Night of the Living Dead is given new life and more death(!) with a relentless live theatre sound performance to a refurbished print of the original movie masterpiece.
More correctly, it is George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, to distinguish it from the 1990 remake which Romero rewrote, and his longtime special effects collaborator Tom Savini directed.
This is the fourth project of Live Live Cinema, founded by composer and musician Leon Radojkovic. He has done three others including Little Shop of Horrors. Re-imagining cult horror movie classics.
The two Herculean performers are Isla Mayo and Jack Buchanan. As well as voicing every character (except one), they play nerve guitar, percussion and electronic gadgets along with sound effects. Gun shots sound like cap guns from childhood times.
Directors are Sophie Roberts and Sam Snedden.
Living Dead was a ground-breaking horror movie in 1968 and created the template for the modern-day zombie movie cult.
But let’s revisit its real origins. This was Le Theatre du Grand Guignol which operated in Paris from 1897 to 1962. Absurdist plays which featured macabre stories with plenty of visual horror effects. Not just blood bags, but guts and gore and gruesome torture. With equal amounts of black humour. The deep origins of the splatter movie and gore-porn.
This Live Live Cinema is bringing it all back home. Mixing mediums with heightened remastered effects.
It’s a dreaded sunny day and meeting at the Cemetry Gates are a brother and sister visiting their father’s grave. The guy eerily resembles Jeffrey Dahmer.
They are accosted by a malevolent looking man, who does not speak. He just attacks. The brother is killed. She runs and becomes hysterical as she tries to escape. She comes to a house and seeks refuge.
Shot in beautiful black and white, yet it looks vibrant. More so than what I remember, seeing it at cinemas, University O weeks and VHS tape. What the original videos stores carried.
The house appears deserted. The phone is out. Upstairs we get a flash insert of a corpse missing flesh from the face. The structure of the film is drawing heavily from Alfred Hitchcock, specifically The Birds. Also, Repulsion and Cul-de-sac from Roman Polanski who was a Hitchcock disciple.
Barbara (Judith O’Dea) is unravelling fast. Soon she is joined by the main protagonist in the movie, Ben (Duane John). He is Black and he’s also seeking refuge from similar attackers.
This is the only character whose actual voice is retained in this production.
More of these malevolent strangers appear heading towards the house. They don’t talk, they only walk relentlessly, and they murder and devour what they kill. This is pieced together from radio reports (re Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds) and television.
No spoilers. I found out many of the audience outside of the Boomers (like me) are seeing this movie for the first time. This is the best way to be introduced to the works of Romero.
The political and social commentary of this movie has been brought into sharper relief than from my original recollections.
The source of this behaviour is explained as an outbreak of a contagion and a weird type of radiation. NASA knows but there is media censorship. Ships sent to Venus and back are being fingered. People die and reanimate to become cannibal hunters. The living are paralyzed with fear.
The historical time of 1967 America that this was written is a key to unlock its metaphors.
The Summer of Love and Hippies were counter-balanced by escalating racial tension and cities were facing riots and burning.
There was no formal script at the time of filming, and actors and the Director improvised a great deal. So, it had a mechanism to reflect the real time events, like the murder of Martin Luther King and the boiling over of Black rage.
The cast is all white except for the one exception of the hero. I am not clear how this was received at the time. It was a financial success.
George A. Romero has said on several occasions that there was nothing political about any of his zombie movies. They were amoral. Of course, he was lying, and there have been other recorded interviews contradicting this. Even more brazen than Bob Dylan.
Romero went on to make three more classic ones and two reasonable ones. He developed those central themes of contagion, fear and slaughter. All have the wicked and macabre sense of humour.
Dawn of the Dead made the most money. I attended the premiere at the Civic theatre, where everyone screamed at the boosted special effects splatter fest. A zombie is walking towards an idling helicopter in mid-range camera view. He mounts a low stair platform and gets the top of his head sliced off. Rednecks are gathered to go on a zombie turkey shoot. As they get more drunk it becomes a comedy of slaughter as the Bubbas’ get overwhelmed.
Day of the Dead is probably the best, as the zombies are legion, and the Army is the only bastion. A great shot of zombies shuffling out of a bank, followed by a huge alligator.
Night of the Living Dead (1990) has a scene of zombies being hung on trees and shot repeatedly.
Those allusions are all there in the original too. The Klu Klux Klan. The Nazi blitzkrieg bop on their Eastern front.
A powerful movie whose strength has been enhanced by this remastered presentation. We are them and they are us. George A. Romero put that line in the remake. It is implicit all over the original Night of the Living Dead.
