Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Saw Night of the Living Dead, the 1968 version. It was the by now familiar tale of survivors banding together to stop the zombie horde, or at least survive the night. It hits all the right notes: unrelenting grimness, one of the survivors 'turning' after a little bite, telephone wires somehow cut, cars always low on gas, hands reaching through boarded-up windows. All of these have now become genre staples and so they seemed a bit worn out to me. But you must remember that this is the film all the subsequent films tried to copy, and the reason for that is that it all works together really well. Like the inner workings of a toilet, it is obvious, but only once you've seen it in action.

The film starts with a woman and a black dude (who actually survives quite a while) holed up in a farmhouse. She is so irritatingly shell-shocked by the zompocalypse that she can barely stop from breaking down (all women in this movie are completely useless, btw. Ah, the 60s. They were a simpler time.) He industriously tries to board up the house and gather information. Whereas his actions are more understandable to us as serene audience-members, as an armchair psychologist I think her reaction is the more realistic. I liked this mix of realism and story-necessitated fantasy. Rather than feeling like hedging, I feel it lets us eat our cake and have it too. Eventually they discover more survivors and try to gas up the car and we shift into the phase of the film where it looks like they might survive.

As per the zombie formula the plan goes slightly awry due (in part) to societal tensions which develop among the survivors. We become not only scared of the recently dead, but also of our friends, the soon-to-be dead. I've never been entirely comfortable with the zombie genre's emphasis on social paranoia, guns, and back-woods outposts. It's very fun to see the survivors building forts but less fun when they inevitably screw everything up in the third act. I think the frustration of seeing them fail is part of the shitty grimness of the zombie-movie but for once I'd like to see them live (and not in a "yes they lived, but the whole world is doomed" sort of way that I'm sure I've seen before.)

Edit: What the actual hilarious fuck Reader's Digest?