Night of the Living Dead Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If there were any justice, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) would be counted as one of the great movie debuts of all time. (Yes, up there next to Citizen Kane.) In some quarters it is, but the fact that it's a horror film and the fact that it has languished for decades in the public domain (and many, many cheap, sub-par VHS tapes and DVDs) counts against it. Not to mention that younger zombie fans that come to the movie for the first time will most likely be surprised -- and probably disappointed -- as to how slow and thoughtful it really is. But if you consider things besides gore and terror to be important in your horror movies, then Night of the Living Dead endures, not just as one of the great genre movies of all time, but one of the greatest movies ever made, period. (It's currently ranked at #260 on the list of the 1000 greatest movies of all time at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?.)

Night of the Living Dead achieved several notable things during its time. Firstly, it established an artistic tone and a directorial signature that Romero would carry through the rest of his career, up to the present day. Secondly, it was an independent film (produced, of all places, in Pittsburgh) long before "independent film" came to be a marketing term. It was made by a cast and crew of people who genuinely wanted to make it, and -- somehow -- it was actually distributed and shown in theaters. Thirdly, by casting an African-American (the late Duane Jones) in its lead role, by introducing the "basement versus the ground floor" conflict, and by featuring gun-toting rednecks as the clean-up crew, it managed to subtly suggest a few ideas about America at the time, and indeed, it still suggests a few things about America in 2009.

Watch Night of the Living Dead on SlashControl!

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but Hollywood tends to break things. If a formula worked once, it will invariably be remade, repackaged, and resold over and over again until the equation is no longer profitable. But occasionally the Hollywood hive mindset is not content with merely breaking something. Every now and then it has to rape and pillage, and thus we shall soon have Night of the Living Dead: Origins. Wallow in these few key bits from The Hollywood Reporter's news on the matter:

"Zombie movie "Night of the Living Dead" is coming back, this time in a 3D CGI format and without the involvement of George Romero." ... "On the story front, De Soto, who wrote the script with David R. Schwartz, wants to update the tale partially by bringing out the characters' backstories and make what he called "an American-style anime."" ... "The aim of the process is to make tennis balls on a stick representing real people or monsters a thing of the past by allowing actors interact with CG elements as if they are tangible." ... "De Soto was a fan of the original "Living Dead" and once the trio realized the rights were in the public domain, zeroed in on that project."

Read the rest of this story at HorrorSquad.

(As a way of welcoming my very favorite month of the year, I thought it would be fun to reprint one of the very few good articles I've ever written. So here it is!)

By: Scott Weinberg

House of Wax, starring Paris Hilton. The Fog, starring Wooden Superman. The Amityville Horror, starring Van Wilder.

Yep, it's tough to be an old-school hardcore horror fan these days, what with all the really atrocious remakes that keep flopping off of the studios' assembly lines. (If you paid money to see When a Stranger Calls, you're either one devoted horror fan -- or a really bored high school kid.) But since the Horror Fan is nothing if not loyally optimistic, we trudge off to each successive remake with a small kernel of hope -- maybe this one won't suck the proverbial egg. So while it's perfectly logical for a passionate horror geek to throw up his/her hands and shriek "Ack! Horror remakes! They all suck!!" -- the simple truth is that they don't all suck. The good ones are just pretty darn few and far between.

7. Night of the Living Dead (1990)-- Splatter-master Tom Savini got the chance to direct his own remake of Romero's all-time classic back in 1990, and -- whaddaya know? -- he did a pretty solid job of it! With extra gore dripping from the floorboards and the presence of genre favorites Tony Todd & Bill Moseley, this re-visit came long before the Remake Renaissance, but I think it still holds up pretty well today.

Despite the slower-than-expected installation of digital projectors into theaters, yet another movie is slated to be released in digital 3-D (which of course requires digital projection plus additional equipment such as a special screen). According to The Hollywood Reporter, New Amsterdam Entertainment plans to re-release George Romero's 1978 zombie classic Dawn of the Dead into theaters after the film is modified, or "dimensionalized," to be shown in stereoscopic 3-D. The transition from 2-D to 3-D will be handled by In-Three, the company that handled George Lucas' presentation of a segment of Star Wars in 3-D at ShoWest back in 2005. The project is expected to be finished within the year. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which New Amsterdam remade in 2004, will likely be only the second film to be re-released with a 3-D version, the first being The Nightmare Before Christmas.

As wonderful as it is, the original Dawn of the Dead seems like an odd choice for 3-D, which often capitalizes on the gimmick of having objects jump out at the audience. With this film, we'll instead get to see zombies ever-so-slowly coming towards us as we nonchalantly continue eating our popcorn without fear. Perhaps we'll even have time to head to the restroom before the zombies actually seemingly make their way out into the space of the auditorium. See, that was part of the humor of Romero's Night of the Living Dead sequel, that the characters had time to run in circles around the undead mallrats. It would be much more frightening to see a dimensionalized version of the remake, which featured much quicker zombies. Presently there appears to be no set release date for the re-release, but depending on how crowded the 3-D marketplace is a year from now, I'd guess New Amsterdam is hoping for a 2009 bow.

Diary of the Dead, George A. Romero's first independent zombie film in over 20 years, follows a group of student filmmakers who, making a low-grade horror film in the woods, drive back to civilization ... only to find it isn't there anymore. We watch the film unfold as footage they shoot travelling through desolate and deadly buildings, neighborhoods, towns, cities -- coming to grips with the fact that the dead are walking and hungry and everything they knew is over. Shot outside of Toronto, where Romero now lives (but, as tradition demands, set near Pittsburgh), Diary of the Dead played both the Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals; Scott Weinberg's review from Toronto can be found here, while Jette Kernion's review is here.

Writer-director George A. Romero spoke with Cinematical about his zombie film legacy that stretches back to 1968's Night of the Living Dead, his concerns about the possibilities and perils of user-generated media, which Presidential candidate he thinks would have the best handle on attacking armies of the dead, and the undying popularity of the undead he created. " (If) I created anything ... it was the "neighborhood zombie" ... the guy with Nikes and a sweatshirt. ... Neighbors are scary, and when they're dead they're a bit scarier. But once you have that, it's idiomatic ... I half expect the zombies to show up on Sesame Street hanging out with The Count. ..."

Cinematical: I've read several notes and quotes from you saying that Diary of the Dead essentially felt like a new beginning.

George A. Romero: For me, it was a new beginning; I made four zombie films before this, and they sort of tracked, they were along a single storyline, even though they were 10 years or more apart, each of them. And they were just getting too big. The last one (George A. Romero's Land of the Dead) was a studio-supported film, which, you know, I turned around and looked at it: They let me make the film I wanted to make, I loved working with Dennis Hopper and Leguizamo and people like that, but I felt the film and I had sort of lost connection with the origin of the series, which was a little guerrilla movie that a bunch of amateurs made in Pittsburgh all those years ago. And I wanted to go back to ... I wanted to see if I had the chops and the stamina to make a little guerilla movie. I happened to have an idea that I wanted to do something ... all of my zombie films have had this kind of socio-political satire underneath them, and I've always used them as snapshots of the time in which they were made.

I got an idea that I wanted to do something about emerging media, with the mainstream losing its power and Joe Blow from Oshkosh taking over on the blogosphere. And it all sort of fell into place. And I thought 'Well, I can make a little film, do it pretty inexpensively, about students who are out shooting a student film when the sh*t hits the fan, when zombies sit up and start walking around.' I said 'We can go back to the very first night, and we can try to pretend ' -- even though that was 1968 and this is now --- 'that this is the same first night, when this phenomenon first begins to happen.'

Zombies appeared in movies early on, in White Zombie (1932), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Last Man on Earth (1964), and -- to some extent -- Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). But the infectious, flesh-eating, undead creatures we know today originated in George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). No other horror movie was such a cornerstone, breaking new ground for its time, establishing the hard and fast rules for an entire subgenre and remaining a much-copied source nearly 40 years later. On top of all this, it's actually a great film, and hardly dated at all. When I first saw it, all alone in a dark room late at night, it gave me the shivers. But it also gave me food for thought.

Many have studied the complex relationship between the film's human characters, all trapped in an abandoned house trying to survive the night. Barbara (Judith O'Dea), after losing her brother to a zombie, becomes nearly catatonic. She's like the child of this twisted family. Ben (Duane Jones) is the leader, and though Romero apparently hadn't written the role for a black man, he evokes echoes of the Civil Rights movement that was brewing at the time. Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman) is white, middle-class America, with a wife, Helen (Marilyn Eastman) and a daughter (Kyra Schon). And Tom (Keith Wayne) and Judy (Judith Ridley) are typical teenagers, hoping to get married and settle down. It's easy to see all kinds of social commentary within this group of characters and their behavior, but even without all that, the film works very simply as a dramatic clash of personalities.

Thanks to the enormous success of 300, director Zack Snyder can probably set up as many dream projects as he wants right now. He has already been able to get Watchmen up and running and he would certainly be offered the 300 sequel if it happens. Another project that he's just set up is a return to the zombie action-horror genre. It is called Army of the Dead and while it sounds like a sequel to his first big hit, Dawn of the Dead, the fact that this will be made by Warner Bros. instead of Universal makes me think it is definitely not related. Snyder wrote the story, which takes place in a quarantined Las Vegas, and he will co-produce with wife Deborah, but he hasn't announced whether or not he'll direct.

For now it is only known that a script is being written by Joby Harold and that Snyder wants the movie to be a sweeping epic with a style similar to that of 300. I am one of the few zombie movie fans that wasn't too crazy about Snyder's Dawn remake (it seemed to me more a scene-by-scene remake of Maximum Overdrive that substituted zombies for trucks), but because I will watch any movie with zombies, I'm willing to give him another shot. Plus, I love the idea of zombies in Vegas. Whenever I'm at a casino, I already think of the people around me as being like the living dead, and I can certainly imagine zombies blankly playing the slots. Of course, since I'm envisioning a campy movie closer in style to Romero's original Dawn of the Dead, I doubt I will be satisfied. Still, I can't completely dismiss it just because it is different than what I would do, and I'm excited to see what Snyder claims will be the biggest-scale zombie movie yet.

To make a horror movie today without color is probably inconceivable; how else could you possibly depict all that blood and gore without red? But there was once a time when horror depended on moods, on light and shadow, and black-and-white provided the perfect palette. Dracula's castle never gained much by adding color. So what if a couple of tapestries show up on the walls? The important things are the creaks and cobwebs and the darkness. Moreover, black-and-white movies play better on TV: On dark nights when the lights are all off; they're more like tingly campfire tales told with flashlights, cozy but creepy.

For my top seven, I decided to start at the sound era, since many silent-era films used color tinting and could not be called true black-and-white. I wish I could have spared room for Tod Browning's Freaks (1932), the anthology film Dead of Night (1945), Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby's original The Thing (1951), Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), 'Herk' Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962), Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), Abel Ferrara's The Addiction (1995) and many others.

Vampyr (1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
When scholars are forced to discuss horror films, they grudgingly mention this and F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) -- but don't hold that against the films. Vampyr is not only one of the greatest of all horror films, but one of the flat-out spookiest. It concerns a dreamy young man who reads occult books. During his travels, he checks into an inn, receives a warning from a ghost and finds himself in the middle of a mystery involving two sisters. Dreyer provides all kinds of chilling, startlingly simple effects using shadows and off-screen sounds. A climactic shot has had scholars buzzing for decades: A point-of-view shot from a corpse, shot through a little window in the lid of a coffin. Dreyer made this between two other masterpieces, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and his witchcraft drama Day of Wrath (1943).

Ooohh, this should be exciting for all you George A. Romero fans out there. A new German film company is working on a remake of Night of the Living Dead...but in 3-D. Lux Digital Pictures is currently shopping the film around to international distributors, in which the budget is said to fall in the $2 million range. A zombie flick in 3-D? Put me in the back near the door just in case, ya know, I should need more popcorn or something.

With a script written by Robert Valding, producer/direcor Jeff Broadstreet describes the film as a "homage" to George Romero's classic film. Since the title is in public domain, I guess anyone with a thirst for more dead can take a stab at it. Recently, films like Dawn of the Dead and Land of the Dead have done well at the box office and on DVD proving zombies are still pretty popular. Personally, I'm waiting for Everyone is Dead Except Me to come out so that I will be able to go to the theater and not have a screaming baby sitting behind me.

What are your thoughts on zombies in 3-D? Will it make the film scarier? Would you go see it?