While I was drawing this, I had a nasty cold (Or is it just a cold? Do I have any suspicious bites?) and was curled up in the living room half-watching Night of the Living Dead. One thing that struck me about Night, this time around, was the way it fits into the general zeitgeist of late 60s low-budget experimental films -- Easy Rider, for example.

The dialog (much of it improvised, according to Wikipedia) has a shambling, but thoughtful, realism, like a Robert Altman film. Most of the drama is somewhat stagy: stressed-out people in a house, arguing over what they ought to do, or quietly going insane. This contrasts with sudden bursts of violent action, trucks blowing up, zombies eating people. The film's view of its own horrors is deadpan, matter-of fact. There are long, lingering shots of the living dead eating the corpses of their victims, and they have a flat seriousness of intent, like people gnawing ribs at a barbecue.

And of course, there's the sudden and shockingly bleak ending.

Even today it's unusual in a film with a mostly white cast for the black guy to be a main protagonist, the hero, and the last to die. Racial tensions are entirely unspoken in the film, but they give it additional depth and bite.

Bite! Hah, that was a pun.

Night brings to mind another aspect of horror movies that I find interesting: what makes a movie gruesome? Is it the shots, that is, what you actually see on screen? Or is it the story, what you know happens? I think Night, like the shower scene in Psycho, provides a strong case for story. Night lacks the special effects to show the dead munching on realistic human body parts. Instead, what you get is a story that clearly establishes what the ghouls are doing, and then you can show them gnawing on a cow leg bone or something, and it's completely horrible.

It is worth noting here that the version I watched was the other one on the "30th Anniversary Edition" DVD that I got cheap. I initially started watching the "30th Anniversary Edition" -- as it's the one that starts up automatically when you put the DVD in -- but was confused by a scene I didn't remember of some guys loading a coffin into a truck. This scene was boring, poorly acted, with stupid dialog, and did I mention boring? I started to wonder if I didn't remember the scene because I've always come into the movie late or something.

Anyway, as the credits started up and I saw a name other than George Romero for "director" I started to fear that I had been ripped off and went back to the main menu where I found a version called "Night of the Living Dead '98" which is the one I watched. This version at least fit with my memories of the movie, and the director credit is George Romero.

I wanted to make note of the slow-vs-fast zombies concept: Night zombies are actually capable of moving pretty fast when they have a target, but when they don't have a target, they just mill around aimlessly. They don't flat-out run, but they shuffle rapidly.

Personally, I think that fast -- as in, faster than living humans -- zombies are a big mistake. Even though I have enjoyed movies with super-fast zombielike monsters (28 Days Later, the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake) I enjoyed them for aspects that are totally unrelated to the speed of the monster -- in both movies, the scenes that worked the best would have worked out almost exactly the same with slower zombies.

Further, I think the super-fast undead concept is part of what ruined the recent I am Legend. Not only does it come across as lazy filmmaking -- here, we're going to induce tension with Lots! Hey! Of! Look out! Quick! Over here! Cuts! -- but it also tends to introduce unnecessary inconsistencies in monster behavior. You have monsters that move so fast you can't even see them when the plot requires, but then when the plot requires something else, they don't.

Also -- and I realize this might be a personal thing -- I tend to think shots of humanoid monsters running really fast look stupid. I thought that in Terminator 2, I thought it in the Dawn remake. I think it might be because there's something characteristic about the way humans run that makes a running human look like a human and not a monster anymore, but I don't know. I just know that when I see a shot of a supposedly scary monster running full-on after someone, I have the urge to start laughing.

The big reason fast zombies bug me, though, is that it's the wrong trope, like vampire movies where the vampires aren't in the least seductive. Sometimes they're good horror movies anyway (Nosferatu comes to mind) but they're not good vampire movies. If you're making a post-Romero style zombie movie -- and he did invent the zombpocalypse genre -- you're making a movie about a certain kind of threat. A threat that is inexorable, mindless, huge, growing. It's not like being chased by a tiger, it's more like being overrun by killer ants. And the most horrific parts of zombie movies tend to be the way newly reanimated zombies lose their human identity and affections, which is something that you have to linger on a bit for the full emotional effect to come through.

One final thing about zombie movies: nobody, including George Romero himself, is quite sure how the term zombie came to be applied to the post-Romero walking dead. The filmmakers did not call them "zombies" during production or promotion, and the word is not used in dialog or titles in his Dead series. Pre-Romero zombie movies, such as the classics White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie, invoke Carribbean voodoo tradition about what it means to be a zombie. I suspect that it was probably a reviewer -- somebody writing about the film called or compared Romero's dead to zombies -- and the name stuck, possibly because people like saying the word "zombie." I know I do.