Night of the Living Dead Essay Example for Free

wickedness of the Living wild EssayAmericanindependentblack-and-whitehorror subscribe toandcult filmdirected byGeorge A. Romero Night of the Living Deadwas heavily criticized during its release because of its explicit content, but received critical acclaim and was selected by theLibrary of Congressfor preservation in theNational Film Registryas a film deemed culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. reviewers cited the film as groundbreaking.Pauline Kaelcalled the film one of the closely gruesomely terrifying movies ever made and when you leave the theatre you may wish you could forget the whole horrible experience. .. . The films grainy, banal seriousness works for it gives it a crude realism. 62AFilm Dailycritic commented, This is a pearl of a horror picture which exhibits all the earmarks of asleeper. Since the release, critics and film historians have seenNight of the Living Deadas a subversive film that critiques 1960s American society, internationalCold W arpolitics and domesticracism.Elliot Stein ofThe village Voicesaw the film as an ardent critique of American involvement inVietnam, arguing that it was not set inTransylvania, but pappa this wasMiddle Americaat war, and the zombie carnage seemed a grotesque echo of the conflict then raging inVietnam Pauline Kael,5001 Nights at the Movies(Henry Holt and Company, 1991 Elliot Stein, The Dead Zones George A. Romero at the American Museum of the Moving Image,The Village Voice(New York), January 814, 2003 http//www. filmsite. org/posters/psyc2. jpghttp//www. filmsite. rg/reddot. gifAlfred Hitchcocks powerful, complex psychological thriller,Psycho(1960) is the mother of all modern horror suspense films it single-handedly ushered in an sequence of inferior screen slashers with blood-letting and graphic, shocking killings The master of suspense skillfully manipulates and guides the audience into identifying with the main character, luckless victim Marion (a Phoenix real-estate secretary) , and then with that characters murderer a tempestuous and timid taxidermist named Norman (a brilliant typecasting performance by Anthony Perkins).Hitchcocks techniques voyeuristically implicate the audience with the universal, dark evil forces and secrets present in the film. Psycho too broke all film conventions by displaying its leading female protagonist having a lunchtime affair in her sexy white undergarments in the first base scene also by photographing a toilet bowl and flush in a bathroom (a first in an American film), and killing impinge on its major star Janet Leigh a third of the way into the film .Film reviews, for instance, will sometimes take up political or sociological concerns in the course of issuing formal-aesthetic judgments. Night of the Living Deaddramatizes the bewildering and uncanny transformation of human beings into non-human forms. Indeed, like all metamorphosis narratives, the film carries uncomfortable messages just about identity about what it means to be a human being and about the terror of alienation.The films power to unsettle its audience also derives from its focus on the taboo resign of cannibalism (which it depicts far more graphically than previous zombie films). In the eighteenth century, the English ironist Jonathan Swift (1996) wroteA Modest Proposal,a darkly satirical attack on the privations suffered by the Irish commonwealth at the hands of the English in which the author ironically proposed that infants be killed and eaten in order to solve the problem of distress in Ireland.Night of the Living Deadalso uses cannibalism as a metaphor for exploitative power relations. Thus, while it deals with a quite different set of social problems, Romeros film can also be seen a sinister satire that exploits an outrageous premise in the interests of social and political critique. In his bookUnderstanding habitual Culture,John Fiske writes It is not violence per se that characterises popular culture, but only that v iolence whose structure makes it into a metaphor for the distribution of power in society. Fiske, 1989 137) fit in to Fiske, then, violence is a metaphor for inequitable (and presumably unjust) power relations in society. It is important, however, to understand this point in historical context. Violence became more unremarkably depicted in films and on television in the late 1960s, during a socially turbulent period when social hierarchies were being challenged Night of the Living Deaddraws on Alfred HitchcocksPsycho(1960), especially in its film craft the use of shadow and camera angles. Night of the Living Dead(and, indeed, its worthy equels) reminds us of something that the recent outbreak of zombie films may have caused us to forget the oppositional potential of popular culture. In this sense, the film is an undead classic that can still tell us something about who we are and warn us about what we might turn into. Waller, Gregory A. (1986),The Living and the Undead(Urbana an d Chicago University of Illinois Press) Swift, Jonathan (1996),A Modest Proposal and other Satirical whole caboodle(New York Dover) like most genre movies, reflect the values and ideology of the culture that produced them.Don Siegels aggression of the Body Snatchers(1956), for example, about an invasion of alien seed-pods that replace people with emotional replicas, is typically discussed in relation to American contemporary culture in the 1950s. Unlike earlier horror films,Invasion of the Body Snatchersimagines infection on an apocalyptic rather than personal scale, as in the vampire myth, a clear reflection of Cold War fears of nuclear destruction. But even as Americans felt threatened by possible nuclear war and Communist infiltration, the film also expresses a fear of creeping conformism at home.Invasionmakes the commonplace seem creepy, and in the climax a mob of plain-looking townsfolk pursue Miles and Becky out of town in a horrific evocation of the frame of witch-hunting m entality witnessed in the United States just a few years before the films releaseRead moreCritical debates Horror Films actor, children, cinemahttp//www. filmreference. com/encyclopedia/Criticism-Ideology/Horror-Films-CRITICAL-DEBATES. htmlixzz1qab4D5B2