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.
