Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [20]
Night of the Living Dead has a more spontaneous feel. It wasn’t the work of a control freak so much as one who understood that things could easily get out of control. Chaos was at hand, and the movie reflected that in content, style, and even the process by which it was made.
The movie was a backup plan for Romero. When he couldn’t get funding for “Whine of the Fawn,” a Bergman-inspired coming-of-age film set in the Middle Ages, he tried something more commercial. “We didn’t know anyone who had any horses, so a western was out,” says the producer Russ Streiner. “And we didn’t live by the water, so we couldn’t do a beach movie. That left horror.”
Night of the Living Dead was made in the spirit of the hippie communes of its era, shot by a group of recent college graduates who smoked pot and tossed some ideas around. Romero was not a dictatorial auteur, and he gave little thought to how to position himself for a future career. He was just having some fun. The stakes were very low. Romero and nine of his friends put up $600 each to make the movie—which eventually cost a little more than $100,000—and then, in good democratic fashion, opened up the floor for debate over the question of who would direct. There were several candidates, but Romero made the most persuasive case, which rested on his experience making industrials and working in TV news for years. Romero had even made short movies for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. “One of my first films was ‘Mister Rogers Gets a Tonsillectomy,’ ” Romero says. “Possibly the scariest film I ever made.”
Even though he was the director, many of his friends had input and the movie was a collage of different styles and ideas. At the beginning of Night of the Living Dead, two young siblings, Johnny (Russell Streiner) and Barbara (Judith O’Dea), laugh in a graveyard looking for their father’s grave. Johnny tries to scare his sister, playing up the joke of getting a case of nerves walking in a graveyard. Two vanilla protagonists, they speak in the capital-letters gee-whiz style of science-fiction movies from the 1950s. The acting was out of a low-budget monster movie, but the camerawork had a grainy documentary feel.
Romero worked in commercials, which is reflected in the quick, clean, accomplished editing of Night of the Living Dead. His stark sense of light and shadow was greatly influenced by Orson Welles, and the apocalyptic story of survivors holed up in a house was taken from the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend, about vampires on the prowl. Romero didn’t want to use vampires again, so he made them deceased cannibals, like the lurching undead from the EC Comics that Romero grew up loving.
Romero insisted the movie take place in real time and that it have absolutely no explanation for why the zombies arrived on the scene. He argued that it would be scarier that way, more real. But as the movie shoot came to a conclusion, this became a subject of controversy among the filmmakers. One of the collaborators and stars, Karl Hardman, spoke up, arguing that this would be too unusual: “All horror films have a reason for the thing and that was a necessary element,” he told the entire group. What he was referring to is the standard scene that appears in almost every fantasy film where the scientist explains that he was dreaming of making a spectacular breakthrough that led him to bring in the monster for testing; or when a mystical old woman reveals the legend of a supernatural creature in hushed tones; or when the detective reveals the secret motivation of the killer. This explanatory scene was an essential genre convention. Romero conceded the point, adding a news story about a probe to Venus gone wrong.
Romero did not have the