio-commentary, Romero mentions that a reference to Maxwell as Robin of Locksley was edited out. As well as showing Maxwell’s memories of Errol Flynn and Richard Greene images of Robin Hood and experience of direct combat in war, his choice of weapons reinforces his decision never to hide behind the camera and become contaminated like the others For some interesting parallels see Reynold Humphries (2006) The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931–1941: Madness in a Social Landscape. Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press. I naturally differ here from Robin Wood, who sees Debra as a much more positive character. Neither do I think that the rednecks are ‘irrelevant’. See Wood 2008: 30, 31.

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chapter fifteen 1 2

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We must also remember that he left the students with essential arms and ammunition necessary to defend themselves from zombies, so he was not totally mercenary and ruthless. O’Flynn’s Internet persona has ironic links with Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling, a novel about fishermen filmed in 1937 with Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew. We later learn that Captain O’Flynn worked as a non-salaried, self-employed fisherman before the zombie plague, placing him in a lower socio-economic status to rancher Seamus Muldoon. He is certainly no Spencer Tracy figure with whom either Sarge or Boy should identify themselves. As he tells them, his new occupation was designed to ‘catch fish on the Internet’. But far from fishing to save souls according to Christian concepts, his mercenary tactics actually damn his victims to either actual death or living death. Friedrich Engels (1982) ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’, in Marx-Engels, Selected Works. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 582–3 Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich (1998) This Is Orson Welles. Second edition. New York: Da Capo Press, 206. In a recent interview Romero states that he will not submit to this tendency and make another Dawn of the Dead. ‘Listen, I try to make every one of these movies a bit different, and truthfully, as much as they support me, my disappointment is with some of the fans. I mean, really if you want the same things every time in your entertainment, watch episodic television. Watch Law & Order, Grey’s Anatomy and CSI . . . hell, pick CSI in any town, they’re all the same.’ Chris Alexander (2010) ‘Survival Among the Dead’, Fangoria, 292, 42–6.

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Thomas Mann (1968) ‘Conrad’s “Secret Agent” ’, in Past Masters and Other Papers, trans. H.T. LowePorter. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 240–1. ‘George Romero’ (1996), in Loris Curci, Shock Masters of the Cinema. Key West, Florida: Fantasma Books, 118. John R. Clark (1991) The Modern Satiric Grotesque and Its Traditions. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 138. See also John Gardner (1972) Grendel. New York: Knopf, 4. The choice of this term is not accidental since it is meant to parallel the same title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1934 political-apocalyptic novel, It Can’t Happen Here. Both Land of the Dead and the historical events influencing its production give an added relevance to this early work warning that Fascism, especially the home-made American version, could easily take over America. ‘The Amusement Park’, Cinema Spectrum, Manchester 1 (1980): 47. I wish to acknowledge the kind permission of its editor, the late Harry Nadler (well-known for his work in organizing The Manchester Festival of Fantastic Films) to quote from an article written for a sadly short-lived publication. ‘What Lies Beneath?’ Senses of Cinema, 15, July-August 2001: http://www,sensesofcinema.com,4. This article is the preface to Steven Jay Schneider (ed.) (2003) Freud’s Worst Nightmares. New York: Cambridge University Press. Reynold Humphries (2002) The American Horror Film: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 113–8. Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment (2000) Realism and Popular Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press, xvi. Both Andrew Britton and Raymond Williams deserve full credit for warning against this movement from its very beginning. Unfortunately, their voices were ignored—at the time. See Andrew Britton (1986) ‘The Myth of Postmodernism: The Bourgeois Intelligentsia in the Age of Reagan’, cineACTION! 13/14, 3–17, since reprinted in Britton on Film, 458–86; Raymond Williams (1989) The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London: Verso.

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See, for example, Steven Jay Schneider (ed.) ‘Realist Horror Cinema, Part 1’, Postscript 21.3; Schneider (2002) ‘ “I guess I’m a Pretty Sick Guy”: Reconciling Remorse in Thérèse Raquin and American Psycho’, Excavatio, 17.1–2: 421–2.

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See Nigel Floyd (1988) ‘Creepshow 2’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 55, 648, 14. Kim Newman (1993) ‘Night of the Living Dead’, Sight and Sound, 3, 4, 52. For the distribution and financial problems affecting the original version see Gagne 1987: 38–9. See Robin Wood (1997), updated by Rob Edelman, ‘George A. Romero’, International Directory of Films and Filmmakers 2. Directors. Third Edition. Detroit: St. James Press, 839. George A. Romero and Susanna Sparrow (1980) Afterword to Martin. New York: Day Books, 210. See Linda Williams, (1996) ‘When the Woman Looks’, The Dread of Difference. Austin: University of Texas Press, 15–34. For an analysis of this character in comparison to Romero’s other females in the zombie films see Stephen Harper, ‘ “They’re Us”: Representations of Women in George Romero’s “Living Dead” Series’. Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media, 3 (2003): intensities.org/Essays/Harper. pdf.

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FILMOGRAPHY

This filmography only lists the major contributions made to each film. A detailed and meticulous list of credits will be found in Paul R. Gagne’s The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh: The Films of George A. Romero. Night of the Living Dead, 1968 Director: George A. Romero Producers: Russell Streiner and Karl Hardman Screenplay: George A. Romero and John A. Russo Director of Photography: George A. Romero Film Editor: George A. Romero Make-up: Hardman Associates, Inc. Special Effects: Regis Survinski and Tony Pantanello Music: Stock music from the Capitol Hi-Q music library with additional electronic effects by Karl Hardman Production Company: The Latent Image, Inc. and Hardman Associates, Inc., Pittsburgh Distributor: Almi Films Length: 96 minutes Cast: Duane Jones (Ben), Judith O’Dea (Barbara), Karl Hardman (Harry Cooper), Russell Streiner (Johnny), Marilyn Eastman (Helen Cooper), Keith Wayne (Tom), Judith Ridley (Judy), Kyra Schon (Karen Cooper), Charles Craig (newscaster), Bill Hinzman (cemetary zombie), George Kosana (Sheriff McClelland), Frank Doak (scientist), Bill ‘Chilly Billy’ Cardille (field reporter), Vince Survinski (posse gunman), John A. Russo (zombie in house/military aide in Washington, D.C.), George A. Romero (reporter questioning military officials in Washington, D.C.) There’s Always Vanilla (The Affair), 1972 Director: George A. Romero Producers: Russell W. Streiner and John A. Russo Assistant Producer: Cramer Riblet Screenplay: Rudolph J. Ricci Director of Photography: George A. Romero Editor: George A. Romero Make-up: Bonnie Priore Sound: Gary Streiner Production Manager: Vince Survinski Music: Rock music performed by Barefoot in Athens with electronic music by Steve Gorn and additional music by Mikw Marracino orchestrated by Jim Drake Production Company: The Latent Image

Distributor: Cambist Films Length: 91 mins Cast: Ray Laine (Chris), Judith Streiner (Lynn), Johanna Lawrence (Terri), Richard Ricci (Michael), Roger McGovern (Chris’s father), Ron Jaye, Bob Wilson, Louise Sahene, Christopher Priore, Robert Trow, Vince Survinski Jack’s Wife (Hungry Wives; Season of the Witch), 1973 Director: George A. Romero Producer: Nancy M. Romero Executive Producer: Alvin Croft Screenplay: George A. Romero Director of Photography: George A. Romero Editor: George A. Romero Make-up: Bonnie Priore Special Effects: Regis Survinski Production Supervisor: Vince Survinski Lighting and Additional Photography: Bill Hinzman Music: Original electronic music by Steve Gorn Production Company: The Latent Image Distributor: Jack Harris Length: 89 mins Cast: Jan White (Joan), Ray Laine (Gregg), Anne Muffly (Shirley), Joedda McClain (Nikki), Bill Thunhurst (Jack), Esther Lapidus (Sylvia), Virginia Greenwald (Marion), Don Mallinger, Dartl Montogomery, Ken Peters, Bob Trow, Bill Hinzman, George A. Romero (‘ass grabber’ at party) The Crazies (Code Name: Trixie), 1973 Director: George A. Romero Producer: Alvin Croft Screenplay: George A. Romero based on an original script by Paul McCollough Director of Photography: Bill Hinzman Editor: George A. Romero Make-up: Bonnie Priore Special Effects: Regis Survinski and Tony Pantanello Production Managers: Bob Rutkowski, H. Cramer Riblett, Vince Survinski Sound: Rex Gleason, John Stoll, Eric Baca, Michael Gornick Music: Bruce Roberts Production Company: A Pittsburgh Films Production (through Latent Image) Distributor: Cambist Films Length: 103 mins Cast: Lane Carroll (Judy), W. G. McMillan (David), Harold Wayne Jones (Clank), Lloyd Hollar (Col. Peckham), Lynn Lowry (Kathy), Richard Liberty (Artie), Richard France (Dr. Watts), Harry Spillman (Major Ryder), Will Disney (Dr. Brookmyre), Edith Bell (Lab Technician), W. L. Thunhurst, Jr (Brubaker), Leland Starkes (Shelby), Bill Hinzman, Vince Survinski Martin, 1978 Director: George A. Romero Producer: Richard P. Rubinstein Screenplay: George A. Romero Director of Photography: George A. Romero Editor: George A. Romero

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Special Effects and Make-up: Tom Savini Sound: Tony Buba Music: Donald Rubinstein Production Company: Laurel Entertainment Distributor: Libra Films Length: 95 mins Cast: John Amplas (Martin), Lincoln Maazel (Tata Cuda), Christine Forrest (Christina), Elyane Nadeau (Mrs. Santini), Tom Savini (Arthur), Sarah Venable (housewife victim), Fran Middleton (train victim), Al Levitsky (Lewis), George A. Romero (Father Howard), James Roy (deacon), Richard Rubinstein (housewife victim’s husband), Albert J. Schmaus, Lilian Schmaus, and Frances Mazzoni (family), Vince Survinski (train porter), Tony Buba, Pasquale Buba and Clayton McKinnon (drug dealers), Regis Survinski and Tony Pantonello (hobos), Harvey Eger and Tom Weber (men in bathroom), Robert Barner and Stephen Fergelic (police) Dawn of the Dead, 1979 Director: George A. Romero Producer: Richard P. Rubinstein Executive Producers: Claudio Argento and Alfredo Cuomo Screenplay: George A. Romero Director of Photography: Michael Gornick Editor: George A. Romero Script Consultant: Dario Argento Special Effects and Make-up: Tom Savini Sound: Tony Buba Music: The Goblins with Dario Argento; stock library music for American version Assistant Producer: Donna Siegel Assistant Director: Christine Forrest Production Company: Laurel Entertainment Distributor: United Film Distribution Length: 126 mins Cast: David Emge (Stephen), Ken Foree (Peter), Scott Reiniger (Roger), Gaylen Ross (Fran), David Crawford (Dr. Foster), David Early (Mr. Berman), Richard France (scientist), Howard Smith (TV commentator), Daniel Dietrich (Givens), Fred Baker (Commander), Jim Baffico (Wooley), Rod Stouffer (young officer on roof ), Jese Del Gre (old priest), Clayton McKinnon and John Rice (officers in project apartment), Ted Bank, Patrick McCloseky, Randy Kovitz, and Joe Pilato (officers at police dock), Pasquale Buba, Tony Buba, ‘Butchie’, Dave Hawkins, Tom Kapusta, Rudy Ricci, Tom Savini, Marty Schiff, Joe Shelby, Taso Stavrakos, Nick Tallo, and Larry Vaira (motorcycle raiders), Sharon Ceccatti, Pam Chatfield, Jim Christopher, Clayton Hill, Jay Stover (lead zombies), John Harrison (zombie janitor), George A. Romero (TV studio director), Christine Forrest (assistant TV studio director) Knightriders, 1981 Director: George A. Romero Producer: Richard P. Rubinstein Executive Producer: Salah M. Hassanein Screenplay: George A. Romero Director of Photography: Michael Gornick Editors: George A. Romero and Pasquale Buba Sound: John Butler Music: Donald Rubinstein Production Company: Laurel Entertainment Length: 145 mins

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Cast: Ed Harris (Billy Davis), Gary Lahti (Alan), Tom Savini (Morgan), Amy Ingersol (Linet), Patricia Tallman (Julie), Christine Forrest (Angie), Warner Shook (Pippin), Brother Blue (Merlin), Cynthia Adler (Rockie), John Amplas (Whiteface), Don Berry (Bagman), Amanda Davies (Sheila), Martin Ferrero (Bontempi), Ken Foree (Little John), Ken Hixon (Steve), John Hostetter (Tuck), Harold Wayne Jones (Bors), Randy Kovitz (Punch), Michael Moran (Sheriff Cook), Scott Reiniger (Marhalt), Maureen Sadusk (Judy Rawls), Albert Amerson (Indian), Ronald Carrier (Hector), Tim DiLeo (Corncook), David Early (Bleoboris), John Harrison (Pellinore), Marty Schiff (Ban), Taso N. Stavrakis (Ewain), Robert Williams (Kay), Molly McCloskey (Corncook’s woman), Judy Barrett, Ian Gallacher, Donald Rubinstein (musician trio), Stephen King (hoagie man), Tabitha King (hoagie man’s wife) Creepshow, 1982 Director: George A. Romero Producer: Richard P. Rubinstein Executive Producer: Salah M. Hassenein Screenplay: Stephen King Director of Photography: Michael Gornick Editors: Pasquale Buba (‘The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill’), Paul Hirsch (‘The Crate’), George A. Romero (Prologue, Epilogue, ‘Something to Tide You Over’), Michael Spolan (‘Father’s Day’, ‘They’re Creeping Up On You’) Special Effects Make-up: Tom Savini Production Design Special Effects: Cletus Anderson Production Sound Services: Ledol, Inc. Music: John Harrison with additional stock library music Assistant Director: Christine Forrest First Assistant Director: John Harrison Production Company: Laurel Entertainment Distributor: Warner Bros. Length: 122 mins Cast: Prologue/Epilogue: Tom Atkins (Billy’s father), Iva Jean Saraceni (Billy’s mother), Joe King (Billy), Marty Schiff (first garbageman), Tom Savini (second garbageman) ‘Father’s Day’: Carrie Nye (Sylvia Grantham), Viveca Lindfors (Aunt Bedelia), Ed Harris (Hank Blaine), Warner Schook (Richard Grantham), Elizabeth Regan (Cass Blaine), Jon Lormer (Nathan Grantham), John Amplas (Dead Nate), Nann Mogg (Mrs. Danvers), Peter Messer (Yarbro) ‘The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verill’: Stephen King (Jordy Verrill), Bingo O’Malley (Jordy’s Dad, bank loan officer, Department of Meteors head doctor) ‘Something to Tide You Over’: Leslie Nielsen (Richard Vickers), Ted Danson (Harry Wentworth), Gaylen Ross (Becky Vickers) ‘The Crate’: Hal Holbrook (Henry Northrup), Adrienne Barbeau (Wilma ‘Billie’ Northrup), Fritz Weaver (Dexter Stanley), Robert Harper (Charlie Gereson), Don Keefer (Mike the janitor), Christine Forrest (Tabitha Raymond), Chuck Aber (Richard Raymond), Cletus Anderson (Host), Kathie Karlovitz (Maid), Darryl Ferruci (‘Fluffy’) ‘They’re Creeping Up On You’: E. G. Marshall (Upson Pratt), David Early (White) Day of the Dead, 1985 Director: George A. Romero Producer: Richard P. Rubinstein Executive Producer: Salah M. Hassanein Screenplay: George A. Romero Director of Photography: Michael Gornick Editor: Pasquale Buba Special Effects Make-up: Tom Savini

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Art Director: Bruce Miller Music: John Harrison First Assistant Director: John Harrison Production Company: Laurel Entertainment Distributor: United Film Distribution Length: 102 mins Cast: Lori Cardille (Sarah), Terry Alexander (John), Joseph Pilato (Captain Rhodes), Richard Liberty (Dr. Logan), Howard Sherman (Bub), Jarlath Conroy (McDermott), Antone DiLeo (Miguel), G. Howrd Klar (Steele), Ralph Marrero (Rickles), John Amplas (Fisher), Philip G. Kellams (Torrez), Taso N. Stavrakis (Miller), Gregory Nicotero (Johnson) Tales from the Darkside, 1985–86 ‘Trick or Treat’ (series pilot shot in 1983) Director: Bob Balaban Teleplay: George A. Romero ‘The Devil’s Advocate’ Director: Michael Gornick Teleplay: George A. Romero ‘Baker’s Dozen’ Director: John Sutherland Teleplay: George A. Romero from a story by Scott Edelman ‘Circus’ Director: Michael Gornick Teleplay: George A. Romero from a story by Sidney J. Bounds Creepshow 2, 1987 Director: Michael Gornick Screenplay: George A. Romero Monkey Shines, 1988 Director: George A. Romero Producer: Charles Evans Screenplay: George A. Romero based on the novel by Michael Stewart Director of Photography: James A. Contner Editor: Pasquale Buba Music: David Shire Peoduction Designer: Cletus Anderson Distributor: Orion Length: 113 mins Cast: Jason Beghe (Allan Mann), John Pankow (Geoffrey Fisher), Kate McNeil (Melanie Parker), Joyce Van Patten (Dorothy Mann), Christine Forrest (Maryanne Hodges), Stephen Root (Dean Burbage), Stanley Tucci (Dr. John Wiseman), Janine Turner (Linda Aikman), William Newman (Doc Williams), Tudi Wiggins (Esther Fry), Tom Quinn (Charlie Cunningham), Chuck Baker (ambulance driver), Patricia Tallman (party guest) Two Evil Eyes, 1988 Directors: George A. Romero and Dario Argento Screenplay: George A. Romero, Dario Argento and Franco Ferrini Cast: Adrienne Barbour (Jessica Valdemar), Ramy Zada (Dr. Robert Hoffman), E. G. Marshall (Pike), Bingo O’Malley (Ernest Valdemar), Nurse (Christine Forrest), Police Officer (Tom Atkins).

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Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, 1990 Screenplay: ‘Cat from Hell’ episode Director: John Harrison Night of the Living Dead, 1990 Director: Tom Savini Producers: John A. Russo and Russ Streiner Executive Producers: Menahem Golan and George A. Romero Screenplay: George A. Romero based on the original screenplay of Night of the Living Dead by John A. Russo and George A. Romero Director of Photography: Frank Prinzi Music: Paul McCollough Production Company: 21st Century Film Corporation Distribution: Columbia Length: 96 mins Cast: Tony Todd (Ben), Patricia Tallman (Barbara), Tom Towles (Harry), McKee Anderson (Helen), William Butler (Tom), Kate Finneran (Judy Rose), Bill Mosley (Johnny), Heather Mazur (Sarah), Bill ‘Chilly Billy’ Cardone (TV Interviewer) The Dark Half, 1993 Director: George A. Romero Producer: Declan Baldwin Executive Producer: George A. Romero Screenplay: George A. Romero based on the novel by Stephen King Director of Photography: Tony Pierce Roberts Editor: Pasquale Buba Music: Christopher Young Production Designer: Cletus Anderson Production Company and Distribution: Orion Length: 122 mins Cast: Timothy Hutton (Thad Beaumont/George Stark), Amy Madigan (Liz Beaumont), Michael Rooker Alan Pangborn), Julie Harris (Reggie Delesseps), Robert Joy (Fred Clawson), Kent Boradhurt (Mike Donaldson), Beth Grant (Shayla Beaumont), Rytanya Alda (Miriam Cowley), Patrick Brannan (Young Thad Beaumont), Larry John Meyers (Doc Pritchard), Christina Romero (Little Girl), Rohn Thomas (Dr. Alberston), Judy Grafe (Head Nurse), John Machione (Male Nurse), Erik Jensen (Male Student), Tom Mardirosian (Rick Cowley), Glenn Colerider (Homer Gamache), Christine Forrest (Trudi Wiggins), Royal Dano (Digger Holt), Chelsea Field (Anna Pangborn), Sarah Parker (Wendy Beaumont), Elizabeth Parker (William Beaumont) Bruiser, 2000 Director: George A. Romero Producers: Peter Grunwald and Ben Barenholz Executive Producer: Allen M. Shore Screenplay: George A. Romero Director of Photography: Adam Swica Editor: Miume Jan Eramo Music: Donald Rubinstein Production Designer: Sandra Kybartas Production Company: Romero-Grunwald Productions.

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Distribution: Lionsgate Length: 99 mins Cast: Jason Flemyng (Henry Creedlow), Leslie Hope (Rosemary Newley), Peter Stormare (Miles Styles), Nina Garbiras (Janine Creedlow), Andrew Tarbet (James Larson), Tom Atkins (Detective McCleary), Jonathan Higgins (Detective Rakowski), Jeff Monahan (Tom Burtram), Marie V. Cruz (Number 9), Beatriz Pizano (Katie Saldano), The Misfits (Themselves), Tina Romero (Cleopatra), Andrew Romero (Little Devil) Christine Forrest (Birdcage Partygoer). Land of the Dead, 2005 Director: George A. Romero Producers: Mark Canton, Peter Grunwald, and Bernie Goldman Executive Producers: Steve Barnet, Dennis E. Jones, and Ryan Kavanaugh Screenplay: George A. Romero Director of Photography: Mirosław Baszak Editor: Michael Doherty Music: Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimel Production Designer: Arv Grewal Production Company: Mark Canton-Bernie Goldman and Romero-Grunwald Distribution: Universal Length: 97 mins Cast: Simon Baker (Riley), John Leguizamo (Cholo), Dennis Hopper (Kaufman), Asia Argento (Stack), Robert Joy (Charlie), Eugene Clark (Big Daddy), Joanne Boland (Pretty Boy), Tony Nappo (Foxy), Jennifer Baxter (Number 9), Pedro Miguel Arce (Pillsbury), Sasha Roiz (Manolete), Tina Romero (‘High Noon’ Soldier), Simon Pegg (Photo Booth Zombie), Edgar Wright (Phone Booth Zombie), Devon Bostick (Brian) Diary of the Dead, 2007 Director: George A. Romero Producers: Peter Grunwald, Art Spigel, Sam Englebardt, and Ara Katz Executive Producers: Dan Fireman, John Harrison, and Steve Barnett Screenplay: George A. Romero Director of Photography: Adam Swica Editor: Michael Doherty Music: Norman Orenstein Production Designer: Rupert Lazarus Production Company: Artfire Films-Romero-Grunwald Distribution: Dimension Extreme Length: 96 mins Cast: Michelle Morgan (Debra Moynihan), Joshua Close (Jason Creed), Shawn Roberts (Tony Ravello), Amy Lalonde (Tracy Thurman), Scott Wentworth (Andrew Maxwell), Philip Riccio (Ridley Wilmott), Chris Violette (Gordo Thorsen), Tatiana Maslany (Mary Dexter), Todd Schroeder (Brody), Megan Park (Francine), Gregory Nicotero (Zombie Surgeon), R.D. Reid (Farmer), Alan Van Sprang (National Guardsman), George A. Romero (Police Chief Arthur Katz), Wes Craven, Stephen King, Simon Pegg, Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo del Toro (Newsreader Voices). Survival of the Dead, 2009 Director: George A. Romero Producer: Paula Devonshire Executive Producers: D.J. Carson, Michael Doherty, Sam Englebardt, Dan Fireman, Jeff Glickman, Peter Grunwald, Jesse D. Ikeman, Ara Katz, Art Spigel

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Screenplay: George A. Romero Director of Photography: Adam Swica Editor: Michael Doherty Music: Robert Carli Production Designer: Joshu de Cartier Production Company: Artfire Films-Romero-Grunwald Distribution: Optimum Releasing Ltd. Length: 86 mins Cast: Alan Van Sprang (‘Nicotine’ Crockett), Kenneth Welsh (Patrick O’Flynn), Kathleen Munroe (Janet/ Jane O’Flynn), Devon Bostick (Brian), Richard Fitzpatrick (Seamus Muldoon), Athena Karkanis (Tomboy), Stefano DiMatteo (Francisco), Joris Jarsky Chuck), Eric Woolfe (Kenny), Julian Richings (James O’Flynn), Wayne Robson (Tawdry O’Flynn), George Stroumboulopoulos (Talk-Show Host)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INDEX

Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (film), 18 Abu Ghraib, 190, 206, 211, 234 Adam, Eddie, 67 adaptation, 219 Adler, Cynthia, 107, 111 Adorno, Theodor, 106, 179 The Adventures of Quentin Durward (film), 108 The Affair (film), 38 afterlife, 168, 188 The Age of Innocence (film), 105 Agnew, Spiro, 41, 44 A-I (film), 191 Aikman, Linda (character in Monkey Shines), 149 Air Force (film), 108 Alan (character in Knightriders), 111, 112, 114, 117, 118 Alda, Rutanya, 173 Aldrich, Robert, 5, 71, 193 Alexander, Terry, 138 Alex in Wonderland (film), 55 Alice’s Restaurant (film), 106 Alien (film), 133, 147, 161, 242 alienation, 55, 56, 116, 153, 178, 182 Allan (character in Monkey Shines), 148, 149–50, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156–57, 159–60, 161, 163, 174

allegory, 3, 24, 31, 50, 65, 66, 119, 120, 121, 134, 137, 168, 174, 190, 196, 197, 217, 235 Allen, Tom, 2 alternative strategies, 11, 40, 48, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 79, 80, 84, 85, 101, 103, 107, 108, 115, 119, 122, 142, 144, 146, 167, 209, 217, 222, 226, 229, 232, 244, 245, 246 Altman, Robert, 9 ambiguity, 145, 161, 176, 246 ambivalence, 154, 172, 242 American Dream, 24, 85, 128, 170, 193 An American Family (film), 30 American family horror film/American horror film, 1, 9, 15, 20, 24, 142, 162, 237, 243 American Gothic, 23 American political sagas, 6 American Psycho (Ellis), 90, 91 American society, 7, 10, 16, 23, 28, 29, 59, 65, 237 An American Tragedy (Dreiser), 189 Amerson, Albert, 116 Ames (character in Sister Carrie), 21 Amplas, John, 83, 108, 110, 125, 126, 141 The Amusement Park (film), 235–37 Amy (character in Curse of the Cat People), 85

Anderegg, Michael, 106 Anderson, Donna, 48 Anderson, McKee, 244 animal imagery, 20, 92, 122, 124, 153 animal instincts, 160, 161 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 42, 99, 182 ‘Anubis’ (Romero), 134 apocalypse, 12, 13, 15, 79, 90, 104, 223 appearance, contrasted with reality, 122, 123 The Apprentice (TV show), 87 arbitrary violence, 28 Arce, Pedro Miguel, 192 Archers, 10 ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ (song), 171, 172 Argento, Asia, 192 Argento, Dario, 104, 162 Arkoff, Sam, 109 Artfire Films, 197 Arthur (character in Martin), 85, 86, 167 Artie (character in The Crazies), 72, 74, 76, 77, 78 aspirations, destruction/failure of, 30, 42 Atkins, Tom, 122, 170, 181 Au Bonheur des Dames (Zola), 14, 16, 92, 183, 184 audience identification, 93 audience manipulation, 202 audience reception, 36, 120 Bachman, Richard, 171 Baffico, Jim, 95, 111 Bagman (character in Knightriders), 114, 115, 116 Baker, Simon, 185 Bakersfield (location in Knightriders), 144 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 36 Balaban, Bob, 240 balance, 113 Ban, Sir (character in Knightriders), 109 bankruptcy: of capitalist family values, 77; of old society, 33, 71, 75, 95, 141, 144; of patriarchy, 94 286

index

Barbara (character in Night of the Living Dead ), 16, 27, 28, 29–31, 32, 35, 50, 55, 67, 93, 104, 123, 207, 231, 242, 243, 244, 245–47 barbarism, 99, 230 Barbeau, Adrienne, 129, 130, 164 Barthes, Roland, 19 Bartleby (character in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’), 91 Baszak, Miroslaw, 185 Bat (character in Only Angels Have Winds), 118 Bateman, Patrick (character in American Psycho), 90, 91 Bates, Mrs (character in Psycho), 14 Bates, Norman (character in Psycho), 83, 124 Baxter, Jennifer, 192 Beard, Steve, 3 Beaumont (character in White Zombie), 18 Beaumont, Liz (character in The Dark Half), 171 Beaumont, Thad (character in The Dark Half), 170, 171, 172 Bedelia (character in Creepshow), 123, 124, 125 Bedlam (film), 138 Beghe, Jason, 148, 149, 156 behaviour: alienated modes of, 101; conditioned, 186; consumerist, 16; contradictory, 222; deadly patterns of, 167, 233; detrimental/negative patterns of, 12, 30, 37, 43, 85, 104, 155, 165; influences on, 53; male/ masculine, 39, 246, 247; mechanical, 181; neurotic patterns of, 124; obsolete patterns of, 103; old and instinctual patterns of, 6, 28, 39, 40, 45, 56, 58, 95, 97, 100, 101, 123, 125, 128, 148, 165, 216, 219, 221, 223, 231; past modes of, 235; pathological, 124; progressive, 191; rational/irrational, 32, 34, 129, 130, 228; redundant and useless patterns of, 217, 219,

245; regressive, 108; repetitioncompulsive, 125; self-destructive, 113; selfish pattern of, 102; social/ civilised, 142, 183; that characters have no control over, 11; violent, 98, 223, 246; worst patterns of, 175; zombie, 136. See also cannibalism; masochism; sadism Bell, Edith, 76 Bellamy, Madge, 18 Ben (character in Night of the Living Dead ), 27, 29, 31, 32–33, 34, 35, 37, 42, 53, 68, 72, 97, 104, 208, 212, 217, 243, 244, 245, 246 Bendix, William, 109 Bergman, Ingmar, 182 Berry, Don, 114 Beyond Thunderdome (film), 6, 195 Bickford, Charles, 218, 223 Bierce, Ambrose, 23 Big Brother (TV series), 87, 190 The Big Country (film), 218, 223 Big Daddy (character in Land of the Dead ), 6, 182, 186, 187, 191, 192, 193, 194, 208 Big Trouble in Little China (film), 195 Bill (character in Day of the Dead ), 140, 142, 143, 144, 145 Billy (character in Creepshow), 122–23, 133 Billy (character in Knightriders), 53, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113–14, 115, 116, 117, 119, 144, 146, 149 Billy (character in The Crazies), 67, 68 bin Laden, Osama, 192 The Birds (film), 128, 153 Birman, Matt, 226 black humour, 139, 166 The Black Shield of Falworth (film), 109 Blaine, Hank (character in Creepshow), 123 blaxploitation genre, 26 ‘The Blue Hotel’ (Crane), 92 Bluto (character in Day of the Dead ), 136

Bogie (character in Monkey Shines), 153, 155 Boland, Joanne, 187 Bonnie and Clyde (film), 55 Bontempi (character in Knightriders), 107, 116, 117 Bors (character in Knightriders), 117, 118 Bostick, Devon, 190, 224 boundaries, 18, 35, 43, 54, 66, 78, 91, 144, 159, 182, 191, 198, 200, 201, 203 Bowlby, Rachel, 92, 93 Bowling for Columbine (film), 194 Boy (character in Survival of the Dead ), 222, 224, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232 Bradbury, Ray, 23 Braddock (location in Martin), 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 139, 144 The Braddock Chronicles (Buba), 88 Brando, Marlon, 39, 117 Brenner, Lydia (character in The Birds), 153 Brian (character in Land of the Dead ), 190, 194 The Bride of Frankenstein (film), 152, 156, 158, 212 Brigadoon (musical), 218 British Amicus, 2 Britton, Andrew, 9, 163, 170 Broadhurst, Kent, 174 Brookmyre, Dr. (character in The Crazies), 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76 Brooks, Richard, 199 Brother Blue, 108, 111 Brown, Jim, 72 Brown, Norman O., 126 Brubaker (character in The Crazies), 71, 74, 77 Bruiser (film), 5, 6, 177, 178–84, 194, 276–77 brute imagery, 21 Bub (character in Day of the Dead ), 6, 19, 43, 136, 137, 142, 146, 160, 185, 186, 191 Buba, Pasquale, 88 Buba, Tony, 17, 88, 137 index

287

Bullets or Ballots (film), 202 Burbage, Dean (character in Monkey Shines), 153–54, 158, 161 Burdette, Nathan (character in Rio Bravo), 107 Bush, George W., 6, 186, 188 Butler, William, 244 Button, Erik, 7 Buzzolani, Dario, 7 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (film), 17 camera: objective camera, 198, 202; subjective camera, 198, 199, 202 Camille (character in Thérèse Raquin), 164 Canada, Romero’s move to, 176, 178, 194, 215, 234, 235, 238 cannibalism, 124, 125, 139, 192 capitalist society, 26, 53, 56, 62, 77, 100, 101, 103, 132, 133, 135, 153, 165, 180, 183, 188, 225, 241 Capra, Frank, 218 Cardille, Lori, 21, 137 Carlos (character in Rio Bravo), 107 Carne, Marcel, 164 carnivore imagery, 93 Carpenter, John, 171, 195 Carpenter, Romero, Cronenberg: Discorso sulla cosa (Esposito), 7 Carrie (film), 24, 147 Carrier, Ronald, 109 Carroll, Lane, 69 Carson, John (character in Plague of the Zombies), 18 Carter, Geoff, 225 cartoon imagery, 10 Caruso, Giacomo, 7 Cass (character in Creepshow), 123, 125 castration, 14, 16, 127, 143, 180, 183 Casualties of War (film), 199 ‘The Cat From Hell’ (screenplay), 240–41 The Cat People (film), 85 Cavell, Stanley, 46 Cesare (character in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), 17 288

index

CGI techniques, 205, 216 chamber drama, 163, 178 Chance, John T. (character in Rio Bravo), 106, 107, 108, 111 change, capacity for making/possibility of, 113, 179 Charlie (character in Creepshow), 130 Charlie (character in Land of the Dead), 186, 191, 192 Chenal, Pierre, 164 Cheyenne Autumn (film), 177 Chicago Democratic Convention (1968), 36 Chico (character in Day of the Dead ), 135 Chihuahua (character in Land of the Dead ), 191 Chiles, Lois, 239, 240 Chimes at Midnight (film), 106, 241 Chinatown (film), 9 Cholo (character in Land of the Dead ), 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195 Chris (character in There’s Always Vanilla), 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49–50, 51, 53, 58, 74, 81 Christine (character in I Walked with a Zombie), 17 Christine (character in Martin), 58, 82, 85, 86, 104, 167 Christine (film), 195 Chronique d’un été (film), 204 chronology, 249–51 Chuck (character in Survival of the Dead ), 217, 223, 226, 230 Cimino, Michael, 109, 196 Cineaste, 195 cinema of attractions, 10 Cinema Scope (magazine), 195 cinematic naturalism, 12, 28, 236 Cisco (character in Survival of the Dead ), 221, 224, 225, 228, 232 Citizen Kane (film), 188, 189, 215, 241 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 102 Clank (character in The Crazies), 69, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 95, 98, 242

Clark, Eugene, 186 Clark, John R., 181, 234–35 class harassment, 95, 137 classical horror film, 2, 29, 83, 212 Clawson, Fred (character in The Dark Half ), 171, 173, 174, 175, 176 Clive, Colin, 152, 156, 158 Close, Joshua, 200 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (film), 236 Cloverfield (film), 198, 199, 205, 212 Code Name: Trixie (film), 65 Cohen, Larry, 1, 9, 10, 31, 162 The Colbys (TV series), 136 Cold War, 22, 23, 27, 28, 67, 70, 71, 120, 121, 138, 223, 237 Colerider, Glen, 174 Colman, Ronald, 218 Colorado (character in Rio Bravo), 108 ‘Comfort Rest’ (Creepshow episode), 129 Comics Code Authority Seal of Approval, 23 comic strips/comic books, 2, 10, 22, 67, 109, 121. See also EC Comics commodification, 92, 183, 184 communication, lack of, 40, 49, 51, 57, 82, 87, 101 compromise, 3, 45, 49, 51, 60, 61, 112, 114, 115, 116, 147, 223, 231, 232, 244 conformity, 23, 39, 41, 56, 61, 134, 142 confused characters, 52 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Twain), 109 Conrad, Joseph, 234 Conroy, Jarlath, 138 conservatism, 1, 162 constraints: affecting characters, 13, 182; affecting Romero, 137, 239 consumerist critique, 24, 29, 30, 31, 38, 56, 92, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 125, 133, 142, 183, 210, 216, 237. See also materialism The Conversation (film), 105 Cook, Deputy Sheriff (character in Knightriders), 112, 114

Cooper, Gary, 186 Cooper, Harry (character in Night of the Living Dead ), 32 Cooper, Helen (character in Night of the Living Dead ), 33, 124 Coopers (characters in Night of the Living Dead ), 20, 27, 33, 44, 68, 69 Coppola, Francis Ford, 105 Corman, Roger, 163, 164 A Corner in Wheat (film), 16 Coulter, Ann, 6 Country (film), 105 Courtney, Captain (character in The Dawn Patrol ), 108 Cowley, Rick (character in The Dark Half ), 173 Craig, Johnny, 23, 24 Crane, Lila (character in Psycho), 14 Crane, Marion (character in Psycho), 206 Crane, Stephen, 2, 92 ‘The Crate’ (Creepshow episode), 126, 129–31, 154, 164 Craven, Wes, 9, 10, 24, 162, 195, 197 The Crazies (film: Romero, 1973), 5, 6, 10, 19, 24, 34, 53, 65–79, 80, 81, 87, 90, 95, 96, 97, 106, 109, 110, 120, 122, 146, 147, 154, 171, 178, 196, 232, 272 The Crazies (film: Eisner, 2010), 5 creative frustration, 147 Creed, Jason (character in Diary of the Dead ), 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 220, 231 Creedlow, Henry (character in Bruiser), 179 Creepshow (film), 2, 25, 53, 109, 120–33, 239, 274 Creepshow 2 (film), 239–40, 241, 275 Crime Suspense (comic), 23 crowd theme, 16, 18, 93, 183, 254n10 Cruise, Tom, 6 CSI (TV series), 190 Cuda (character in Martin), 81, 82, 83, 84, 85–86, 88, 89, 108, 110, 113, 144, 167, 235 index

289

Cujo (film), 24 Cunningham, Coach Charlie (character in Monkey Shines), 150 Curse of the Cat People (film), 85 Curtis, Tony, 109 Dallas (TV series), 136 Danforth, Maxwell (character in The Osterman Weekend ), 199 Daniels, Melanie (character in The Birds), 153 Danny (character in The Shining), 172 Danson, Ted, 128 Dante, Joe, 6 Danvers, Mrs (character in Creepshow), 124, 125 Darby O’Gill and the Little People (film), 224 The Dark Knight Returns (film), 205 The Dark Half (film), 1, 10, 53, 162, 170–76, 178, 276 David (character in Dawn of the Dead ), 16, 19, 49, 246 David (character in The Crazies), 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78–79, 82, 89, 96, 103, 104, 113, 135, 242 Davies, Amanda, 116 Davis, Jack, 24 Dawn of the Dead (film: Romero, 1978), 5, 10, 14, 16, 19, 21, 24, 25, 31, 33, 38, 40, 41, 49, 52, 53, 64, 67, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 90–104, 106, 109, 113, 120, 121, 125, 128, 135, 137, 140, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 171, 178, 179, 184, 185, 191, 194, 195, 197, 198, 202, 204, 207, 208, 215, 216, 217, 231, 235, 244, 273 Dawn of the Dead (film: Snyder, 2004), 5, 184, 195 Dawn of the Dead: Anatomie einer Apokalypse (Koenig), 7 The Dawn Patrol (film), 108, 119 Day of the Dead (film: Romero, 1985), 14, 18, 19, 21, 22, 31, 33, 34, 40, 41, 53, 54, 56, 57, 64, 73, 78, 79, 93, 97, 101, 106, 109, 126, 134–46, 147, 154, 171, 290

index

179, 184, 185, 195, 197, 198, 204, 207, 216, 220, 232, 235, 237, 274–75 Day of the Dead (film: Miner, 2008), 184 Dead Reckoning (vehicle), 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194 Dean, James, 39 Dean, Julie (character in Knightriders), 108, 111, 114, 115, 117–18, 144 Deb (character in Diary of the Dead ), 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 209, 210, 211, 212–13, 230, 231 deceptive images, 54 Delesseps, Reggie (character in The Dark Half ), 171 del Toro, Guillermo, 197 de Maupassant, Guy, 23 DeMille, Cecil B., 184 Demos (Gissing), 19 Denbo, Riley (character in Land of the Dead), 184–85, 186 denial, 53, 84, 88, 110, 122, 149–50, 159, 160, 164–65, 173, 179, 206, 240 Denning, Michael, 23 De Palma, Brian, 9, 10, 162, 195, 198, 201 dérangement, 11, 12 desires: conflicting, 156; repressed, 20, 68, 159 destiny, 112, 113, 116, 117, 118, 132 determinism, 12, 13, 22, 36, 91, 92 Dexter (character in Creepshow), 130, 131 Dexter, Mary (character in Diary of the Dead ), 204 Dial M for Murder (film), 206 Diary of the Dead (film), 7, 178, 184, 185, 190, 195–214, 216, 218, 219, 220, 231, 277 Dickens, Charles, 209 Dickerson, Henry (character in Day of the Dead ), 136, 140, 141 Dickinson, Angie, 107–108 dilemmas, faced by characters, 40, 53, 55, 62, 81, 83, 84, 96, 114, 181, 217, 220 DiLeo, Antone, 138 Dillard, R. H. W., 2

DiMatteo, Stefano, 224 Dinicol, Joe, 204 Disney, Will, 69 The Divided Self (Laing), 84 Doc (film), 109 Doherty, Michael, 197 Domville, Philippa, 222 Donaldson, Mike (character in The Dark Half ), 174, 175 Dorian, Michael (character in There’s Always Vanilla), 43, 44, 45, 46, 48 Dorothy (character in Monkey Shines), 148, 151, 153, 154, 155–56, 157, 159, 166 Double Indemnity (film), 164 Dreiser, Theodore, 2, 21, 28, 37, 104, 189, 237 Drogan (character in ‘The Cat From Hell’), 241 Dr. Pascal (Zola), 11, 13, 14 Dr. Strangelove (film), 224 Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (film), 18 Drums Across the Mohawk (film), 188 duality, 60, 146 Dude (character in Rio Bravo), 108, 118 Duncan, Patrick, 199 Dunson, Tom (character in Red River), 114, 116, 210, 245 duplicity, 130, 149 DVD distribution, 5, 178, 181, 184, 195, 197, 210, 215 Dynasty (TV series), 136 Early, David, 132 Eastman, Marilyn, 33 Easy Rider (film), 9, 55, 189 EC Comics, 2, 3, 10, 22–25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 34, 35, 46, 65, 67, 69, 71, 79, 81, 89, 90, 91, 92, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 129, 131, 133, 142, 198, 237 Eddie (character in To Have and Have Not), 186 editing: over-abrupt editing style, 65; practices/system of Hollywood, 146, 204 education critique, 142–43, 145, 154, 186

Edwards, Ethan, 222 84 Charlie MoPic (film), 199 El Dorado (film), 108, 118, 177 Ella (character in Monkey Shines), 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154–55, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163 Elliot (character in Diary of the Dead ), 204, 207, 212 Ellis, Brett Easton, 90, 91 Elvis (TV movie), 171 Emge, David, 94 Engels, Friedrich, 230 entrapment: ideological confinement/ entrapment (see ideological confinement/entrapment); personal entrapment (see personal entrapment); social entrapment, 52, 72 environment, effects of, 30, 47, 48, 68, 81, 132, 204 escapism, 61, 89, 144 Esposito, Lorenzo, 7 Evans City (location in The Crazies), 66, 70, 71, 73, 74, 77, 79, 94 The Exorcist (film), 86 ‘The Experimental Novel’ (Zola), 1, 11, 12, 66 Explorer Satellite, 33 Eyes without a Face (film), 184 ‘The Facts in the Case of Mr Valdemar’ (film), 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 170 Falcon Crest (TV series), 136 false perceptions, 53 Falstaff (character in Chimes at Midnight), 106 family, effects of, 47, 50, 53, 81, 83, 88, 101, 103, 125, 143, 180, 216, 230. See also heredity, effects of The Family (film), 30 family violence, 68, 77 fantasy: combined with realism, 236; divisions between fantasy and reality, 70, 80, 81, 84, 85, 88, 110, 182; greatest power of, 235; role of, 144 fantasy sequences, 57, 60, 62, 130, 181 index

291

Fassett, Lawrence (character in The Osterman Weekend ), 199 Father (character in Creepshow), 127 ‘Father’s Day’ (Creepshow episode), 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 132, 166 Faujas, Abbé (character in La Conquête du Plassans), 85 Faulkner, William, 92 Feathers (character in Rio Bravo), 106, 107, 108 Fécondité (Zola), 106 Feldstein, Al, 23 female characters, positive, 175 female perspective, 171 feminist perspective, 33, 46, 59, 70, 108, 165, 242, 243, 245, 246 Ferrero, Martin, 116 Feullade, Louis, 184 F for Fake (film), 215 Fiddler’s Green (location in Land of the Dead ), 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194 Field, Chelsea, 171 filmography, 271–78 Finneran, Kate, 244 first-person subjective camera, 198 Fisher (character in Day of the Dead ), 136, 137, 141 Fisher, Geoffrey (character in Monkey Shines), 151 Fitzpatrick, Richard, 217 Fixed Bayonets (film), 67 Flemyng, Jason, 179 Floyd, Nigel, 239 Fondacaro, Phil, 191 Forbidden Planet (film), 153 Ford, John, 109, 177, 218 Foree, Ken, 95, 109, 110 Forrest, Christine, 82, 94, 129, 147, 151, 167 Forrest, J. Clifford, Jr., 86 Foster, Hal, 109 Fouret, Father (character in La Faute du l’Abbé Mouret ), 15 Fox, Richard, 16 292

index

Foxy (character in Land of the Dead ), 193 Fran (character in Dawn of the Dead ), 19, 21–22, 49, 69, 92, 93–94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 111, 114, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143, 145, 166, 207, 209, 242, 246 France, Richard, 19, 71, 94 Francine (character in Diary of the Dead ), 203 Francisco (character in Survival of the Dead ), 224 Franju, Georges, 184 Frankenstein, 141, 152, 155, 157, 179, 188, 203, 212 Fremont, Pierre (character in Zola novels), 11 French, anthologies including Romero’s work, 7 French, Warren, 21 frenzied direction, 65 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 84, 102, 103, 124, 126, 181, 182 Friday the 13th (film), 9, 135, 148, 162 Froment brothers (characters in Zola’s final trilogy), 106 Fry, Dr. Esther (character in Monkey Shines), 151 Frye, Dwight, 152 Fuller, Samuel, 67 The Fury (film), 196 Gagne, Paul R., 30, 39, 52, 53, 80, 102, 130 Gaines, William, 23, 24 Gamache, Homer (character in The Dark Half ), 174 Garbiras, Nina, 180 Gardner, John, 234 Garfield, John, 108 Garnett, Tay, 164 Garth, Matthew, 245 gay, 108, 111, 114 gender, 109, 173, 191, 193, 228, 235 Gent (character in Only Angels Have Wings), 118

Geoff (character in Monkey Shines), 150, 152–53, 154, 157, 158, 159–60, 161 George, Christopher, 187 George A. Romero (Caruso), 7 George A. Romero (Vallan), 7 George A. Romero: La notte dei morti viventi (Buzzolani), 7 George A. Romero: Un cinéma crépusculaire (Lafond), 7 German, publications on Romero, 7 Germinal (Zola), 11, 13, 14, 16, 19, 40, 88, 104 The Ghost Breakers (film), 17, 18 Gilling, John, 18 Gimme Shelter (film), 184 Gissing, George, 19 Gladiator (film), 205 Gledhill, George (character in Creepshow), 132 globalization, 180, 237 G-Men (film), 202 Godard, Jean-Luc, 42, 139, 150, 195, 196, 197, 201 Godfather (films), 9 Goodbye Columbus (film), 38 Gordo (character in Diary of the Dead ), 204, 205, 206, 207, 211 gore fests, 198 Gornick, Michael, 80, 86, 120, 239 Gorris, Marlene, 246 Gothic, 2, 80, 81, 84, 88, 124, 162, 163, 164, 166, 168, 170, 171, 174 government critique, 34, 66, 68, 71, 73, 74, 77, 79, 95, 129, 139, 196, 211 The Graduate (film), 38 Grand Guignol, 190 Grant, Barry K., 36, 37, 242 Grant, Julie (character in Day of the Dead ), 136, 137 Grantham, Nathan (character in Creepshow), 124, 127, 128 Grantham, Richard (character in Creepshow), 123 Grantham family (characters in Creepshow), 132

Greed (film), 2, 14 Greene, Graham, 204 The Green Berets (film), 65 Greenwald, Virginia, 56 Gregg (character in Jack’s Wife), 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63 Grendel, 234–35 Griffith, D. W., 16 Griffiths, Clyde, 189 gross-out, 12, 92, 120 grotesque, 2, 14, 15, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 55, 70, 83, 90, 91, 92, 96, 100, 116, 122, 124, 125, 126, 136, 143, 164, 181, 183, 187, 206, 234, 240, 243 grotesque realism, 10, 35, 36 Grunwald, Peter, 178, 195 Guantanamo Bay, 190, 234 Gumpert, Matthew, 36 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (film), 231 Hall, Jim (character in White Fang), 19 Hallam, Julia, 238 Haller, Lloyd, 72 Halloween (film), 9 Halperin, Victor, 17 Halstead (character in ‘The Cat From Hell’), 241 Hank (character in Creepshow), 125 Hansen, Ron, 120, 121 Hardman, Karl, 32, 33 harmonic variants, 216 Harper, Robert, 130 Harper, Stephen, 7 Harrah, J. P. (character in El Dorado), 118 Harris, Ed, 106, 109, 123 Harris, Jack, 52 Harris, Julie, 171, 172 Harris, Lyle (character in There’s Always Vanilla), 47 Harrison, John, 197, 239, 241 Harry (character in Creepshow), 129 Harry (character in Night of the Living Dead ), 27, 32–33, 34, 35, 37, 42, 53, 212, 217, 242, 244, 245 index

293

Harvey Weinstein Company, 195 Hatari! (film), 107 Hauer, Rutger, 199 Hawks, Howard, 102, 106, 108, 109, 114, 118, 119, 150, 177, 186, 187, 217, 218, 219, 226, 232 Hawksian professionalism, 107, 242, 244, 245 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 23 Hayden, Sterling, 109 Heaven’s Gate (film), 109, 196 Hector, Sir (character in Knightriders), 109 Helen (character in Night of the Living Dead ), 27, 33, 34, 35, 68, 244 Henreid, Mary (character in Day of the Dead ), 136, 137 Henreid, Paul, 43 Henry (character in Bruiser), 179, 180, 182–83, 184 Henry (character in Creepshow), 129, 130, 131, 181 Henry, O., 23, 34 heredity, effects of, 11, 12, 15, 19, 21, 30, 88. See also family, effects of heroines, 14, 27, 69, 74, 92, 93, 104, 146, 166, 183, 205, 207, 212, 219, 231, 242, 244, 245, 246. See also specific heroines hidden sides, 151 Higashi, Sumiko, 12 Hinzman, Bill, 28, 55, 59 His Girl Friday (film), 107 Hitchcock, Alfred, 22, 125, 128, 148, 149, 153, 202, 206, 221, 237, 242 Hixon, Ken, 115 Hodges, Maryanne (character in Monkey Shines), 147, 151 Hoffman, Dr. (character in ‘The Facts in the Case of Mr Valdemar’), 164 Hoffman, Dr. Robert (character in ‘The Facts in the Case of Mr Valdemar’), 165, 166, 167, 168–70 Holbrook, Hal, 129 Hollywood: deterioration of into alliance of corporate conglomerates, 9; 294

index

editing practices/system, 146, 204; as hostile to progressive creative expression, 6; and profit motive, 9; Western merged with zombie film, 217–18 Homecoming (TV series), 6 Home Movies (film), 195, 196, 201 Homer (character in The Dark Half ), 174 homo economicus, 101, 115, 169 homoerotic associations, 103 homosexuality, 88. See also gay; lesbian Hooper, Tobe, 9, 10, 243 Hope, Bob, 18 Hope, Leslie, 180 Hopper, Dennis, 9, 188 horror films: American family horror film/American horror film (see American family horror film/ American horror film); classical (see classical horror film); as representing return of the repressed, 20; social dimensions of, 237, 238 Howard, Father (character in Martin), 86 Howard, June, 12, 13, 18, 20, 21, 22 ‘How Little We Know’ (song), 106 human responsibility, 30, 113, 151, 175 humans, contrasted with zombies/ monsters, 16, 78, 89, 167, 190, 191, 197, 198, 229 Humphries, Reynold, 207, 208, 237 Hungry Wives! (film), 52 Hurricane Katrina, 208 Hurstwood (character in Sister Carrie), 22, 28 Hurt, John, 133, 199 Hussein, Saddam, 189 Hutton, Timothy, 172, 176 hypocrisy, 130, 230 Ibsen, Henrik, 2, 237 ideal heroines, 166 idealism, 30, 105, 106, 108, 112, 116, 119, 134

identity politics, 72 ideological confinement/entrapment, 11, 30, 39, 48, 56, 58, 60, 69, 72, 73, 75, 77, 82, 84, 86, 87, 98, 100, 127, 139, 141, 199, 216, 218, 227, 228, 229, 232, 245, 247 ‘I’d Rather Be a Wanderer’ (song), 119 I Eat Your Skin (film), 17 I Know What You Did Last Summer (film), 9 illusions, 38, 43–44, 48, 54, 81, 84, 85, 110, 139, 144, 145, 146, 220 ‘I’m a Man’ (song), 96 ‘Impressed by a Nightmare’ (Orlando), 24 incest, 22, 77, 78, 124, 125 Indian (character in Knightriders), 116–17, 118 individual entrapment, 52. See also personal entrapment Ingersoll, Amy, 110 insecure males, 76 ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ (Freud), 103, 181 institutional violence, 76, 97 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (film), 138 Irena (character in The Cat People), 85 Irish (character in Day of the Dead ), 135 ironic humour, 188 irony, 91, 92, 101, 120, 128, 142, 185, 203, 207, 208, 209, 211, 232 Italian, publications on Romero, 7 Ivanhoe (Scott), 108, 109 Ives, Burl, 218, 223 I Walked with a Zombie (film), 17 J’Accuse (Zola), 237 Jack (character in Jack’s Wife), 54, 55, 56, 60, 62, 111 Jackson, John, 24 Jack’s Wife (film), 10, 19, 24, 40, 52–64, 66, 67, 70, 79, 80, 81, 87, 90, 96, 110, 113, 144, 150, 154, 181, 272 Jadwin, Laura (character in The Pit), 100

Jagger, Dean (character in Revolt of the Zombies), 17, 18 James, Henry, 21 Jane (character in Survival of the Dead ), 217, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226, 227, 229, 231, 232 Janet (character in Survival of the Dead ), 217, 220, 221, 224, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231, 232 Janine (character in Bruiser), 180, 181, 182 Jarsky, Joris, 217 Jason (character in Diary of the Dead ), 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 220, 231 Jaws (film), 9 Jazz Age, 14 Jessel, Chris, 113 Jessica (character in ‘The Facts in the Case of Mr Valdemar’), 165, 166, 167, 168 Jim (character in Bruiser), 180 Joan (character in Jack’s Wife), 54, 55–57, 58, 59–63, 71, 81, 84, 87, 88, 93, 96, 101, 104, 107, 157, 242, 246 John (character in Day of the Dead ), 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 144, 145, 242, 246 Johnny (character in Night of the Living Dead ), 27, 29–30, 32, 55, 67, 96, 123, 125, 168, 231, 242, 243, 246 Johnson (character in Day of the Dead ), 140 Johnson, Hildy (character in His Girl Friday), 107 Jones, Duane, 29 Jones, Harold Wayne, 69, 117 Jones, Jenny, 87 Jordy (character in Creepshow), 126, 127–28 Joy, Robert, 173, 186 Judex (film), 184 Judy (character in Knightriders), 116, 117 index

295

Judy (character in Night of the Living Dead ), 20, 27, 33, 34, 44, 74, 75, 93, 244, 245 Judy (character in The Crazies), 69–70, 71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 78, 104 Julie (character in Day of the Dead ), 136, 137 Julie (character in Knightriders), 108, 111, 114, 115, 117–18, 144 Kael, Pauline, 105, 117 Kai (character in Ebola Syndrome), 223 Kamen, Jack, 123, 239 Karen (character in Night of the Living Dead ), 27, 33, 35, 68 Karkaris, Athena, 224 Karloff, Boris, 18, 29, 152, 157, 179, 212 Kathy (character in The Crazies), 72, 74, 76, 77, 78 Katz, Arthur (character in Diary of the Dead ), 201, 208 Kaufman (character in Land of the Dead ), 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194 Keefer, Don, 129 Kehr, Dave, 146 Kelly, Gene, 218 Kelly, Grace, 206 Kennedy, George, 239 Kenny (character in Survival of the Dead ), 219, 220, 224, 225, 226 Kilroy (TV show), 87 King, Joe, 122 King, Larry, 6 King, Stephen, 2, 24–25, 108, 111, 120, 121, 124, 126, 142, 162, 170, 171, 172, 174, 197, 237, 239 King, Tabia, 111 King of the Zombies (film), 17, 18 Klar, Gary, 140 Knightriders (film), 53, 104, 105–119, 120, 139, 144, 174, 177, 217, 242, 273–74 Knights of the Round Table (film), 108 Knipp (character in Land of the Dead ), 193 296

index

Koenig, Frank, 7 Kosana, George, 35 Kosintsev, Grigori, 70 Krueger, Freddy (character in Nightmare on Elm Street series), 14 Kublai Khan, 189 Kubrick, Stanley, 224 Kurten, Peter, 83 La Bête Humaine (Zola), 11, 13, 14, 41, 70, 88, 148 La Conquête du Plassans (Zola), 14, 85 La Curée (Zola), 14, 183 La Faute du l’Abbé Mouret (Zola), 14, 15 Lafond, Frank, 7 La Fortune des Rougon (Zola), 13, 14, 16, 30, 93 Lahti, Gary, 111 Laine, Ray, 39, 55, 58 Laing, R. D., 84 La Joie du Vivre (Zola), 14 Lalonde, Amy, 202 Lambert, Jack, 18 Lancaster, Burt, 199 Land of the Dead (film), 5, 6, 134, 178, 184–94, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 202, 204, 208, 216, 235, 277 Lang, Fritz, 40 Lange, Jessica, 105 Lansing, Annie (character in ‘The Hitchiker’), 240 Lantier, Claude (character in Zola novels), 11 Lantier, Etienne (character in Zola novels), 11, 16, 104 Lantier, Jacques (character in Zola novels), 11, 88, 148 L’Argent (Zola), 14, 15 L’Assommoir (Zola), 11, 13, 14, 88, 237 Last Exit to Brooklyn (film), 2 last romantic couple theme, 69, 111 The Last Temptation of Christ (film), 105 Latent Image, 147, 235 La Terre (Zola), 14, 237 Laurel Company, 65, 90, 137, 239

Laurel Entertainment, 147 Laurent (character in Thérèse Raquin), 14, 61, 164 Laveuve (character in Paris), 13 Lawrence, D. H., 37 leadership: masculine ideas of, 109; problems of, 107, 116 Lears, T. Jackson, 16 Le Débâcle (Zola), 11, 12, 13, 14, 70, 144 Le Dernier Tournant (film), 164 Ledger, Heath, 205 Lee, Hiram, 208 Le gai savoir (film), 195, 197 Legendre (character in White Zombie), 17, 18 Leguizamo, John, 187 Lehan, Richard, 12 Leigh, Janet, 109, 206 Leone, Sergio, 6 Le rêve (Zola), 218 lesbian, 108, 109, 111, 114, 224, 225, 226 Less Than Zero (Ellis), 91 Lester (character in Knightriders), 111 Le Ventre du Paris (Zola), 15 Levitsky, Al, 88 Lewis (character in Martin), 88 Lewis, Jerry, 18 Lewton, Val, 138, 188 L’Homme sans visage (film), 184 liberation, 54, 57, 58, 87, 179, 197 Liberty, Richard, 19, 72, 141 Life Against Death (Brown), 126 Lightning over Braddock (film), 17, 88 Linda (character in Monkey Shines), 150, 151, 157, 166 Lindfors, Viveca, 123, 124 Linet (character in Knightriders), 108, 110, 114, 116, 117, 118 Lippe, Richard, 82, 89 literary naturalism, 1, 3, 10, 11, 12, 13–14, 18, 22, 23, 26, 28, 89, 91, 163, 164, 237 Little John (character in Knightriders), 110, 111, 114 The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (film), 17

living dead themes, 23 Liz (character in The Dark Half ), 171, 172, 173, 175, 176 Logan, Dr. (character in Day of the Dead ), 34, 43, 101, 135, 136, 137, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 152, 154, 158, 160, 186, 232 Logan, Dr. (character in Plague of the Zombies), 19 Logan, Pat, 243 London, Jack, 2, 14, 19, 22, 92, 237 ‘The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill’ (Creepshow episode), 126–28, 130 Lormer, Jon, 124 Lost Horizon (film), 218 Loudermilk, John A., 7 Lourdes (Zola), 11 love interlude/romantic interlude, 20, 34, 44, 74 low-budget cinema, 26, 38, 115, 148, 178, 195, 196, 197, 201, 216, 233 Lowry, Lynn, 72 Lucas, George, 9, 236, 238 Lugosi, Bela, 18, 29, 122 Lynn (character in There’s Always Vanilla), 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47–49, 50, 51, 53, 81, 104 Maazel, Lincoln, 83, 235, 236 MaCabe, Colin, 238 Macbeth (film), 233 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 152, 155 MacGuffin device/motif, 78, 129, 148, 221, 237 Machine, Alexis (character in The Dark Half ), 173, 174, 176 machines, as beasts, 40–41 Mack, Gene, 193 Macquart, Gervaise (character in Zola novels), 11 Macquart, Jean (character in Zola novels), 11, 13, 144 ‘Madame Bluebeard’ (Orlando), 24 Madigan, Amy, 171, 173 Mad magazine, 23, 24, 26 index

297

Mad Max (films), 6 Maggie (Crane), 20, 92 The Magnificent Ambersons (film), 241 Malcolm X, 193 male arrogance, 58, 76 male control, 27, 60, 103. See also patriarchy male violence, 76, 171, 246 Mamet, David, 164 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Wilson), 22–23 Mann, Allan (character in Monkey Shines), 148 Mann, Thomas, 91, 234 Manolete (character in Land of the Dead ), 192 The Man Who Knew Too Much (film), 242 Marhalt (character in Knightriders), 111 Maria (character in Day of the Dead ), 135 Maridirosian, Tom, 173 Marion (character in Jack’s Wife), 54, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63 Marrero, Ralph, 140 marriage, 48, 51, 59, 63, 69, 76, 115, 117, 130, 165, 172, 183 Marshall, E. G., 131, 164 Marshment, Margaret, 238 Martin (character in Martin), 96, 101, 108, 110, 113, 144, 167 Martin (film), 17, 19, 40, 47, 52, 54, 58, 64, 80–89, 90, 94, 96, 107, 110, 112, 144, 154, 167, 181, 182, 272–73 Martin, Adrian, 190 Martin, Dean, 18 Martinez (character in Dawn of the Dead ), 95 Marx, Karl, 101 Mary (character in Day of the Dead ), 136, 137 Mary (character in Diary of the Dead ), 204, 205, 206, 207 Maryanne (character in Monkey Shines), 151–52, 153, 154, 155 298

index

masculine aggressiveness, 103, 127. See also patriarchy masculinist perspective, 42. See also patriarchy Maslany, Tatiana, 204 masochism, 21, 22, 62, 95, 96, 101, 102, 103, 113, 114, 129, 143, 145, 149, 155, 156, 181, 240 The Masque of the Red Death (Poe), 183 Masters of Horror, 6 materialism, 23, 98, 182, 235, 237. See also consumerist critique Maxwell, Andrew (character in Diary of the Dead ), 203, 204, 205, 207, 209, 210, 212 Mazur, Heather, 245 McClain, Joedda, 56 McCleary, Detective (character in Bruiser), 181, 183 McClelland, Sheriff (character in Night of the Living Dead ), 35 McCleod, Nelse (character in El Dorado), 187 McDermott, Bill (character in Day of the Dead ), 135, 138 McDonaldization of America, 118 McFee, Bruce, 190 McGovern, Roger, 45 McKinnon, Clayton, 88 McLaglen, Victor, 109 McLuhan, Marshall, 7, 197 McMillan, W. G., 69 McNeil, Kate, 154 McTeague (Norris), 20, 28, 91, 92, 148 media critique, 34, 38, 43–44, 47–48, 51, 74, 87, 94, 128, 129, 153, 196–97, 199–201, 208, 209, 211 medical critique, 150 Meeber, Carrie (character in Sister Carrie), 104 Meindl, Dieter, 90, 91, 92 Melanie (character in Monkey Shines), 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160 Melville, Herman, 91

Merlin (character in Knightriders), 108, 111, 112–13, 118 Messer, Peter, 124 Metropolis (film), 40, 152 Mickey One (film), 55 Middleton, Fran, 83 Miette (character in La Fortune des Rougon), 14, 93 Miguel (character in Day of the Dead ), 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 143–44, 146, 217 Mike (character in Creepshow), 129, 130 military critique, 34, 41, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72–73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 97, 130, 136, 139, 140 Milne, Tom, 126 Milo (character in Bruiser), 180, 181, 183 mindless entertainment, 135, 176 minimal production values, 52 Miriam (character in The Dark Half ), 173 mirror imagery, 181, 205 Missing in Action (film), 67 ‘The Mist’ (King), 24 Mitchell, Jack (character in Jack’s Wife), 54. See also Jack (character in Jack’s Wife) Mitchells (characters in Jack’s Wife), 57, 59 mob imagery, 16. See also crowd theme modernism, 15, 23, 146 Modleski, Tania, 175 Mogg, Ken, 237 Mogg, Nan, 124 Monkey Shines (film), 10, 53, 147–61, 163, 171, 184, 275 Monroeville mall (location in Dawn of the Dead ), 92, 194 ‘The Monster Mash’ (song), 29 montage technique, 65, 110, 112, 122, 146, 150 Moon, Keith, 117 Moore, Roger, 194 MoPic (character in 84 Charlie MoPic), 199, 206

morality play, 121, 124, 206, 237 moral tales tradition, 123 Moran, Michael, 112, 118 Morgan (character in Knightriders), 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119 Morgan, Michelle, 200 Morin, Edgar, 204 Moseley, Bill, 243 Mother (character in Creepshow), 122 motivations, 21, 95, 123, 126, 128, 144, 149, 151, 154, 160, 205, 220, 221, 226, 231, 242, 247 Mouret, Octave (character in RougonMacquart novels), 92, 183–84 Mouret family (characters in Martin), 85 Moynihan, Debra (character in Diary of the Dead ), 200. See also Deb (character in Diary of the Dead ) Muffly, Anne, 58 Muldoon, Beth (character in Survival of the Dead ), 222 Muldoon, Lem (character in Survival of the Dead ), 226 Muldoon, Seamus (character in Survival of the Dead ), 217, 218, 221, 222–23, 224, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233 Muldoons (characters in Survival of the Dead ), 218, 220, 225 Mulligan (character in Land of the Dead ), 190, 192, 194 multinational firms, 9 Mulvey, Laura, 128 Munroe, Kathleen, 217 My Name Is Nobody (film), 6 Mythologies (Barthes), 19 Nadeau, Elyane, 85 Nails, Rusty (character in Dead On), 7 Nana (Zola), 11, 13, 14, 70 Nappo, Tony, 193 Nathan (Nate) (character in Creepshow), 124, 125, 126 index

299

naturalism, 1, 2, 3, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15–16, 18, 19, 20, 30, 36, 37, 65, 90, 91, 92, 104, 122, 163, 164, 167, 183, 236, 238 naturalist associations, 12, 19–22, 89, 163 Nazis, 75 New American Cinema, 42 New American Gothic, 2, 10 The New Babylon (film), 70 Newman, Kim, 162, 170, 175, 241, 242 Newman, William, 148 new society/new world, 13, 71, 79, 84, 85, 95, 107, 138, 144, 145, 185, 189, 197, 198, 210, 216, 217, 219, 229, 231 New World Order, 188 New World Pictures, 239 Nicotero, Gregory, 140 Nielsen, Leslie, 128 Nightmare on Elm Street (film), 9, 14, 135, 148, 162, 195 nightmares, 7, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64, 74, 93, 111, 138, 143, 145, 146, 171, 182, 183, 185, 193 Night of the Living Dead (film: Romero, 1968), 9, 10, 16, 17, 19, 21, 24, 26–37, 39, 40, 42, 44, 50, 53, 54, 55, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96, 98, 103, 113, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 128, 137, 139, 140, 147, 155, 159, 162, 164, 171, 178, 185, 196, 197, 198, 201, 204, 212, 215, 217, 219, 234, 241–47, 271, 276 Night of the Living Dead (film: Savini, 1990), 16, 22, 24, 31, 85, 103, 108, 111, 133, 197, 239, 241, 242, 244, 245, 246 Nikki (character in Jack’s Wife), 54, 55, 56, 57–58, 59, 61 1980s, 1, 10, 23, 24, 67, 105, 115, 134, 135, 138, 139, 142, 146 1990s, 10, 115, 178, 242 1970s, 2, 7, 9, 10, 18, 20, 42, 44, 55, 135, 146, 176, 177, 222, 234, 235, 238 1960s, 7, 8, 9, 10, 24, 30, 31, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51, 55, 61, 71, 111, 119, 134, 146, 188, 189 300

index

No Exit (Sartre), 71 Noriega, General, 189 Norman (character in Psycho), 14 Norris, Frank, 2, 16, 20, 28, 37, 40, 91, 92, 100, 148, 237 Northrup, Henry (character in Creepshow), 129 The Nothing Man (Thompson), 183 ‘Nowhere Man’ (song), 183 Now Voyager (film), 43 Number 9 (character in Land of the Dead ), 192 Nye, Carrie, 123 objective camera, 198, 202 objectivity, 113 The Octopus (Norris), 16, 40 OD (character in 84 Charlie MoPic), 199 O’Dea, Judith, 28, 243 O’Flynn, Patrick (character in Survival of the Dead ), 217, 218, 219, 220–21, 222, 223, 224–25, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231, 232, 233 O’Flynns (characters in Survival of the Dead ), 218, 225 old civilisation/old order/old society/old world, 32, 33, 53, 66, 71, 75, 77, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 95, 96, 100, 101, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 187, 190, 194, 229, 230, 231 old values, 37, 48, 96, 217, 219 Old World supernatural conventions, 82, 84 O’Malley, Bingo, 127, 165 The Once and Future King (White), 112 Only Angels Have Wings (film), 108, 119, 225 The Only Game in Town (film), 165 On the Beach (film), 48 oppression, 14, 23, 54, 62, 63, 64, 68, 72, 81, 82, 131, 180, 188, 237 ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’ (Engels), 230 Orion (studio), 147, 148

Orlando, Joe, 24 Ossessione (film), 164 The Osterman Weekend (film), 199 Our Town (Wilder), 24 Panatello, Tony, 89 Pangborn, Annie (character in The Dark Half ), 171 Pangborn, Sheriff Alan (character in The Dark Half ), 171, 172, 175 Pankow, John, 151 parallels, 2, 5, 6, 12, 20, 21, 23, 24, 33, 44, 45, 48, 49, 55, 56, 58, 61, 63, 66, 67, 70, 74, 75, 85, 87, 88, 91, 92, 95, 99, 104, 106, 115, 118, 124, 125, 128, 132, 134, 139, 141, 142, 145, 147, 148, 149, 156, 160, 164, 165, 171, 179, 181, 182, 183, 185, 188, 191, 195, 198, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 222, 225, 226, 230, 235 Paris (Zola), 11, 13, 14 Park, Megan, 203 Parker, Melanie (character in Monkey Shines), 154 parody, 15, 29, 92, 100, 102, 127, 135, 136 past, as controlling, 79. See also entrapment patriarchy, 33, 54, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 68, 70, 76, 77, 84, 89, 103, 122, 128, 142, 143, 166, 175, 181, 226, 242 Patrick (character in Survival of the Dead ), 231. See also O’Flynn, Patrick (character in Survival of the Dead ) Peckham, Colonel (character in The Crazies), 71, 72, 73, 75, 79 Peckinpah, Sam, 6, 199 Pekar, Harvey, 24 The People of the Abyss (London), 22 perfectionism, 149 Perkins, Anthony, 48 Perry, Frank, 109 Person, Ethel Spector, 143 personal control, 175 personal entrapment, 40, 62, 64, 80, 164, 183, 246

personal flaws, 53 personal responsibility, 33, 39, 41, 44, 48, 50, 56, 59, 61, 62, 66, 73, 76, 94, 95, 119, 150, 157–58, 159–60, 175, 187, 206, 223, 225 Peter (character in Dawn of the Dead ), 6, 19, 21–22, 75, 78, 82, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103–104, 108, 111, 113, 128, 140, 145, 146, 191, 219, 220, 242, 244, 246 Pet Sematary (King), 24, 162 Pierrot le Fou (film), 69 Pike (character in ‘The Facts in the Case of Mr Valdemar’), 164, 165, 166 Pilato, Joseph, 140 Pillsbury (character in Land of the Dead ), 191, 192, 193 Pippin (character in Knightriders), 109, 111, 112, 114 The Pit (Norris), 40, 100 Pittsburgh: as Romero’s base, 147, 162, 178, 194; in Romero’s films, 16, 184, 188, 192 Pizer, Donald, 20 Plague of the Zombies (film), 18, 19 Plassans (character in La Conquête du Plassans), 85 Platoon (film), 72 Plum Island (location in Survival of the Dead ), 217, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223, 224, 226, 230, 231, 232 Poe, Edgar Allen, 23, 163, 164, 166, 183 Poitier, Sidney, 72 Polanski, Roman, 138 Politique des Zombies: L’Amérique selon George A. Romero (Thoret), 7 Positif (journal), 7 possessive attitudes/possessiveness, 92, 93, 98, 100, 124, 125, 128, 132, 133 The Postman Always Rings Twice (film), 164 postmodernism, 1, 179, 237, 238 Pot-Bouille (Zola), 14 Powell, Michael, 10 Powers, Elaine, 136 index

301

The Power and the Glory (Greene), 204 Pratt, Upson (character in Creepshow), 131–32 Presley, Elvis, 171 Pressburg, Emeric, 10 Pretty Boy (character in Land of the Dead ), 187, 192, 194 Prince of Darkness (film), 195 The Prince Who Was a Thief (film), 109 Prince Valiant (film), 109 probability, 113 Psycho (film), 14, 149, 206 Public Enemy (film), 202 Puritan Captivity Mythology, 189, 192 The Purple Mask (film), 109 Pursuits of Happiness (film), 46 Quatermass II (film), 18 The Quatermass Xperiment (film), 33 Queneu, Lisa (character in Le Ventre du Paris), 244 A Question of Silence (film), 246 Quinn, Don (character in The Crazies), 34 Quinn, Tom, 151 Rabelais, François, 36 Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin), 36 race/ethnicity, 26, 31, 72, 109, 111, 132, 135, 139, 191, 193, 216, 224 racial harassment, 95, 103 radiation, 29, 73, 162 Rafelson, Bob, 164 Rambo (film), 67 rational control, 159 Rausch, Dr. Milton (character in Dawn of the Dead ), 94, 101 Ravello, Tony (character in Diary of the Dead ), 203 Raymonds (characters in Creepshow), 129, 130 Reagan associations, 1, 3, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 162, 170, 185 realism, 10, 20, 67, 90, 91, 164, 235, 236, 238. See also grotesque realism 302

index

reality shows, 87 re-awakenings, 2, 179 Rebecca (character in Creepshow), 128–29 Rebel Without a Cause (film), 39 Redacted (film), 198, 199, 211 rednecks, 35, 74, 75, 76, 96, 98, 103, 208, 213, 217, 224, 228, 229, 244, 246, 247 Red River (film), 102, 114, 245 Reed, Oliver, 205 Reeve, Matt, 198 Regan, Elizabeth, 123 Rege (character in Night of the Living Dead ), 243, 244, 245 Reggie (character in The Dark Half ), 175 Reid, R. D., 207 Reiniger, Scott, 96, 111 relationships, 12, 15, 38, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, 61, 62, 66, 67, 69, 74, 76, 79, 86, 87, 92, 99, 100, 104, 107, 111, 114, 116, 117, 124, 137, 142, 143, 149, 156, 166, 173, 186, 204, 219, 226, 230, 231, 232, 246 religious analogies/references, 30, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 99, 101, 140, 142, 145, 146, 158, 168, 204, 205, 222, 226, 228 remakes: Dawn of the Dead (Snyder, 2004), 5, 184, 195; Day of the Dead (Miner, 2008), 184; Night of the Living Dead (Savini, 1990), 16, 22, 26, 241; Scared Stiff (Marshall, 1953), 18 Renoir, Jean, 164 repression, horror film as representing return of, 20 Republican Religious Right reference, 226 Repulsion (film), 138 Resident Evil project, 7 responsibility. See human responsibility; personal responsibility Revenge of the Zombies (film), 18 Revolt of the Zombies (film), 17, 18

Rhodes, Captain (character in Day of the Dead ), 76, 95, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 152, 155 Ricci, Richard, 43 Ricci, Rudolph J., 38, 39 Riccio, Philip, 200 Richard (character in Creepshow), 125, 128, 129 Rickles (character in Day of the Dead ), 95, 140, 143 Ridley (character in Diary of the Dead ), 200, 202, 204, 209, 211, 212 Ridley, Judith, 33, 39 Riley (character in Land of the Dead ), 5, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191–92, 193, 194 Rio Bravo (film), 106, 107, 118, 150 Rio Lobo (film), 108, 177 Ripley (character in Aliens), 242 Roberts, Shawn, 203 Roberts, Timothy, 7 Robin Hood (film), 109 Rockwell, Norman, 125 Rocky (character in Knightriders), 107, 111, 114 Roger (character in Dawn of the Dead ), 19, 76, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 113, 242, 244 Roger (character in There’s Always Vanilla), 45, 46, 50 Roiz, Sasha, 192 romantic interlude. See love interlude/ romantic interlude Rome (Zola), 11 Romero, George A.: as always linked with zombie movie, 177; as avoiding overt political messages, 106; cameo roles, 49, 94, 208; in Canada, 5, 6, 7, 176, 178, 194, 215, 234, 235, 238; as existing outside Hollywood system, 179; as experimenter, 215; fictional characters as rarely one-dimensional, 155; film roles, 34, 86, 89, 201, 236; inactivity of, 10, 179; independent spirit of, 7; as influenced by 1960s, 7; as intuitive artist, 198, 234; as

marginalized, 10, 237; as never a crowd-pleaser, 195; on new media/ technologies, 7, 8; as not a zombie film director, 7, 198; as not wishing to be stereotyped as horror film director, 38; as operating intuitively, 10; as operating within basic narrative structure of Hollywood, 215; oppositional directions of, 2; as outsider, 2; return of to mainstream filmmaking, 184; as risen from ashes, returned from grave, 5, 6, 8; as satirist, 10; withdrawal of from film industry, 1 Rooker, Michael, 171 Root, Stephen, 153 Rope (film), 125, 202 ‘A Rose for Miss Emily’ (Faulkner), 92 Rosemary (character in Bruiser), 180, 181, 182, 183 Ross, Gaylen, 93, 128 Ross, Jonathan, 87 Rothman, William, 206 Rouch, Jean, 204 Rougon, Félicité (character in Dr. Pascal ), 13, 14 Rougon, Félicité (character in La Fortune des Rougon), 244 Rougon-Macquart novels, 11, 13, 14, 15, 24, 30, 47, 66, 83, 91, 93, 106, 144, 183, 218 Rove, Karl, 6 Rubinstein, Richard, 65, 88, 115, 121, 239 The Rules of Attraction (Ellis), 91 Russo, John A., 26, 30, 38, 42 Ryder, Major (character in The Crazies), 70, 71, 73 sadism, 30, 103, 129, 156, 174, 181, 206, 224 Sadusk, Maureen, 116 Sal (character in Sweet Sal ), 88 Salem’s Lot (King), 24, 142, 162 The Salvation Hunters (film), 2, 14 The Sands of Iwo Jima (film), 67 index

303

Santini, Mrs (character in Martin), 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 167 Saraceni, Iva Jean, 114, 122 Sarah (character in Day of the Dead ), 21, 22, 57, 92, 93, 104, 114, 135, 136, 137–38, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 166, 207, 209, 242 Sarah (character in Night of the Living Dead), 245 Sarge (character in Survival of the Dead ), 218–20, 221, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 232 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 71 Satchell (character in Night of the Living Dead ), 243 satire, 7, 10, 15, 22, 23, 24, 36, 71, 81, 91, 96, 102, 120, 129, 140, 179, 181, 185, 187, 203, 234 saturation technique, 81 savagery, division between savagery and civilisation, 148 Savini, Tom, 16, 22, 24, 31, 85, 103, 108, 111, 133, 197, 239, 241, 242, 244, 245, 246 scapegoats, 53, 62, 149, 171, 175, 236 Scared Stiff (film), 18 Schatzman, Morton, 84 Schiff, Marty, 109, 133 Schneider, Michel, 12 Schon, Kyra, 33 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 237 Schor, Naomi, 93 Schreber, Daniel, 84 Schulberg, Budd, 132 science fiction, 23, 29, 33, 34, 66, 74, 162 scientific establishment critique, 34, 66, 71, 73, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141 Scorsese, Martin, 105 Scott, Douglas (character in The Dawn Patrol ), 108 Scott, Sir Walter, 109 Scottie (character in Dawn of the Dead ), 16

304

index

Scream (film), 9, 195 screenplays, 102, 109, 121, 124, 134, 135–41, 145, 148, 149, 150, 156, 159, 163, 171, 174, 182, 194, 239–43, 247 Screen Theory, 238 The Searchers (film), 222 Season of the Witch (film), 52 The Sea Wolf (London), 22 The Seduction of the Innocents (film), 2, 22 self-awareness, 21, 22, 59, 62, 63, 72, 87, 101 self-control, 107, 245 self-deception, 61, 96, 129, 149, 175 self-defence, 209 self-denial, 85 self-destruction, 101, 159 self-discovery, 84 self-esteem, 55, 56 self-indulgence, 64, 81, 89 self-realisation, 64, 82, 86, 87, 93, 108, 110 Sergeant York (film), 186 Serling, Rod, 23 Seth’s Brother’s Wife (film), 20 sexual attacks, 83 sexual guilt, 61 sexual harassment, 89, 140 sexual identity, 111 sexuality, 60, 85, 87, 165 sexual revolution, 45, 46, 47 Shakespeare in Love (film), 87 Shallow (character in Chimes at Midnight), 106 Sharpe, Albert, 224 Shaun of the Dead (film), 216 Shaviro, Steven, 2 Sheila (character in Knightriders), 116, 118 The Shining (film), 24, 172 Shire, David, 149 Shirley (character in Jack’s Wife), 54, 58, 59, 62 shock horror, 138

‘A Shocking Way to Die’ (Feldstein), 23 Shock Suspense (comic), 23 Shook, Warner, 109, 111, 123 Sikov, Ed, 107 Silvère (character in La Fortune des Rougon), 14, 93 Silvia (character in Creepshow), 123, 124, 125, 127 Simon, Simone, 85 Singer, Robert, 11, 12 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 21, 28, 104 Slack (character in Land of the Dead ), 191, 192 slasher films, 23, 162 slob factor, 108, 111, 120, 121 Smith, Beauty (character in White Fang), 19 Snyder, Zack, 5, 184 social awareness, 66 social chaos, 66, 70, 73 social circulus, 11, 12, 65, 93 social criticism, 23, 181, 240 social dimensions (of horror films), 237, 238 social disintegration, 67 social entrapment, 52, 72 social influences, 50 social malaise, 28 society: American society (see American society); capitalist society (see capitalist society); decline of, 83, 84; as deeply disturbed, 37; effects of, 53, 56, 59, 64, 83, 85; new society (see new society/new world; also old society, old civilisation/ old order/old society/old world); as reverting to old habits and negative patterns, 40 ‘Something to Tide You Over’ (Creepshow episode), 128–29, 132 Son Excellence Euguene Rougon (Zola), 14, 183 Son of Ali Baba (film), 109 The Son of Frankenstein (film), 142

Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family (Schatzman), 84 Spider (character in Day of the Dead ), 135, 136 Spiegelman, Art, 24 Spielberg, Steven, 6, 9, 191, 236, 238 Spillman, Harry, 70 splatter movies, 26, 36 Springer, Jerry, 87 Spruce, Ray (character in ‘Old Chief Wood’nhead’), 239 Sragow, Michael, 105, 120 The Stand (King), 120, 162 Stanley, Dexter (character in Creepshow), 130 A Star is Born (film), 127 Stark, George (character in The Dark Half ), 171, 172, 173–74, 175, 176 Starman (film), 195 Star Wars (film), 9, 236 Steadicam, 156 Steele (character in Day of the Dead ), 140, 143 The Steel Helmet (film), 67 Stephen (character in Dawn of the Dead), 69, 93, 242, 244 Steve (character in Dawn of the Dead ), 94, 95, 96–97, 98, 99, 100, 101–102, 103 Steve (character in Knightriders), 115, 116 Stevens, George, 165 Stewart, Michael, 147, 161 Stewart, Robert M., 23, 24 Stiller, Jerry, 240 Stone, Oliver, 72 Stormare, Peter, 180 Streep, Meryl, 180 Streiner, Judith, 39 Streiner, Russell, 29, 38, 42, 43, 243 Stumpy (character in Rio Bravo), 107 Styles, Milo (character in Bruiser), 180 subjective camera, 198, 199, 202 supernatural, 24, 52, 58, 61, 62, 64, 86, 90, 162, 167–68, 170, 174, 183 Survinski, Regis J., 89

index

305

Survinski, Vince, 35, 51 Survival of the Dead (film), 7, 215–33, 277–78 Sweet Sal (film), 17, 88 Swica, Adam, 197 A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens), 209 Tales from the Darkside (TV series), 275 Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (film), 239, 241, 276 Tales of Hoffman (cinematic opera), 10 Tales of Terror (films), 163 talk shows, 47, 81, 86–87, 89, 94, 101, 153, 181, 182, 197, 199, 224, 240, 244 Tallman, Patricia, 111, 243 Tanner, John (character in The Osterman Weekend ), 199 Tarantino, Quentin, 197 Tarbet, Andrew, 180 Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline, 13 Taylor, Robert, 109 technical problems, 80 technology: applications of new technology, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 209, 210; automobile as, 28; Dead Reckoning (vehicle), 192; dehumanizing nature of, 212; malfunction of, 29; Romero on, 7 teleplays, 239, 240 Television, Technology and Cultural Form (Williams), 7 Terri (character in There’s Always Vanilla), 45–46, 49, 50 Terry (character in Day of the Dead ), 140 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (film), 2 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (film), 243 Thad (character in The Dark Half ), 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176 Thames, Byron, 199 Thanatos (Death Wish), 102, 126, 212 There’s Always Vanilla (film), 10, 38–51, 52, 53, 58, 61, 66, 74, 79, 80, 81, 87, 306

index

90, 94, 96, 106, 113, 119, 128, 134, 144, 147, 150, 154, 189, 271–72 Thérèse (character in Thérèse Raquin), 14, 61, 164 Thérèse Raquin (Zola), 14, 22, 163, 164, 166 They Live (film), 195 They Live By Night (film), 69 ‘They’re Creeping Up on You’ (Creepshow episode), 131–33 The Thing From Another World (film), 29 third-person objective camera, 198 The 39 Steps (film), 242 Thompson, Jim, 183 Thoret, Jean-Baptiste, 7 Thornton, Cole (character in El Dorado), 108 Thunhurst, W. L. (Bill), 54, 71 ‘Till Death’ (Craig), 23 ‘Tin Soldier’ (song), 74 Toby (character in Day of the Dead ), 136, 137 Todd, Tony, 243, 244 To Have and Have Not (film), 106 Tom (character in Night of the Living Dead ), 20, 27, 33, 34, 44, 74, 93, 244, 245 Tomboy (character in Survival of the Dead ), 221, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 232 Tony (character in Day of the Dead ), 135, 203, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212 Toronto, Romero’s residency in, 178, 194 Torrance, Jack (character in The Shining), 24, 172 Tourneur, Jacques, 6 Towles, Tom, 244 Tracy (character in Diary of the Dead ), 202, 203, 204, 207, 211, 212 trash culture, 2 Trauberg, Leonid, 70 Travail (Zola), 106

Tricks (character in Day of the Dead ), 135 Trina (character in McTeague), 92 Trixie, 66, 71, 73, 79, 96. See also Code Name: Trixie (film); The Crazies (film) trope, failure of human reliance upon advanced technology as, 29 Tropic Thunder (film), 187 Tucci, Stanley, 150 Tuck (character in Knightriders), 116, 117 Turner, Janine, 149 Turner, Nat, 193 Twain, Mark, 109, 180 28 Days Later (film), 202 Twilight’s Last Gleaming (film), 5, 71 The Twilight Zone (Serling), 23 Two Evil Eyes (film), 162, 164, 275 Two Fisted Tales (comic), 67, 121 Two Rode Together (film), 177 Ulzana’s Raid (film), 193 Une page d’amour (Zola), 218 uneven acting, 52, 65, 80 Universal Pictures, 184 Universal Studios, 6, 18, 84, 89, 152, 185, 188 University of Mississippi’s Interview series, 7 Un Page d’Amour (Zola), 14 utopian/Edenic, 7, 11, 12, 15, 21, 42, 53, 100, 106, 111, 112, 119, 139, 144, 145, 146, 179, 235, 236 Valdemar, Dr. Ernest (character in ‘The Facts in the Case of Mr Valdemar’), 163, 165, 167, 168 Valdemar, Jessica (character in ‘The Facts in the Case of Mr Valdemar’), 164, 165 Vallan, Giulia D’Agnolo, 7 vampire imagery, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 89 Vandover (character in Vandover and the Brute), 20, 21, 22

Vandover and the Brute (Norris), 20, 21, 28 Vanessa (TV show), 87 Van Patten, Joyce, 148, 156 Van Sprang, Alan, 218 Van Weyden, Humphrey (character in The Sea Wolf ), 22 The Vault of Horror (comic), 24, 28 Veidt, Conrad, 17 Venable, Sarah, 85 Venus probe radiation, 66, 73 verbal aggression, 27, 29, 55, 124, 140 Vérité (Zola), 106 Vertov, Dziga, 204 Vickers, Richard (character in Creepshow), 128, 132 video market, 52, 65 Vietnam War, 1, 6, 31, 35, 41, 44, 49, 65, 66–67, 70, 71–72, 73, 75–76, 95, 188, 193, 194, 197 The Vikings (film), 109 violence: arbitrary, 28; family, 68, 77; institutional, 76, 97; male, 76, 171, 246; as no real solution, 78, 183 violent masculinity, 171 Violette, Chris, 204 Visconti, Luchino, 164 VOD (Video on Demand) distribution, 215 voice-overs, 40, 43, 50, 157, 185, 197, 200–203, 207, 209, 210, 213, 218–19, 220, 221, 224, 232 von Sternberg, Josef, 14 von Stroheim, Erich, 14 Voodoo Man (film), 18 Wagner, Robert, 109 The Wahnsee Declaration, 71 Walker, Mark, 66 The Walking Dead (film), 18 Waller, Gregory, 2 Walt Disney Company, 23 Warner Brothers, 202 The War of the Worlds (film), 6, 29 Wasserman, Lew, 187 index

307

Watts, Dr. (character in The Crazies), 71, 73, 76, 78, 101 Watts, Richard, 217 Wayne, John, 107, 114 Wayne, Keith, 33 The Weakest Link (TV series), 87, 190 Weaver, Fritz, 130 Weaver, Sigourney, 242 Weekend (film), 139 Welles, Orson, 106, 188, 200, 215, 233, 241 Welsh, Kenneth, 217 Wendice, Margot (character in Dial M for Murder), 206 Wendy (character in The Dark Half ), 172 Wentworth, Harry (character in Creepshow), 128 Wentworth, Scott, 203 Wertham, Frederic, 2, 22 Western merged with zombie film, 217–18 Whale, James, 152, 158, 185 What Makes Sammy Run? (Schulberg), 132 ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ (song), 69, 73 When We Dead Awaken (Ibsen), 2, 237 White, Mr. (character in Creepshow), 132, 133 White, T. H., 112 Whiteface (character in Knightriders), 110 White Fang (London), 19 White Zombie (film), 17, 18 Wiggins, Tudi, 151 Wilder, Billy, 164 Wilder, Thornton, 24 The Wild One (film), 39 William (character in The Dark Half ), 172, 175 Williams, Dr. (character in Monkey Shines), 148, 156, 161

308

index

Williams, Raymond, 7, 15–16 Williams, Robert, 109 Williamson, Fred, 72 Williamson, Gregg (character in Jack’s Wife), 58 Wilma (character in Creepshow), 129, 130–31, 155 Wilson, Brian, 7 Wilson, Sloan, 23 Winfrey, Oprah, 87 Winocki (character in Air Force), 108 Winthrop, John, 188 Wise Blood (film), 2 Wiseman, Dr. John (character in Monkey Shines), 150, 151, 154, 156, 157 witchcraft/witches, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 246 Witek, Joseph, 23, 24 Wong, Anthony, 223 Woo, John, 80, 177 Wood, Robin, 1, 2, 7, 9, 12, 19, 20, 57, 65, 67, 70, 78, 104, 105, 108, 120, 135, 237 Wooley (character in Dawn of the Dead ), 95, 97, 98, 103 Woolfe, Eric, 219 wrong path, choosing, 53, 74 Wyler, William, 218 Yarbro (character in Creepshow), 124 Yau, Herman, 223 Zabriskie Point (film), 42 Zada, Ramy, 165 Zola, Emile, 1, 3, 11–16, 22, 24, 30, 36, 37, 40, 41, 47, 61, 66, 70, 83, 85, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 106, 144, 148, 163, 164, 166, 183, 218, 236, 237, 244 ‘Zombie’ (Craig), 23 zombie cinema, 17–19 Zombie Flesh Eaters (film), 17 Zombie Holocaust (film), 17 Zombieland (film), 216

zombies, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 14, 16, 27, 56, 68, 79, 90, 91, 140, 141, 167, 174, 175, 183, 184, 185–87, 190, 191, 192, 235. See also Dawn of the Dead (film); Day of the Dead (film); Diary of the Dead (film); Land of the Dead (film); Night of the Living Dead (film); Survival of the Dead (film)

Zombies on Broadway (film), 18 zombie trilogy, 3, 6, 16, 18, 22, 28, 52, 71, 91, 92, 93, 119, 134, 139, 154, 155, 162, 166, 167, 185, 237. See also Dawn of the Dead (film); Day of the Dead (film); Night of the Living Dead (film) Zulemas, Father (character in Martin), 86

index

309