In his book On Writing, Steven King remarks that the movie The Night of the Living Dead was a watershed event, changing the whole horror movie genre, in some ways for the better, in some ways for the worse. (IIRC)
He didn’t give any real discussion of the thesis, however. I’d love to read the thoughts of Dopers who can give opinions, well-informed or otherwise, on the notion that TNOTLD changed the horror genre, what the change was, and what was good or bad about that change.
Thanks much!!
I’m not sure if this is what he means, but NotLD brought a new starkness and direct depiction to horror films. ou had zombies eating human flesh (something they hadn’t done , to my knowledge, in any ovies before that). What’s more, they showed them munching down on flesh, limbsm, and organs. Ripping flesh from limbs, unrolling intestines and kicking kidneys or whatever along the ground. I can’t recall anything quite like it before. In the somewhat similar Invisible Invaders you don’t see anything like this. The zombies come, and it’;s clear that they’re evil, but they’re never shown doing anything. In vampire movies you saw neck-biting, but it never looked serious. Even for stake-through-the-heart moments they either cut away, or threw a little blood, or made it seem bloodless. NotLD brought grossness to the horror film. The closest anything came to this before when the big bald whatsit in Ther Brain That Wouldn’t Die bit out the mad scientist’s thyroid gland (or whatever) and spit it on the floor. And disarmed his assistant (literally).
Later, we got to see a “possessed” kid kill her mother. That was pretty ground-breaking, too.
When a Chicago-area theater showed this film at a matinee, the kids (expecting a “kiddie matinee” were freaked. Roger Ebert, who was pretty unknown at that time, wrote a long declamatory article in Reader’s Digest about it, condmning the film. (Although it was really the fault of the theater owners, who didn’t check out the film beforehand. Even in those pre-ratings days there were films you didn’t show kids.)
NotLD was the first real cult horror shocker, going way beyond “Macabre” or “PSycho”
If I recall the time period correctly, the original NOTLD was just about the first horror movie to really show the horror on screen. Even with the famous shower scene in Psycho you never actually see Marian get slashed by Norman/Mother Bates.
That’s just my guess. IANA film critic.
It’s been too long since I’ve read it for me to presume to quote it, but I think King gives a more detailed explication of the movie’s significance in his book Danse Macabre. I admit this is only helpful if you can find a copy. My recollection is that King’s opinion was more or less described by CalMeacham.
Yeah, I seem to recall some more detailed discussion in Danse Macabre, specifically about the girl killing her mother, and (don’t ask me why this particularly stuck in my head) the cinematography of the scene, with a hanging lightbulb swinging and adding eerie light and shadow movements. I also believe **CalMeacham ** is on target: it was a revolution in what people considered possible to be shown in a movie. Hell, I still get creeped out by the graphic chowing down on human body parts!
A black hero.
As far as the “bad” things that NOTLD might have brought to the genre was the inspiration of the “slasher flick”, where the purpose is seemingly to see people die in as nasty a way as could be thought of by the screenwriter.
IIRC, I saw it at the library when I checked out On Writing just a short time ago. I hope it has an index.
Yes it does. Danse Macabre and On Writing are two books I refer to people who say King can’t reeeeaaalllllly write.
Actually I think you can blame the slasher flick movement on Mario Bava’s Twitch of the Death Nerve.
I’m guessing you never saw anything by Herschell Gordon Lewis. Might I suggest you check out Blood Feast or 2000 maniacs or perhaps Color Me Blood Red.
All just full of bloody horror and they all predate NOTLD by several years.
I was half-listening to "Boogeymen II: Masters of Horror on the sci-fi network last night and they had an entire section about TNOTLD but I wasn’t paying much attention to what was said.
It did have the first black “hero” so to speak, even though they did manage to kill him off at the end. It was an ongoing joke that the black guy was always the first one killed. TNOTLD was the first film where they almost let the guy live.
You might want to rent that movie to find out more about it and other horror films that have changed the genre.
In addition to the graphic violence already discussed, *NotLD * was also a watershed in that it was one of the first extremely successful independent films,and it was clearly a film with a social conscience. The blend of graphic horror and social commentary hadn’t been done much (if at all) before, but with the Vietnam War coming to everyone’s living rooms on the nightly news, *NotLD * found its way into the mainstream. It opened up the horror genre to a lot of interesting new possibilities (King’s change for the better), but it also started an endless chain of mindless splatter films where the gore was the point and there was nothing else to it (perhaps a change for the not-so-better).
Very true, and they did well in drive-ins, but *NotLD * hit the mainstream in a way that films like HGL’s never did.
I was not comparing the impact of the movies. Just responding to the statement that NOTLD brought gross to the movies. When it was not the first.
What contemporary social issues does it address? I know the black guy dies, but that’s clearly an accident. Is it supposed to be some kind of metaphor for destroying the village in order to save it?
Ahhh-- I totally forgot his stuff. I haven’t seen any of them, but I’ve read more than enough about them (In Re/Search: Incredibly Strange Films, among others, which gives HGL a whole chapter to himself)
In defense of NotLD as first exponent of gory horror, I have to point out that the acting in the HGL filoms is reputedly atrocious and the effects awful (stiff mannequins being passed off as flesh-and-blood people). In NotLD the body parts look real (although if they really were ham covered with Hershey’s chocolate syrup “blood”, I think the film would be just as nauseating if they just told the audience that’s what it really was.)
I think what really gave NotLD its position, though, was that widely-disseminated condemnatory artuicle in Reader’s Digest. I suspect a lot of people figured that anything gthat upset RD was worth seeing.
I always say the fact that the hero died in a way totally unrelated from the main plot as having nothing to do with racism, but instead being about the fact that sometimes, horrible things happen, and they have nothing to do anything else happening.
Yeah, it was just so incredibly pointless.
BTW, I checked out Danse Macabre and King does mention the movie several times, but does not answer—or even raise—the question of why NotLD was a watershed movie.