Director: George A. Romero
Cast: Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Richard Liberty
Have I Seen It Before: Never*.
Did I Like It: I wonder sometimes where I developed my social allergy to the zombie genre. I’m not entirely sure why it’s been such a mystery. Zack Snyder (there he is again) tried to make the genre something palatable to the widest audience possible, and The Walking Dead tried (and, one supposes, is still trying) to make prestige drama out of the material.
At it’s best, it’s neither of those things. Romero understood this. That’s why his movies (still) work. There’s an unflinching, and yet somehow still savagely entertaining quality about Romero’s undead. They may have been fairly tame ghouls in Night of the Living Dead (1968), but by the time he really got cooking with Dawn of the Dead (1978), there’s an equal measure of social commentary on display, and the zombies are truly dead bodies come to life. Organs are sliding out of them. They are wet, and slimy. I don’t want to be around them, and yet I cannot look away. Today’s zombies are just rot moving around. Less interesting.
But what’s more, rot can’t be avoided. We are all headed into the dirt in one form or another, so watching Rick** and company perpetually lose the battle to not rot is just a stone cold bummer. The people in Romero’s films are in an intractable situation, to be sure. But even then, there might be hope. There’s hope of escape by helicopter. There’s somewhere to go on a beachhead. There’s even a solid attempt at living like a human underground while the zombies rule above.
I guess it took this film for me to realize I don’t hate Zombies, I just hate nihilism. Who knew?
*While this does prove to be the 1,001st on the site, since I asked Lora to pinch-hit for me for Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2017), this winds up being my 1,000th review. Technically.
**The only character on The Walking Dead whose name I can 100% remember and pick out of a lineup.