none of them are scary. at least last house on the left, which we watched a week or so ago, and night of the living dead, which i watched last night, are not. last house is horrifying, however, in a way that living dead is not. perhaps these films were scarier to audiences in the late 60s/early 70s but now they read more like material for sociology theses. in craven’s film the flower-power kids get it from the working class, and the bourgeois parents turn into monsters to get revenge (while the law bumbles around outside). (sunhee remarked on the resemblance/difference to lady venegeance in terms of the parents’ revenge.) in romero’s film the dead rise up as a result of government science gone awry, and a black man has to survive not only the “ghouls” but also the white survivors.
[spoilers follow]
i’m sure reams have been written on living dead but i haven’t read them and so am hoping the horror-fans among us can tell me a little about how this film’s (or craven’s for that matter) narratives of race and class have been read. we start out with white yuppie siblings, one of whom gets the chop almost immediately, while the other enters into a hysterical state from which she only occasionally emerges. next up is a young black man who remains calm, rational and organized throughout. rising out of the cellar of the house these two have taken shelter in are a young rural couple–plucky but not a whole lot of brains–and a middle-class family with a father who knows best (and wants to hide out) and a mother who seems ready to burn her bra. young rural couple prove their lack of brains and get blown up. the mother rebels against the father, not flinching when he is shot by the black man (who he’s been engaged in a power struggle with all along and who he’s tried to kill twice)–both then stagger back to the cellar where they are dispatched by their young daughter who’s turned into a ghoul herself. hysterical woman succumbs to the incestuous embrace of her now-ghoul brother and is consumed. the black man is the sole survivor–that is, till the government gets there the next morning and shoots him in the head.
so, yes, the house as microcosm of 60s american society in chaos, paranoia, vietnam, race riots, sexual revolution blah blah blah. but what’s interesting is that it turns out that the cowardly white father was in fact right all along. if they’d hung out in the cellar, where the black man finally takes refuge, the ghouls would have lost interest, as they eventually do, and they would have all survived.
more on last house on the left later.
Well, yeah–like the gore, there’s not much subtle about the social “messages” of Living Dead, and, yes, reams have been written. There’s a pretty good documentary called American Nightmare that touches on Romero, the aptly-named Craven, Tobe Hooper, and others making these counter-cultural horror films into the ’70s.
What always struck me about the first Night is the look–it isn’t just that the black hero is shot by white cops, but that the finale is a montage of still photos, sweaty southern-looking pasty white sheriffs standing with shotguns around the dead black man…. in a grainy, harsh bulb-lighted manner entirely reminiscent of photos of lynchings. Romero’s not a particularly fancy filmmaker (and may even, like his shuffling biters, be a bit flat-footed), but I think people overlook the aesthetic particularities of his films, how the style amplifies or engages the film’s thematics.
Both of these films tear up and into pieties about the nuclear family; there’s no easy horror out, where the family protects its own against outsiders. The family quite literally consumes itself, and others.
Why the horror kick, Arnab?
Of these ‘classic’ horrors, Texas Chainsaw still has a bite–it can still make me uncomfortable, freaked-out, antsy while watching. (And it, too, has an all-consuming family.) But, yeah, most of ’em aren’t so terribly terrifying. Romero’s films always, even the first time I saw them when pretty young, seemed more about dread than horror.
Craven. Hm. He gets lumped in with these guys, but he’s always struck me as particularly but unself-reflexively attuned to the zeitgeist — able with Last House or Hills Have Eyes to amp up ’70s anxieties about changes in the culture, able with the Freddy Krueger series to tap into a generation of ’80s adolescent movie-goers who crave punishment, equally ready in the ’90s to appease that audience now seeking ironic knowingness (with the Scream flicks). Yet not quite aiming for message as much as audience. I really like Romero; Craven I see as interesting for his perfect shameless B-movie sensibilities, and I am skeptical about the way he now stands up as (and for) a quasi-social-conscious horror filmmaking. I tend to think he surfed the shit, and simply caught the wave of horror that flashed through the period. (I’m all for that. But call it what it is.) Plus I often plain don’t enjoy Craven–his films are more interesting when I hear their details than when I actually watch them. Watching Last House is like an exercise to numb the mind, and Hills ain’t much better.
I might suggest watching Night‘s clammy claustrophobia against Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View, which came out a few years later, but seems tonally in sync–the paranoia engendered in/by these films seems of the moment.
“the cowardly white father was in fact right all along.”
Like Mr. Pink. Mr. Pink was always right.
Not horror, either classic or modern, but I was watching ‘John Carpenter’s They Live’ again yesterday. Carpenter gets in a little joke right at the end of the movie when an alien broadcaster is inveighing against horror films and singles out Romero and Carpenter. ‘They Live’ is really pretty bad (I’m not sorry Roddy Piper did not go on to regularly grace movie screens), and it has the longest, most pointless fight (between Piper and Keith David) I have ever seen, with the possible exception of the second Matrix movie. Still, there is something pleasurable about the lack of political subtlety and the notion that yuppies and Republicans really are aliens.