Night of the Living Dead Essay

Americanindependentblack-and-whitehorror filmandcult filmdirected byGeorge A. Romero Night of the nutrition gonewas heavily criticized during its release because of its explicit content, notwithstanding received critical acclaim and was selected by theLibrary of Congressfor preservation in theNational snap Registryas a film deemed cultur everyy, historically or aesthetically significant. reviewers cited the film as groundbreaking.Pauline Kaelcalled the film one of the most gruesomely terrific movies ever made and when you leave the theatre you may wish you could forget the whole horrible experience. .. . The films grainy, banal seriousness works for it gives it a crude realism. 62AFilm Dailycritic commented, This is a pearl of a horror picture which exhibits all the earmarks of asleeper. Since the release, critics and film historians deport seenNight of the Living Deadas a subversive film that critiques 1960s American society, internationalCold Warpolitics and domesticracism .Elliot stein ofThe Village Voicesaw the film as an ardent critique of American involvement inVietnam, arguing that it was not set inTransylvania, unsloped Pennsylvania this wasMiddle Americaat war, and the zombie carnage seemed a grotesque echo of the conflict hence raging inVietnam Pauline Kael,5001 Nights at the Movies(Henry Holt and Company, 1991 Elliot Stein, The Dead Zones George A. Romero at the American Museum of the Moving Image,The Village Voice(New York), January 814, 2003 http//www. filmsite. org/posters/psyc2. jpghttp//www. filmsite. rg/reddot. gifAlfred Hitchcocks situationful, complex psychological thriller,Psycho(1960) is the mother of all modern horror question films it single-handedly ushered in an era of inferior screen slashers with blood-letting and graphic, shocking killings The master of suspense skillfully manipu after-hourss and guides the earreach into identifying with the main character, luckless victim Marion (a Phoenix real-estate secretary), an d then with that characters murderer a crazy and timid taxidermist named Norman (a brilliant typecasting performance by Anthony Perkins).Hitchcocks techniques voyeuristically implicate the audience with the universal, dark evil forces and secrets present in the film. Psychoalso broke all film conventions by displaying its leading female protagonist having a lunch period affair in her sexy white undergarments in the first scene also by photographing a toilet bowl and flush in a bathroom (a first in an American film), and killing off its major star Janet Leigh a third of the way into the film .Film reviews, for instance, will sometimes take up political or sociological concerns in the course of issuing formal-aesthetic judgments. Night of the Living Deaddramatizes the bewildering and uncanny transformation of human beings into non-human forms. Indeed, like all metamorphosis narratives, the film carries uncomfortable messages somewhat identity about what it means to be a human be ing and about the terror of alienation.The films power to unsettle its audience also derives from its focus on the taboo subject of cannibalism (which it depicts far more graphically than previous zombie films). In the ordinal century, the English ironist Jonathan Swift (1996) wroteA Modest Proposal,a darkly satirical attack on the privations suffered by the Irish people at the hands of the English in which the author ironically proposed that infants be killed and eaten in order to solve the problem of poverty in Ireland.Night of the Living Deadalso uses cannibalism as a metaphor for exploitatory power apprisals. Thus, while it deals with a quite different set of social problems, Romeros film can also be seen a sinister derision that exploits an outrageous premise in the interests of social and political critique. In his bookUnderstanding Popular Culture,John Fiske writes It is not violence per se that characterises popular culture, but only that violence whose structure makes it into a metaphor for the distribution of power in society. Fiske, 1989 137) According to Fiske, then, violence is a metaphor for inequitable (and presumably unjust) power relations in society. It is important, however, to understand this point in historical context. Violence became more commonly depicted in films and on television in the late 1960s, during a socially turbulent period when social hierarchies were being challenged Night of the Living Deaddraws on Alfred HitchcocksPsycho(1960), especially in its film craft the use of shadow and camera angles. Night of the Living Dead(and, indeed, its worthy equels) reminds us of something that the recent outbreak of zombie films may have caused us to forget the oppositional potential of popular culture. In this sense, the film is an undead classic that can still tell us something about who we are and warn us about what we might turn into. Waller, Gregory A. (1986),The Living and the Undead(Urbana and Chicago University of Illinois Pre ss) Swift, Jonathan (1996),A Modest Proposal and other Satirical Works(New York Dover) like most genre movies, reflect the value and ideology of the culture that produced them.Don SiegelsInvasion of the Body Snatchers(1956), for example, about an invasion of alien seed-pods that replace people with emotional replicas, is typically discussed in relation to American contemporary culture in the 1950s. Unlike earlier horror films,Invasion of the Body Snatchersimagines infection on an apocalyptic rather than personal scale, as in the vampire myth, a clear reflection of Cold War fears of nuclear destruction. But even as Americans felt threatened by practical nuclear war and Communist infiltration, the film also expresses a fear of creeping conformism at home.Invasionmakes the commonplace seem creepy, and in the coming a mob of plain-looking townsfolk pursue Miles and Becky out of town in a horrific evocation of the kind of witch-hunting mentality witnessed in the United States just a fe w years before the films releaseRead moreCritical debates Horror Films actor, children, cinemahttp//www. filmreference. com/encyclopedia/Criticism-Ideology/Horror-Films-CRITICAL-DEBATES. htmlixzz1qab4D5B2