Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane

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СКАЧАТЬ Johnny (Russell Streiner) and his prim little sis Barbara (Judith O’Dea). The tedium of their long and, in Johnny’s eyes, pointless drive to pay a perfunctory graveside visit to their deceased dad has reduced the twentysomething siblings to regressive role playing, with Johnny’s teasing Barbara and Barbara chastising Johnny for his immature antics. Sans a single excess frame, the scene perfectly encapsulates both the pair’s longstanding relationship and present situation.

      As with all of Night’s major characters, the viewer voluntarily fills in the rest of their backstories based on the few key clues provided. Johnny, we surmise from his suit, tie, and protruding pocket pens, is likely a low-rung white-collar worker. His acceptably longish hair, slightly stylish specs, and driving gloves indicate that the ’60s have encroached on him in a distant ’burb way. But he’s essentially a pretty straight dude, the type who would much prefer watching the Steelers on TV rather than visiting the grave of a father he claims to barely remember. Johnny is relentlessly, even deflatingly pragmatic, but also a bit of a joker.

      Barbara, with her conservative coat and proper demeanor, is probably a secretary or similar office support person. We determine that she’s somewhat repressed, almost certainly single, and a virgin. Both siblings, it would appear, still live at home with mom. And, most crucially, neither is played by a recognizable Hollywood thespian; both look like people we see in real life. Already, the film has taken on a distinct documentary feel.

      An almost subliminal hint of impending danger is subtly conveyed via a static-interrupted radio broadcast. Johnny, shrugging, switches it off, convinced that what he’s heard is merely a temporary technical glitch. While the siblings place a wreath at the gravesite, Johnny recalls a similar moment from their shared childhood, when his attempts to scare young Barbara aroused their granddad’s rage, provoking their elder to angrily predict, “Boy, you’ll be damned to hell!”

      When Johnny senses Barbara’s growing anxiety, he reverts to the same puerile behavior, mischievously invoking Boris Karloff, lisp intact, and uttering Night’s signature line, “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!” If we hadn’t guessed already, we know we’re in deep nightmare territory when Boris himself, or an unreasonable facsimile thereof, suddenly materializes, as if by black magic, behind them.

      At first, the film teases the viewer with that distant apparition: Is the figure important? Menacing? Or merely set decoration? We soon learn the answer when he clutches a vulnerable Barbara, stunning us with one of the primo shock moments in horror-film history. Johnny races to sis’s rescue, engaging the mysterious aggressor in a furious fight that seems all the more frightening for its raw, random choreography. This isn’t a Hollywood stunt show; this is an awkward, brutal battle to the death. When Johnny’s head hits a cement cemetery marker with an accompanying thud, the image chills with its abrupt finality. Barbara reacts just as instinctively, running to their car and, despite her terrified state, retaining enough composure to release the emergency brake and roll downhill, even as the single-minded killer shatters the window with a heavy rock.

      Alas, Barbara’s escape attempt lasts but a few yards as she plows the car into a tree. There follows a frenzied flight, shown in a blur of multi-angle images further spiked by a panicky soundtrack, as Barbara zigzags down the graveyard road. She never pauses, not even once she’s outdistanced her erratically loping pursuer. In a standard horror film, her nearly three-minute sprint might well tax audience patience. But Night ingeniously ups the terror ante with each frantic footfall, hitting such a hyper pace that the opposite effect takes hold, forcing jangled viewers to share Barbara’s suffocating fear.

      When she escapes into an appararently empty farmhouse, Barbara keeps cool enough to lock the door, dial the phone (it’s dead), and snatch a protective knife from a kitchen drawer. A frightened peek outside reveals that two additional fearful figures have joined her brother’s attacker. Shell shocked, Barbara decides to explore upstairs, only to be stopped dead in her tracks by the grotesquely grinning skull of a rotting corpse.

      Draped over the banister, Barabara half-slips, half-slides down the stairs. Now she’s freaking out in earnest. She staggers to the front porch, where headlights freeze her, fawnlike, in their blinding glare. Without warning, a face pops up out of nowhere and into frame—a black face. Help or another threat? For the moment, Barbara doesn’t know—and neither do we. When the intruder hustles her back into the house, we realize he’s on her (and our) side. Still, trapped in the imperiled farmhouse with a black stranger while killers mill outside, Barbara’s mental meltdown accelerates.

      The man identifies himself as Ben, but there’s no time for personal details or pleasantries. Ben quickly sizes up the situation and takes control, questioning, with little success, the now silent and useless Barbara. He also tries the phone, which emits a weird, faint electronic hum. He, too, discovers the corpse at the top of the stairs and mutters a stunned, “Jesus.” When he stumbles downstairs, Barbara briefly assumes a prayerful position as if responding to Ben’s religious “plea.” But it doesn’t look like any deus ex machina’s on the way to save these souls caught in a sudden living hell.

      As Ben moves about the house, we also imbue him with a sketchy backstory never spelled out in the film. We can tell by his speech and comportment that he’s intelligent and highly competent, but his casual clothes suggest that, as a black man in 1968 America, he probably works a job that’s somewhat beneath his abilities. We also suspect, from the otherwise white (and, in the case of the attackers, downright pale) characters we’ve encountered thus far, he’s probably not native to the immediate area but just “passing through.”

      While Ben scours the house for food, blood from the ceiling drips on Barbara’s hand. Seeking Ben’s solace, she locates him in the kitchen and absently fondles his tire iron. Her hysterical query—“What’s happening?”—could have gotten a laugh, given the jargon of the time, but it never did at any screening we attended. Ben doesn’t know the answer.

      Outside, the zombie ranks continue to swell. The walking dead seem more focused now, hefting stones and systematically smashing Ben’s headlights. He takes his trusty tire iron to one of the creatures, then another, crushing their skulls (at this point, they’re out of frame, though the scene is accompanied by emphatic soundtrack thumps).

      One zombie enters the house via the back door and creeps up on Barbara, but Ben swiftly intervenes, wrestling the crippled-looking fiend to the floor. This time the camera doesn’t cut away, and we see the gruesome results of Ben’s handiwork—a large, lethal hole in the zombie’s forehead. Ben dispatches another deader in the doorway. The first zombie’s eyes fly open. Ben commands Barbara, “Don’t look at it!” He drags the body outside and sets it on fire as the other zombies back away.

      Stifling his impatience, Ben exhorts Barbara to help him find boards to block the windows and reinforce the doors, vulnerable points of entry the zombies appear determined to penetrate. Barbara is hypnotized instead by a tinkling music box, a genteel reminder of a recent, abruptly smashed past. Ben locates lumber conveniently stashed under the kitchen sink and, working alone, begins boarding up the house. Barbara lends an ineffectual hand in a slow, nearly wordless sequence that again could have bored audiences. By this time, however, most viewers with active pulses are too hooked to fidget; they’re thoroughly fixated on every move, no matter how slight, the screen protagonists make.

      While dismantling a table, Ben relates the tale of carnage he’d witnessed at Beekman’s Diner: “I was alone. Fifty or sixty of those things were just standing there.” Once Ben completes his horrific monologue, Barbara begins to tell her story, albeit in the voice of a traumatized child. She trails off, complains of the house’s heat, tugs at her clothes, and again grows hysterical, irrationally insisting they leave and look for Johnny. When Ben opines that Johnny’s dead, Barbara slaps him. In another culturally trailblazing moment, black Ben delivers a solid punch to the white woman’s jaw. He gently places an unconscious Barbara on the couch, then clicks on the radio.

      As СКАЧАТЬ