Night of the Living Dead - Shakespeare and Romero

Night of the Living Dead. The power of the Zombie should not be underestimated. Just when you think they’re dead they’re coming back to life again. (Is the guy on the right a Nazi revivalist?)

Here be Monsters. Here be Money. Grotesque horror and gothic fiction sells because it plays to our deep concerns and insecurities. And, to put it crudely, it’s entertaining.

Since the beginning of modern gothic and horror fiction in the eighteenth-century critics have worried about its quality. For each spectator who wants to indulge in the cannibal feast of laughter there is another who wants to uncover the deeper meanings and ideological significance. The two spectators can seldom be reconciled in their different approaches.

It’s no secret that Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead plays well to the fashionable taste for the bizarre. He said that he was catering to a known taste at the time. 

Perhaps an enduring aspect of its appeal was it ability to reflect deeper concerns about the outsider; racism; family relations; cannibalism and taboos; contagion and contamination; the parasitic vampire; the dead weight of the past preying on the present. 

The return of the repressed is another formula, from the psychoanalytic field, that supports the re-incarnation of the living dead theme into the present. 

Let’s admit that film too, as a technology based on spectres and animation, has always been at the forefront of projecting our unconscious onto gigantic screens. What the ego edits out, the Id-film projects back.

Clearly Night of the Living Dead is well suited to a variety of theoretical and ideological approaches. The  notion that the film encapsulates a variety of gothic and grotesque themes which are cross-cultural and recurring across time also helps to explain its continuing appeal to new audiences.

But I often find that there is a resistance to more political interpretations (such as seeing horror films as a replay of grotesque war scenarios displaced onto the home territory – see below). Without speaking about any war in specific terms, the splatter and horror genres zoom in with grotesque effects on human aggression and violence.

With a budget of of $114,000 Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead (NLD) went on to make $40m at the box office in 1961 and has since earned $291m. At first ten members of the production crew stumped up $600 each. It demonstrates admirably what a small group can accomplish where there is a will to succeed.

It’s now a free commons film and rose to be the Internet Archive’s second most downloaded film in 2010, with over 700,000 hits.

Research has show that the film emerged from an  horror comedy co-written by John Russo and George A. Romero, with the catchy title Monster Flick. It is also no secret that the film was inspired by a horror/science fiction novel by Richard Matheson called I Am Legend (1954). The ‘vampiric’ novel dealt with a plague situated in a futuristic Los Angeles. In gothic writing there are few originals.

There is evidence that the dialogue was at times unscripted or improvised and that Duane Jones upgraded Ben Huss’s role in the film to make the character better educated like himself.

The final scene in which the black hero becomes an accidental victim is rather like a KKK lynch mob.

The notion that the film is open to political interpretation will always be open to question. That it is a comment on, or influenced by the war in Vietnam may also seem far-fetched. But I was intrigued to come across some interesting comments from Tom Savini, a special effects artist who worked on later Romero films:

"Some people die with one eye open and one eye half-closed, sometimes people die with smiles on their faces because the jaw is always slack. I incorporated the feeling of the stuff I saw in Vietnam into my work."

Savini worked on films such as Deathdream (1972) “in which a Vietnam MIA  […] shows up alive on his family’s doorstep as a slowly disintegrating zombie-vampire.” (Skal: 308) and it has also been suggested that the film “oddly echoes Sticks and Bones (1972), in which a blinded soldier returns from Vietnam and ‘sees’ for the first time the monstrousness of his own family.” (Skal: 308-9)

The combination of death and humour “smiles on their faces” brings us to the notion that these films are grotesque, rather than pure horror.

Another recurring feature of the monstrous is the inability to kill it off. It keeps coming back.

Another feature of the monstrous and the grotesque is that it typically combines elements of the life-affirming and the life-denying; blindness and insight; the erotic and the dead (eros and thanatos); flowering and decaying; attraction and repulsion; the joke as frivolity and insecurity. 

Is it time, perhaps to celebrate the negotiation of another opposition that plagues us: education and entertainment?

None of that is new, of course, as anyone who has watched Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus or King Lear will know. G. Wilson Knight brilliantly explored Shakespeare characteristic use of grotesque comedy.

To deny the comic components in Shakespeare’s tragedies is to miss the point. Yorick was poor, for instance, but he was also, like Hamlet, a clown. Hamlet is a casebook on humour; from biting satire to practical jokes.

When I contemplate the work of the Bard, I’m thinking The Might of the Living Dead. Or, The Night of the Laughing Dead. 

Do I see a re-make coming on ...

Titus at The Globe London

References 

David J. Skal, (1993/2001) The Monster Show. Faber and Faber.

The Rise of Zombie Studies. Here.

Socrates, Silenus and the Grotesque

The links between intoxicated excess, wild dance, and rough music is well known in the figures of Bacchus and Dionysus. It comprises what has sometimes been called a celebration of the irrational or the repressed drive in Greek culture.

But the grotesque link between the great deformed philosopher Socrates and the grotesque Silenus is perhaps less well-known. The link is, of course, most famously presented in the 'Author's Prologue' to Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel:

"Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my writings,) Alcibiades, in that dialogue of Plato's, which is entitled The Banquet, whilst he was setting forth the praises of his schoolmaster Socrates (without all question the prince of philosophers), amongst other discourses to that purpose, said that he resembled the Sileni. Sileni of old were little boxes, like those we now may see in the shops of apothecaries, painted on the outside with wanton toyish figures, as harpies, satyrs, bridled geese, horned hares, saddled ducks, flying goats, thiller harts, and other such-like counterfeited pictures at discretion, to excite people unto laughter, as Silenus himself, who was the foster-father of good Bacchus, was wont to do; but within those capricious caskets were carefully preserved and kept many rich jewels and fine drugs, such as balm, ambergris, amomon, musk, civet, with several kinds of precious stones, and other things of great price."

"Just such another thing was Socrates. For to have eyed his outside, and esteemed of him by his exterior appearance, you would not have given the peel of an onion for him, so deformed he was in body, and ridiculous in his gesture. He had a sharp pointed nose, with the look of a bull, and countenance of a fool: he was in his carriage simple, boorish in his apparel, in fortune poor, unhappy in his wives, unfit for all offices in the commonwealth, always laughing, tippling, and merrily carousing to everyone, with continual gibes and jeers, the better by those means to conceal his divine knowledge. Now, opening this box you would have found within it a heavenly and inestimable drug, a more than human understanding, an admirable virtue, matchless learning, invincible courage, inimitable sobriety, certain contentment of mind, perfect assurance, and an incredible disregard of all that for which men commonly do so much watch, run, sail, fight, travel, toil, and turmoil themselves."

For other life-philosphers of monstrous excess see Shakespeare's Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night and John Falstaff in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2:

“Socrates was poor, Socrates was deformed, Socrates was inglorious, Socrates was of ignoble birth, Socrates lived with ignominy. For how is it possible he should not be deformed, without honour, of ignoble birth, inglorious, and poor; who was the son of a statuary, flat-nosed, and paunch-bellied; who was reviled in comedies and cast into prison; and who died there, where Timagoras died?”

The dissertations of Maximus Tyrius, Translated by Thomas Taylor. Volume 2 (1804), p. 34.

Compare Montaigne

I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself. We become habituated to anything strange by use and time; but the more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonished me, and the less I understand myself.

And Joseph Addison:

A beautiful eye makes silence eloquent; a kind eye makes contradiction an assent; an enraged eye makes beauty deformed. This little member gives life to every other part about us; and I believe the story of Argus implies no more than that the eye is in every part; that is to say, every other part would be mutilated were not its force represented more by the eye than even by itself.

and Richard Bentley:

If the eye were so acute as to rival the finest microscopes, and to discern the smallest hair upon the leg of a gnat, it would be a curse, and not a blessing, to us: it would make all things appear rugged and deformed; the most finely polished crystal would be uneven and rough; the sight of our own selves would affright us; the smoothest skin would be beset all over with rugged scales and bristly hairs.