Laserdiscs
monster movies of the 1950s), provides an additional, textural nod to the gulf dividing cinema and reality; indeed, the first thing we hear on this disc, in glorious THX-enhanced mono, is the sound of a phonograph needle riding the well-played grooves of one of these old records. After the lighting of the final bonfire, the card that reads “The End” in flowery script (included here for the first time on video) seems a shallow, misplaced reas­ surance in light of the gut-felt, personal apocalypse we have just witnessed. Speaking of the THXed au­
dio, it’s surprising how much this cheaply-produced, monophonic film benefits from this (at first) seemingly extravagant measure. The stock library tracks may be in mono, but they are also profes­ sionally recorded music, with a richness of tonal variety that isn’t so apparent in any other version of this film. But most impressive is the visceral impact of the sound of Ben’s footfalls on the farm­ house floor; not only can you feel his weight with each step, you can almost feel the bending of the floorboards. As a result, the farmhouse conveys a far more appreciable sense of its useless­ ness as a barrier, and thus con­ veys a much greater sense of the characters’ vulnerability. Despite the beauty of the
transfer, the print itself is not a 100% smooth ride. Owing to the condition of the original nega­ tive, Side One contains several instances of frames being re­ peated at the point of edits, re­ sulting in a barely perceptible freeze as one shot cuts to the next; some minor frame damage is evident when Johnny (Russell Streiner) fetches the styrofoam cross memorial from his car’s back seat in Chapter 2, and at
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Chapter 15/2:15-19, a shot of Helen Cooper sitting down un­ folds in slow-motion, apparently to correct sprocket damage. These unavoidable flaws are a small price to pay for seeing NOTLD in a new light. The film’s soundtrack is con­
tained only on the digital tracks; the analog tracks are devoted to two running commentaries by the major crew and cast members. The tracks are informative in a practical and anecdotal way, but also extremely loose, containing as much (if not more) joking as insight. We learn that the entire farmhouse was furnished for about $50, that most of the fur­ nishings and memorabilia were saved by Marilyn Eastman, that Kyra Schon (Karen) also played the farmhouse corpse in the shot where Ben drags it into hiding from the top of the stairs, and that Romero and Russell Streiner drove the answer print to Hew York on the day that Martin Luther King was assassinated. On the other hand, the cast members use an unexplained bruise on Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman)’s forehead as an excuse to venture some tasteless remarks about Mikhail Gorbachev’s birthmark. The commentaries suffer from miscellaneous flaws, as well; about 14m into the Analog 1 track, some very light jazz piano can be heard bleeding through the mix, and the first 12s of the second side commentary is miss­ ing. In fact, according to Elite’s editorial remarks on the supple­ mentary disc, a large chunk of the Analog 2 commentary was accidentally erased, necessitat­ ing the use of a perfectly good backup recording, picked up by one of the microphones used to record portions ofNOTLD itself! The greatest failing of the ana- log tracks is that few of the
commentators bother to iden­ tify themselves, and it takes some time to tell the voices of, say, Judith O’Dea and Kyra Schon (now a grown woman) or Keith Wayne and Bill Hinzman, apart. The supplementary disc takes
about 2!/2 hours to plough through, and while the Table of Contents reads like a model of chronological discipline, the play­ back has a jumpier feel. It begins with an excerpt from John A. Russo’s THE COMPLETE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD FILMBOOK (white text printed on a black background) telling how the project came to be. This is fol­ lowed by the complete original screenplay (a white-on-black re­ typing, not the original mimeo­ graphed pages), which reads quite differently from the finished film; its hero is “Truckdriver” (one pictures Peter Falk or Dennis Franz), Tom is a middle-aged cemetery attendant, Barbara sur­ vives, and its zombies must be “blinded or dismembered”—not shot in the head. There is a gen­ erous photo file, consisting of roughly 350 B&W shots and 25 in color (there is some repetition among the B&Ws); unfortunately, the two photo files are not sepa­ rately chaptered, so the color shots can only be accessed by playing through the B&Ws. Eight commercials, directed by George Romero for Latent Image, are included (also collected under a single chapter mark); like his fea­ tures, they seem more appropri­ ate to drive-in than television play, and reflect a steadily increasing wit. Also included are profiles of The Latent Image, Hardman Eastman Studios, George A. Romero (his television credits are incomplete, lacking the TALES OF THE DARKSIDE epi- sodes he scripted, including
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