Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane

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СКАЧАТЬ shoots Harry in cold blood. Harry staggers down the cellar steps. In his dying act, he tries to touch daughter Karen.

      Upstairs, Barbara snaps out of her trance and pushes herself against the door, enabling Helen to break free. Then we shock-cut to one of the reigning money shots in horror-film history: A zombified Karen chowing down on her dead dad’s severed arm. When Helen appears, Karen abruptly drops the hunk of raw father flesh and stalks mom, who falls during her disbelieving backward retreat. Karen retrieves a trowel and gets busy, stabbing mom to death as blood splashes the wall.

      Then we shock-cut to one of the reigning money shots in horror-film history: A zombified Karen chowing down on her dead dad’s severed arm.

      We’re down again to the original two, Ben and Barbara, trying to halt the zombie assault. Johnny makes his dramatic zombie entrance and reclaims sister Barbara, pulling her out the door into the cannibals’ midst; instinctively, she wraps her arms around her brother, half-resisting, half-succumbing.

      Now Ben is the last of the farmhouse Mohicans. As the zombie from the opening-scene cemetery climbs through a window, Ben belatedly follows the late, hated Harry’s advice and barricades himself in the basement, though not before tossing little zombie Karen across the room.

      Once downstairs, Ben wearily, warily surveys Harry and Helen’s bodies. Suddenly, Harry’s eyes pop open and Ben seizes the opportunity to kill him again, pumping three bullets into his brain. This time, the act carries no sense of triumph. Moments later, he’s forced to do the same for Helen. Upstairs, the thwarted dead mill aimlessly, sans purpose or direction.

      Outside, the scene resembles a post-combat Vietnam morning; as a helicopter buzzes overhead, we can almost smell the napalm. We see an aerial view of Sheriff McClelland’s posse crossing the field on foot, guns at the ready. A newsman intercepts the sheriff for an on-the-spot interview, leading to the following deathless exchange:

      NEWSMAN: Chief, if I were surrounded by six or eight of these things, would I stand a chance with them?

      SHERIFF: Well, there’s no problem. If you had a gun, shoot ’em in the head, that’s a sure way to kill ’em. If you don’t, get yourself a club or a torch. Beat ’em or burn ’em, they go up pretty easy.

      NEWSMAN: Are they slow-moving, Chief?

      SHERIFF: Yeah, they’re dead. They’re…all messed up.

      Cut briefly to Ben in the basement, then back to the posse and police systematically executing the retreating zombies, whose nocturnal uprising looks to have faded with the morning light as authorities easily quell the rebellion. Ben hears the activity and, with measured hope, climbs the stairs. When he peers out the window, a rifle shot from a posse member terminates his life. All that remains is the mop-up, as Ben is dragged, “another one for the fire,” to a mass funeral pyre in a crushing photo montage as the stark credits appear.

      The zeitgeist had been captured in a low-budget film can. In the parlance of the day, Night of the Living Dead had crawled out of nowhere to liberate the horror movie. That is indeed The End for the devastated viewer. But how did this dark cinematic miracle begin?

      SHERIFF: Well, there’s no problem. If you had a gun, shoot ’em in the head, that’s a sure way to kill ’em. If you don’t, get yourself a club or a torch. Beat ’em or burn ’em, they go up pretty easy.

      3

      BIRTH OF THE LIVING DEAD

      I thought George was kidding. People eating people!

      —Rudy Ricci

      It was a cold and snowy day in January 1967 when three twentysomething principals of a modest Pittsburgh commercial/industrial film house, The Latent Image, Inc., repaired to a local eatery for a late lunch, well-lubricated with equally cold beers. The three—George A. Romero, John A. Russo (“Jack” to his friends), and Rudy Ricci—were bemoaning their business struggles. Russo, like the others a frustrated filmmaker, suggested they undertake a feature-film project for the drive-in circuit. Little—make that nada—did they know that such a seemingly whimsical notion would, less than three years later, result not only in a completed movie but an international pop-culture phenomenon that would endure decades into the future, still with no end in sight.

      Meanwhile, back at the drawing board, or lunch table, major obstacles loomed. On the upside, The Latent Image HQ harbored all the basic equipment needed for low-budget feature-film production. The group had already produced such commissioned mini-epics as The Calgon Story (quite possibly the first detergent-oriented sci-fi film) and Mr. Rogers Gets a Tonsillectomy (“probably the scariest movie I ever made,” Romero would later declare). But the company could only loosen some $6,000—and that with a little help from its friends—to fund filming. Even in 1967 Pittsburgh, six grand could barely buy a 30-second local commercial, let alone bankroll a marketable movie. What kind of feature could be lensed, or at least begun, on so low a budget?

      “How about a monster movie?” Russo suggested.

      “How about a monster movie?” Russo suggested.

      While certainly a thought in the right direction, that inspired query didn’t immediately lead to the creation of the immortal Night of the Living Dead. Russo recalls:

      The first concept—one that we all liked—was about monsters from outer space, only it was going to be a horror comedy instead of a horror drama. Some teenagers “hotrodding” around the galaxies were going to get involved with teenagers from Earth, befriending them, while cartoon-like authority figures stumbled around, trying to unearth “clues” to the crazy goings-on. The outer space teenagers were going to have a weird, funny pet called The Mess—a live garbage disposal that looked like a clump of spaghetti; you just tossed empty pop cans, popsicle sticks, or whatever into The Mess and it ate them. There was also going to be a wacky sheriff called Sheriff Suck, who was totally inept and kept being the butt of all the teenagers’ jokes.

      Make that a long way from the Living Dead. Indeed, that initial concept hewed closer to an earlier indie horror hit likewise lensed in the wilds of Pennsylvania, Irwin S. “Shorty” Yeaworth’s The Blob (1958). “The main reason this project got scrapped,” Russo elaborates, “was that we couldn’t afford the props and special effects that would have been required to pull off the spaceship landing, The Mess, and so on. We had to scale our thinking down a little in terms of logistics.” In this instance, lack of budget may have actually saved the day, or at least rescued The Latent Image crew from ongoing obscurity.

      Fueled by such fave fright films as Forbidden Planet (1956), Psycho (1960), and especially the über-creepy Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Russo began exploring a darker idea: A boy runs away from home following a fight with his brother—the same basic setup employed by an earlier, gentler indie film, Morris Engel’s Brooklyn-set Little Fugitive (1953). The similarity ends there, however: Instead of frolicking at Coney Island like the latter film’s titular runaway, Russo’s young hero arrives at a clearing in the woods, where he discovers large panes of glass covering rotting bodies. “Ghoulish people or alien creatures would be feeding off the human corpses,” Russo remembers, “setting them under the panes of glass so that the flesh would rapidly and properly decompose to suit the ghouls’ tastes.” Russo further determined: “Whatever we did should start in a cemetery because people find cemeteries spooky.”

      Russo relayed his bare-bones idea to Romero, who, a few days later, “amazed me by coming back with about forty really excellent pages of an exciting, suspenseful story. Everybody in our group loved it. We all decided this had to be it—the movie we would make. It СКАЧАТЬ