Ten Days of Terror!: Hungry Wives

Film: Hungry Wives (Season of the Witch)
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

Like it or not, George Romero is going to be forever associated with his zombie movies. To be fair, they are his greatest cultural legacy for a reason. He did more than rewrite the world’s concept of zombies, though. Romero made some other oddball movies like Knightriders and The Crazies as well. Hungry Wives (also called Season of the Witch is one of those oddball movies. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was another zombie movie, given the word “hungry” in the title.

This is a Romero movie, though, given the amount of social commentary that is at play here. Hungry Wives is about ennui, about feeling disaffected and disconnected from your own life. The film follows the sort of awakening of Joan Mitchell (Jan White), who is dissatisfied with her life as a housewife, her lack of connection to her daughter, and her unhappy, unpleasant marriage to her husband Jack (Bill Thunhurst). Looking for something more, Joan starts to explore witchcraft, which turns out to be more true and more effective than she would have thought.

Cancer of the Pseudonym

Film: The Dark Half
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

Stephen King sometimes recycles locations and, because of this, characters. Sheriff Alan Pangborn, the thin blue line in the city of Castle Rock, Maine. If you’re watching “Castle Rock,” you know the character, played by Scott Glenn. Alan Pangborn shows up in a few of King’s novels, and thus a few of King’s movies. In The Dark Half, Pangborn is a more minor character, but he’s also played by Michael Rooker, which is a strong point in the movie’s favor.

The Dark Half is very much a film tied to King’s own career. Just as Misery was a sort of evil love letter to his fans, The Dark Half is King coming to terms with his alter-ego, Richard Bachman. There are a lot of parallels here between the film’s main character, writer and professor Thad Beaumont (Timothy Hutton), and his pseudonym-come-to-life George Stark (also Timothy Hutton).

There's Something in the Water

Film: The Crazies (1973)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

Say the name “George Romero” and pretty much everybody is going to think of the zombie films. If you’re not a horror nerd, it can be difficult to think of anything that Romero did that wasn’t awash in the living dead. The Crazies (sometimes called Code Name: Trixie) is one of those Romero films that is easy to forget or, honestly, not know about. There’s a lot here that feels very much like what you’d expect from a George Romero film, though, including some very zombie-like behavior.

I also have to say that the middle of a pandemic is probably not the right place to watch a film like The Crazies. The elevator pitch is that a plane carrying a deadly strain of bacteria (or a virus—they call it both) goes down near a small down in Pennsylvania. The bacteria gets into the water supply, and over the next couple of days, it starts to affect the townspeople. The two results of being infected are either death or insanity, and those who go insane also become homicidal. Of course, the military shows up to try to shut things down, but in George Romero’s world, the military is as incompetent as everyone else, and things quickly spiral out of control.

Wednesday Horror: Diary of the Dead

Films: Diary of the Dead
Format: DVD from LaSalle Public Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.

So let’s talk for a minute about George Romero. You cannot get away from the fact that Romero was an important filmmaker. If he did nothing after Night of the Living Dead, he’d still be remembered with a great deal of respect. He did a lot more, of course, but despite films like Martin and The Crazies, he’s always going to be remembered as the guy who created zombies as they are known in the modern world. After his initial trilogy, he took a 20-year break from zombies until creating three more films. The middle film of that group, Diary of the Dead, is the one that concerns us today.

Before we dive too heavily into the film itself, I need to say a few things about it. First is that the overall quality of Romero’s zombie films drops off after the initial trilogy. I like the initial three movies quite a bit. Night of the Living Dead is a true genre classic and Dawn of the Dead is arguably better and definitely bloodier. Day of the Dead is better than it’s initial reputation and not nearly as good as its current reputation, but it’s not bad. When we move into the second trilogy, we start with Land of the Dead, which has some interesting ideas, but doesn’t quite reach the strength of the original movies. Diary of the Dead is not nearly as good as Land of the Dead.

Ten Days of Terror!: Land of the Dead

Films: Land of the Dead
Format: IFC on rockin’ flatscreen.

When George Romero created Night of the Living Dead he essentially invented a new subgenre of horror films, mainly by not having the original film copyrighted. Sad for him, happy for horror fans everywhere. Romero revisited his undead zombie world five times. Sadly, each of these movies has ended up with declining reviews; the highest point is Dawn of the Dead and the lowest is the most recent, Survival of the Dead. Of the five after the original film, Land of the Dead falls in the middle—the fourth in the series and the midpoint of the five sequels in terms of critical reception.

Each of Romero’s zombie films explores a different aspect of the world using the zombies as metaphor. In the case of Land of the Dead, Romero is going to a different aspect of what he looked at with Dawn of the Dead. Where that film explored mindless consumerism, there is a strong undercurrent of wealth inequality in Land of the Dead. It’s a theme worth exploring, and frankly, it’s worth exploring more than Romero does it here. This is undoubtedly one of the ideas that is at play in the film, but it’s really only seen in the margins except for in a few places.

Wednesday Horror: Day of the Dead

Film: Day of the Dead
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

I’m put into a strange situation with Day of the Dead. When the third installment of George Romero’s zombie series came out, it was very poorly received in general. Those critics who don’t typically like horror films didn’t like it because it’s a horror film. Horror fans didn’t like it very much either because it’s a huge step backward in terms of gore. Dawn of the Dead was incredibly bloody while Day of the Dead is much lesser on the general gore scale.

In the years after its release, Day of the Dead has been re-evaluated a number of times and has slowly risen in the estimation of horror fans. Once over the disappointment of a huge curtailment in the gore factor, viewers started to look at what was really here and saw the story beneath the lack of gore and saw the commentary that Romero was making. Over and over Day of the Dead was brought up as a movie that was severely underrated (Halloween III is the other one that is frequently mentioned). Now it’s to the point that Day of the Dead may actually be overrated. It’s good, but it’s definitely the weakest of Romero’s original trilogy.

Ten Days of Terror!: Martin

Film: Martin
Format: Internet video on The Nook.

When I think of George Romero, I think of zombies. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that. After all, the various Dead movies are where Romero made his name, even if all of them haven’t really lived up to the promise of the first trilogy, and the first two especially. He did other things, though, including Martin in the mid-‘70s. In fact, Martin was produced before Dawn of the Dead, so this comes from a time before Romero was pigeonholed into being the zombie guy.

Martin is interesting for a number of reasons beyond being a non-zombie Romero film. This is his take on the vampire story, and it’s very different from the typical vampire tale. Martin (John Amplas), our title character, is evidently completely human, but believes himself to be a vampire. Martin thinks he is 87 years old despite looking 19. He’s fascinated with blood, and has figured out the best way to get the blood he believes he needs. His method is to knock his victims out with a syringe and then use a razor blade to drain the blood from his victims. While all of this is happening, in Martin’s mind the world is reduced to black-and-white, and the reality of a struggling victim is transformed into a Gothic romance.

Off Script: Creepshow

Film: Creepshow
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

It seems that whenever I watch and write about a horror film from the late 1970s or 1980s, I reference Video Bug, the video rental place we went to when I was a kid. Creepshow, the 1982 horror/comedy anthology based on the look and feel of old E.C. comics like The Haunt of Fear is yet another film that I was introduced to through the magic of video rental. When? I don’t really know. Sometime between 1982 and 1985, for certain. I have fond memories of Creepshow, as should most people who have seen it.

I have it on very good authority that the sequels, particularly the third one, are crap, but the first one really is a lot of fun. Part of this is the direction from George Romero, who really made a lot of effort to make Creepshow look as much like the comics it’s based on as possible. Another major plus is the presence of Stephen King. King not only takes the main role in one of the five stories, he also wrote three of the five episodes specifically for the film and adapted a fourth from one of his previously published works. That gives this film a lot of credibility, and it’s credibility that really pays off.

When There is No More Room in Hell

Film: Night of the Living Dead; Dawn of the Dead
Format: Streaming video from Drive-In Classics on rockin’ flatscreen (Night); DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player (Dawn)

I’m a fan of the zombie sub-genre of horror films. It’s taken me awhile to figure out precisely why, though. The simple reason is that zombie movies are just about the only form of supernatural horror that has the potential to scare the monkey shit out of me. Ghosts, vampires, and demons don’t have that potential, but zombies? Yeah, I admit it. They scare me. Because of this, there is a certain level of respect I have for zombie movies, and the really great ones rank high on my list. If I really want to get pedantic here, I could complain that these are actually movies about ghouls, but that would just be confusing. There should be no surprise at this point that I’m talking about Night of the Living Dead and its eventual sequel, Dawn of the Dead.

One of the great favors that George Romero did for the horror industry (inadvertent, I’m certain) was to leave Night of the Living Dead without a copyright notice, putting the film in the public domain, thus giving every other filmmaker in the world the opportunity to make more zombie films. The film is thought by many to be a sort of allegory for race relations, although this was never intended according to George Romero—it just happens to have worked out that way. Instead, it is a ferociously original idea for a horror film, so original that it spawned hundreds of imitators.