Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [61]
O’Bannon was disgusted by the movie, and he told Carpenter so. In its casual disregard for the humanity of its characters, he saw a reflection of the coolness that Carpenter displayed toward him. It reminded him of how easily their friendship was discarded. “His disdain for human beings would be serviced if he could make a film without people in it,” O’Bannon said. “Even though he stabbed me in the back, I grudgingly thought he may be a bad person but at least he has a lot of talent. How could I fool myself over the years? He ain’t Orson Welles. He ain’t Howard Hawks. He’s somewhere below Wes Craven.”
IF CARPENTER’S Assault owed a debt to Night of the Living Dead, it wasn’t alone. Romero’s film kept running at midnight screenings in cities through the country and its reputation only improved. But instead of leaving for Hollywood, Romero attempted to stay true to his roots and make films cheaply and collaboratively. At first, he tried to leave the horror genre. His Pittsburgh-based group of collaborators never had any intention of becoming merely genre mavens. Since they wanted to show their range, they followed up Night of the Living Dead with a coming-of-age romance in the spirit of Goodbye, Columbus and The Graduate.
Once again set in Pittsburgh, There’s Always Vanilla is about a young man discharged from the army who has an affair with an older woman whom he accidentally impregnates. She goes to get an underground abortion under dangerous-seeming circumstances. The movie was the kind of socially conscious drama that was then in vogue and, unlike Night of the Living Dead, it addressed politics directly. Shooting dragged on due to disputes over the script, and since abortion was legalized before the movie was released, it seemed dated by the time it opened.
Romero also didn’t like the script penned by Rudy Ricci, who played a zombie in Night of the Living Dead. He went ahead shooting it and in the rush to finish, didn’t get everything that he needed, meaning that he had to add a voice-over at the end to fill in the gaps. “We wanted to show the world that we weren’t limited to horror,” John Russo says. “That’s when ego problems set in and eventually the group split up.”
After Vanilla and then The Crazies, a sharply edited survival movie about the impact of a biological weapon on a small town that also failed to become a hit, George Romero tried to move in a more realistic direction with Martin, a fascinating spin on the vampire genre that quite self-consciously ridicules the use of the supernatural in horror. Focusing on an alienated kid who has been convinced that he is a vampire by the movies and his ranting family, the movie’s central tension is the question of whether or not he’s a real vampire. When he goes to sleep, his dreams are shot like old Universal movies, and these expressionistic images of gothic horror are pitted against the unvarnished realism of his real world. Vampire movies in the 1970s set out to leave the past behind, placing the bloodsuckers in modern times in movies like The Satanic Rites of Dracula, Dracula A.D. 1972, and David Cronenberg’s Rabid (in which vampirism is a kind of virus). But Martin takes this a step further, using its own unblinking, grainy realism to question the supernatural. Martin drinks blood, but he doesn’t have fangs. And while his family talks about their curse, can you really trust your family?
Martin, sensitive, lonely, and surrounded by terrible relationships, appears harmless compared with the ugliness that besets ordinary people in the dying industrial city of Pittsburgh. Women are harassed on the street. Cars are crushed into metal for cash. The radio shows are filled with confessions of sad people. To keep himself entertained, he dresses up in a Dracula costume to scare his uncle. “It’s only a costume,” he says. Throughout the film, Romero mocks the conventions of the Old Horror movie as betraying any sense of reality. “That’s the other thing the movies get wrong,” says Martin, much more anxious than the suave, seductive killer