NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD: 25TH ANNIVERSARY COLLECTOR’S EDITION
1968, Elite Entertainment #EE1114, D/MA/+, $89.98, 96m 3s
The picture quality is murky,
impenetrable, cloudy as the bot­ tom of a fish tank, with scratches darting through like lichen. Then, in a gesture of anarchistic glee, the wretched image—the norm for countless public domain video issues of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD—explodes, revealing the logo of Elite Entertainment, the laser industry’s new kid on the block. It fades to the THX logo, with its exciting tenor synth cre­ scendo, which then cuts to a NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD we’ve never seen, taken for the first time directly from the film’s original negative. Almost immediately, we feel
in the grip of a different experi­ ence. Elite’s NOTLD looks and sounds beautiful, artistic, profes­ sional—dramatically unlike the cheaply processed 35mm prints and bum video transfers its ad­ mirers have known for the last 26 years. (This is at least a year too late to qualify as a “25th Anniver­ sary” set.) The consistently smeary, delirious ambience of that film (not this one) has been accepted by many critics as a deliberate textural choice by di­ rector George A. Romero and his Image Ten cohorts, a choice meant to accentuate the film’s documentary flavor, as well as to remind us of the B&W newsreels that brought into our homes the unfolding story of the Vietnam War; indeed, the film’s classic reputation is in many ways in­ separable from the “emotion of its emulsion” (to borrow a phrase from THROAT SPROCKETS). So while Elite Entertainment has clearly hit a home run their first time out of the box, they have
also given us a film that feels markedly different from the one we were expecting; a viewing ex­ perience to savor, but also to reassess. The NOTLD preserved in this
two disc set (one contains a CLV pressing of the film, the other a CAV disc of supplementary ma­ terials) is a peculiar mixture of elegant B&W Expressionism and muscular, roughhouse editing, a combination of seemingly con­ trary techniques that evokes a disturbing kind of stylistic twi­ light. You never know which way the film is going to lean—toward the haunting, misty frisson of an unfolding music box, or toward the charnelhouse shocks of a cannibal feast. Its frontiers are wide open. If comparisons must be made, its unknown cast and accomplished technique recall Herk Harvey’s CARNIVAL OF SOGLS (1962), but it’s bolder, more believable, less predictable. Pre-Elite versions of NOTLD
were sometimes so washed-out that its lesser performances seemed on-target, lending a somewhat pretentious veneer to Duane Jones’ lead performance as Ben. In this new transfer, we can see that Jones is, in fact, the only actor who consistently hits the same heights the technicians are achieving; his inflections are dynamic, his movements are graceful, his involvement is total. He’s there. (If everyone had been on the same beam, this film might have been able to support a lofty title like NIGHT OF ANCIBIS.) By the same token, Marilyn
Eastman’s performance as Helen Cooper has always seemed neu­ tral in the past, yet it benefits most of all from the new transfer. With the photography’s original clarity restored, we can see a network of emotions at work in her face, a kind of still suburban death mask, sublimated by years of living in the shadow of her
tyrannical husband, Harry (Karl Hardman). I’ve always thought of Harry as the kind of guy who served in the Navy, remembers it as the best time of his life, and who tries to commandeer his fam­ ily like a PT boat; now I can see that Hardman was playing him more like a film noir tough guy, curt, wiry, hard-boiled. A cookie- cutter profile darting through the gobo shadows, an Expressionist touch in its own right. Hardman’s performance remains exagger­ ated, but the exaggeration now looks more like a man overreact­ ing under stress than an actor overacting in a low-budget horror picture. And then there are per­ formances that do not benefit from a sharper focus, like that of Keith Wayne (Tom), who is now upstaged by his own nervous blinking. The clarity also makes one more than previously aware of various secondary actors (like newscaster Charles Craig) dou­ bling as zombies (he’s the one shown wrestling with the intes­ tines during the “Last Supper” sequence). The old pseudo-documentary
atmosphere is gone, but what remains is no less admirable: a hometown stab at old-fashioned horror movie-making, in which all of the old-fashioned rules of movie-making are exploded. The hero is black, female nudity is shown, graphic cannibalism is depicted, and most adventurously of all, everybody dies. Those de­ cisions seemed to go hand-in- hand with the old documentary look, which implied that steps toward a new cinematic realism were being taken; in the context of an artificially stylized motion picture experience, however, these decisions come across with an even bolder sense of daring. The science-fictiony theramin score, culled from Capitol’s “Hi- Cue” library music recordings (previously used in countless
55
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84