Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane

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СКАЧАТЬ sees transparent aliens commandeer earthly cadavers for the usual sinister purposes. Of all the ’50s zombies, these most closely resemble those in Night of the Living Dead. They don’t boast the latter’s age, gender, and occupational variety—all are business-suited, middle-aged white guys who look like they suffered simultaneous seizures at the same sales convention. But they’re honestly unnerving dudes for 1959 as they stagger in stiff, hollow-eyed tandem down a cemetery hillside.

      Kicking off the next decade, 1960’s Cape Canaveral Monsters repeats Invisible Invaders’ riff of aliens reanimating and inhabiting expired Earthlings, in this case bodies retrieved from a car crash. An admirably nihilistic ending supplies the lone attribute of this shoestring sci-fi effort by director Phil Tucker, who fails to recapture his Robot Monster (1953) magic. Another notoriously penurious entrepreneur, minimalist sleaze merchant Barry (The Beast That Killed Women) Mahon, went the traditional voodoo route with his obscure New Orleans-set outing The Dead One (1961). It’s the first Stateside zombie movie lensed in color, the better to accentuate the pale white title character’s sickly green visage. Connecticut-based auteur Del (The Horror of Party Beach) Tenney headed south to the Caribbean, by way of Miami Beach, to create the nearly thrill-less black-and-white zombie quickie Voodoo Blood Bath (1964). A.k.a. Zombie, the film wouldn’t widely surface until 1971 when aptly named distributor Jerry Gross resurrected it as the cheatingly titled I Eat Your Skin. The film doubled up with his much more explicit I Drink Your Blood, a blatant bid to ride Night of the Living Dead’s cult coattails.

      AIP produced a more lavish living dead story in Roger Corman’s 1962 Tales of Terror. The Edgar Allan Poe-based trilogy highlighted a reanimated Vincent Price in The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar segment, a tale George Romero would tackle nearly thirty years later in the Dario Argento collaboration Two Evil Eyes. The most creative of the period’s drive-in-targeted active corpse flicks, though, came from Las Vegas and the fertile mind of the late Ray Dennis Steckler. His 1964 The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies not only boasted the second-longest title in genre-film history (after Corman’s The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Journey to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent) but arrived as the first zombie musical (in fact, Steckler billed it as the “First Rock’n’Roll Monster Musical”). Del Tenney’s Horror of Party Beach, unleashed earlier that year, actually offered the first zombie rock song, the Del Aires’ “The Zombie Stomp.” The Incredibly Strange Creatures…scores more points with its wildly surreal, pre-psychedelic extended-nightmare sequences than with its rather uninspired rubber-masked zombies.

      Other countries likewise contributed to the screen zombie ranks, often tinkering with traditional zombie rules. Mexico delivered Santo vs. the Zombies (1962), a.k.a. Invasion of the Zombies, pitting that most exalted, eponymous masked wrestler against energetic dead men in the employ of a criminal mastermind. That pic proved popular enough to inspire Santo to join forces with fellow grappler Blue Demon in Santo and Blue Demon Against the Monsters (1968), Santo and Blue Demon in the Land of the Dead (1969), and Invasion of the Dead (1973). Zombies would likewise surface in the Jess Franco-directed French/Spanish co-production Dr. Orloff’s Monster (1965) and Germany’s The Frozen Dead (1966), the latter fleetingly elevated by Nazi scientist Dana Andrews’s death-by-zombie-arms-protruding-through-a-wall. The tableau is similar to the nightmare sequence that opens Romero’s Day of the Dead, though executed with far less flair.

      Britain took its zombies a tad more earnestly. Sidney J. Furie’s Dr. Blood’s Coffin (1961) is a slowly paced Frankenstein-like affair, while the bleak doomsday quickie The Earth Dies Screaming (1965) offers some atmospheric shots of terminated townsfolk raised (once again) by alien invaders. The Hammer period piece The Plague of the Zombies (1966) represents the first film to show ghouls rotting before viewers’ eyes (unless you count Vincent Price’s famous facial meltdown in the earlier cited Tales of Terror).

      Plague of the Zombies (1966) represents the first film to show ghouls rotting before viewers’ eyes.

      It might be argued that Herk Harvey’s brilliantly terrifying art-house horror Carnival of Souls (1961)—with its relentless nightmare quality and haunting nocturnal images of zombie-like phantoms in perpetual pursuit of alienated heroine Candace Hilligoss, in a movie created by the operators of a Lawrence, Kansas, commercial/industrial film house—served both as Night of the Living Dead’s spiritual progenitor and basic business model. But the film that acted as its true template was the 1964 American-Italian co-production The Last Man on Earth. Based on Richard Matheson’s celebrated doomsday novel I Am Legend (also the inspiration for the 2007 Will Smith blockbuster of the same name as well as the 1971 Charlton Heston showcase The Omega Man), The Last Man on Earth arrives replete with slow-moving human corpses-turned-predators, boarded-up windows with the creatures’ hands thrusting through them, an infected child, human bonfires, and many other key elements that would soon surface in Night.

      But no matter how groundbreaking the walking dead imagery, even Last Man lacked the insidious black magic that would make Night of the Living Dead the most terrifying and enduring zombie movie ever.

      I caught that on television, and I said to myself, “Wait a minute—did they make another version of I Am Legend they didn’t tell me about?” Later on they told me they did it as a homage to I Am Legend, which means, “He gets it for nothin’.” George Romero’s a nice guy, though. I don’t harbor any animosity toward him.

      —Richard Matheson on Night of the Living Dead, as told to Tom Weaver

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      DUBIOUS COMFORTS: INTRODUCTION TO THE LIVING DEAD

      They’re coming to get you, Barbara!

      —Johnny (Russell Streiner) in Night of the Living Dead

      It was a dark and stormy night, Halloween season, out in rocky Montauk Point, Long Island. We had just left a wedding reception and had driven several blind blocks, through a drenching rain, powered by gale-force winds. Finally finding shelter at the Memory Motel (earlier immortalized by the Stones song of the same name)—and already three sheets to the wind and counting—I wanted nothing more at that exhausted moment than to fall into bed for a solid eight.

      First, though, from force of lifetime habit, I instinctively turned on the telly. And what grainy sight should greet my booze-befogged eyes? None other than Johnny and Barbara’s car just starting its doomed journey down that forlorn road to the old Evans City Cemetery, where the eternal, infernal nightmare would begin anew. As lightning and thunder thrashed outside, I obediently settled on the edge of the bed, instantly scared sober by that flickering tube. I dreaded every frame I knew I was about to reexperience, but I was powerless to resist.

      That night time-warped me to Times Square, more than a quarter-century before. I had glimpsed Night of the Living Dead adorning Deuce marquees, circa 1969, but, despite that cool title, took it for just another fright flick, one I was always too busy to drop in and see. When Night resurfaced in June 1970, however, at the Museum of Modern Art, where I had a student membership, it seemed a sure sign that this black-and-white indie from the Steel City had been deemed something special. This time I surrendered, eagerly joining an anticipatory audience of art-house lovers and horror hounds in MoMA’s auditorium.

      The film opened, natch, the same way it would on the Memory Motel TV, and as it had at several midnight shows I attended at New York City’s Waverly Theater during the ’70s, on VHS in the ’80s, DVD in the late ’90s, and during countless other broadcast airings and streaming video Internet showings: As soon as we sight that lonely vehicle, we sense we’re going on a journey and, given that title and bleak autumnal landscape, we’re pretty sure it won’t be a pretty one. As the car follows the gray brick road to the graveyard, we get the feeling we’re not in Pittsburgh anymore.

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