Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [19]
The horror genre was hardly known for exploring issues of race. And in the late sixties, most liberal Hollywood movies preferred to portray African American characters as strong stoics who triumphed by maintaining their dignity in the face of racism. The hero in Night of the Living Dead was a man of action. He was going to survive no matter what and didn’t care how it looked if he slapped a white woman as long as it helped save lives. That he died fighting invited comparisons to other fallen civil rights leaders of the era.
This political subtext was a revelation to horror directors. Wes Craven saw Night of the Living Dead in a theater in Times Square and describes it as the first horror movie that wasn’t shackled to a sense of decorum. At around the same time, John Carpenter saw the movie while attending film school at USC and Dario Argento, then a film critic, enjoyed the film in Rome. Chomping, lurching, and drooling their way across the country, George Romero’s zombies became popular in Europe, where they were interpreted by some critics as a searing indictment of American warmongering and racial prejudice. The influential French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, which championed obscure or underappreciated American movies, praised the movie as a political rallying cry about American racism. Argento, an Italian film critic turned director, who built on Bava’s legacy to make even more surreal and dreamlike giallos, raved about Romero to his friends. As a critic, Argento celebrated him in print, and invited him to screenings in Italy, before starting his own horror movie career.
Night of the Living Dead was also proof for a generation of directors that you didn’t need the support of a studio, big or small, to make an effective horror film that would attract large audiences. You didn’t need money, much experience, or stars. You didn’t even have to leave Pittsburgh. Film students noticed. Night of the Living Dead might never have received a huge national release, but it ran for years at small movie theaters and inspired countless directors to pick up a camera. It did for horror what the Sex Pistols did for punk.
The movie itself, however, was actually much more rooted in the past than the reviews of the day would have you believe. Unlike Polanski, Romero didn’t look down on the old traditions of horror. Growing up in the Bronx, Romero was a precocious kid whose loving parents encouraged his artistic interests even though they wouldn’t allow him to bring scary comic books into the house. His amiable, laid-back style hid a single-minded drive and dedicated love of fantasy films. As a teenager, he told his parents he was going to the prom, dressed up in a tuxedo, and instead went to Times Square to see a movie. “In my mind, horror wasn’t the poor relative,” he said. “It wasn’t the penny dreadful. It was legit.”
What he was less excited about, however, were the films of Alfred Hitchcock. As a teenager Romero worked on Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest as a volunteer on the set. His responsibilities were mainly limited to fetching things, but he did pay attention to the director and noticed his chilly demeanor. But it wasn’t just his imperious manner that bothered him. He thought the movies were mechanical. They didn’t have the gleefully bad taste of his favorite comic books or the goofy fun of monster movies. He found Hitchcock’s suspense sequences overly technical.