Essay Dimensions of Night of the Living Dead

Zombies, as we know them today, have mortified movie viewers for the last forty six years. Modern zombies first appeared in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968. These zombies were the slow moving, staggering ghouls that one has seen in countless films, but in 1985, Return of the Living Dead featured a new kind of zombie, the first fast moving and talking ghoul. Both Night of the Living dead 1968 and Return of the Living Dead 1985 feature the zombie as its villain, but Return of the living dead’s fast moving, talking zombies are a more modern take on the movie monster.

Reading through the whole essay, there are many appealing strategies found in order to strengthen the essay academically. Brooks attracts the audience with a pathos-style strategy, giving specific movie examples to straighten up the essay. The movie Night of the Living Dead resonates the viewers with an image of a flesh-eating and harmful zombie figure instead of a harmless voodoo-created zombie, which makes the notion of zombies transformed into a horrifying figure, provoking the sense of fear of audience with emotional appeal. The revolutionary creation of zombie film was led by George A. Romero, the father of the entirely new horror genre. In his work, zombies are characterized as a form of undead

In David Sedaris’ “Nuit of the Living Dead”, we at first see only a story about a slightly strange night at a home off the beaten path where our author lives. Through the first person narrative, there is much to learn of David and his perspective and with this comes an understanding of how we ourselves perceive things. Context is perhaps the greatest tool used to show us these mental processes. We are given the benign details with David’s explanation of them and then reflect on those details from another point of view without context yet still coming from the narrator himself. This very simple and elegant short story illustrates that things are not always what they seem and it ranges from things that go bump in the night, the reasons for those bumps, and to the assumptions we make when we do not have all of the information.

Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968) is a movie that contains a large amount of historical significance. This movie is well known for its incredible relevance to the year that it was released. The movie has been described as “A Newsreel of 1968”, and there is ample reason to make that statement. The year 1968 was a very tumultuous period in American history that saw a great deal of violence overseas and in the United States itself. There were many history altering events that took place during 1968, which would all serve to rile up and instill fear and anger in the American people. 1968 saw the latest presidential election in which there was great division amongst the parties, and was the election in which Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Not only did that year see the assassination of another Kennedy, but it also bore witness to the assassination of the most prominent civil rights leader of the time, Martin Luther King Jr. With these tragedies a war in Vietnam raged which had riled much of the country into protest, especially young people.

In this essay, I will be focusing on the analysis of the opening scene in Shaun of the Dead, specifically for the media language techniques used and how the film uses an interesting combination of genre as well as narrative to appeal to a target audience. Shaun of the Dead intriguingly merges the conventions of horror and comedy, and this is especially apparent in the opening scene that I will be analysing.

When analyzing this piece of writing it is clear that the purpose is not to entertain or persuade. The purpose, instead, is to inform and give a new perspective on zombie movies in a simple way that an audience of all ages can understand. In Andrew Cooper and Brandy Blake’s, “George Romero Zombie Films: A Plague of Meaning,” the authors walk the reader through how as time changed zombie movies changed with it. The authors further explain how zombies in many movies represent the time and culture. The writers inform the reader through their use of information from past zombie movies and analysis of the events of the times they were made.

On October 1, 1968, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was released in movie theaters. Although this film was released toward the end of the 1960s, the decade’s civil unrest translates into Romero’s film. Earlier that year, Martin Luther King, Jr., the iconic Civil Rights Movement leader, was assassinated, yet racial tension still ran high in the South, with small, local civil struggles occurring in many places. Far away, America’s youth was fighting the seemingly never-ending Vietnam War. Adam Lowenstein’s introduction to Shocking Representation discusses “The Allegorical Moment”, or “a shocking collision of film, spectator, and history where registers of bodily space and historical time are disrupted, confronted, and intertwined” (2). The representation on screen of this “historical trauma” complicates the distinction between time and space, causing viewers to experience similar sensations mimicking the original pain inflicted by the event. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead presents the tragedy of the black soldier narrative during both the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, drawing from this “allegorical moment”, and subsequently acquiring a larger black audience.

The film “Night of the Living Dead” is a movie based on a zombie apocalypse. The film begins with a man named Johnny and a woman named Barbara, with blonde hair, driving four hours from their home to a cemetery. They drive all that way because their father's grave is in that cemetery and their mother wants her children to replace the flowers on the grave. Once Johnny and Barbara arrive at the cemetery and replace the flower Johnny starts horseplaying around and teasing Barbara saying “they're coming to get you they just want your brain.” After Johnny said that a man was wandering around the cemetery and he walked up to Barbara and grabbed her. Johnny then threw the man off Barbara and the man and Johnny started to wrestle. Johnny was knocked out on the ground and the man started to chase Barbara. Barbara was trying to find a place to hide and was running in fear from the man. She finally found a house, so she ran into the house and closed the door and tried finding a weapon. As she was going through the house trying to find help a man named Ben, who is black, walked into the house trying to talk to Barbara and help her. Ben knew how to keep them safe in the house he wanted to board up the windows and the doors so these creatures wouldn’t get in. These creatures looked like humans and walked very slow and weren’t smart, they didn’t talk and just attacked humans by walking at them grabbing them and then biting them. Ben killed a couple of these things while boarding up the

Starting first with Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the most obvious social commentary aspect to the film is the ending. While everyone else has been killed by the undead, Ben survives the night in the basement, only to be shot by a member of the militia the next morning. This moment as well as the grainy newspaper photo montage reminds the audience of the race relations of the time, in particular, between southern police officers and black men. In addition, we see the subversive critique of 1960’s American society. Romero’s zombies have no cure; the good guys don’t win at the end, and the zombie apocalypse cannot be stopped. This shows the reflection of the shattering 1950’s optimism. The film takes on a pessimism approach; society is on the verge of collapse, and the authorities cannot be trusted or are too inept to deal with the

For many fans of the genre, blood and gore had always been a consistent factor, however, this is only a fraction of what the atmosphere presents to it's viewers. As a result, audiences across the globe are given an opportunity to observe a unique phenomenon; experiencing, a plethora of harsh, relentless, and disturbing, survival methods.

Is it possible to kill an idea when it is undead? Classic movie monsters tend to fade in and out of popularity as audiences grow bored and move on to fresher concepts. But there is one that has risen up and does not seem to slow down: zombies. Zombies have gone from being a small subgenre of horror film to a staple of popular culture across various media. This paper will explore the rise of zombies in popular culture and why it continues to remain relevant.

The popularity and appeal of the undead has greatly increased in the past few years with the rise of the popular television show, The Walking Dead. The show began in October 2010, and is still on the air today. Before the show was created, there were The Walking Dead comic books that were first published in 2003, and continue to be published today with over 148 issues. The fascination did not begin with The Walking Dead, though. Many movies were produced, and many books published before The Walking Dead was even thought of. An extremely influential individual to note is George Romero. Romero is an American-Canadian screenwriter, film producer, film director, and editor. He is best known for his series of apocalyptic films, beginning with Night of the Living Dead in 1968. Romero has been nicknamed the “Godfather of the Undead.” Some other works of fiction and film to note include 28 Days Later, I am Legend, Pride and Prejudice Zombies and The Zombie Survival Guide, also by Max Brooks. Our cultural fascination with “the return of the dead” can be traced back to the events and the general morale leading up to World War Two, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

To conclude, zombie apocalypse films have captured audiences’ attention for many years and years to come. Their exhilarating story lines, unique comedy, and respect for the world we

In the last 50 years a fear of the “other”, specifically zombies, has risen in many cultures whether shown through various novels, television shows or movies. The zombie in horror movies creates a desire for excitement to watch or read different variations. However, the zombie isn’t always a representation of thrilling excitement but a fear in losing yourself or even humanity. Mark Forster’s film “World War Z” demonstrates the fear in losing control in yourself and humanity through the use of different film techniques, while fighting for survival during a world-wide epidemic zombie attack.

Perhaps The Shining is rated one of Rolling Stone’s Top 10 Scariest Films of All Time (Greene), not because it offers a bit of a thrill, or blood and gore, but because it acknowledges the intrinsically evil nature of humankind and the human condition from which we all suffer; not only on a psychological level, but a sociological, as well. There are many motifs, metaphors, and symbolism scattered throughout The Shining, many of them great examples of styles of editing, filmmaking, and