What's so great about George Romero?

I.
Romero is generally praised for two major points. The first is his innovations within the horror genre. He invented the flesh-eating zombie; he introduced a highly realistic, almost documentary style with Night of the Living Dead; he ushered in remarkable, new gore effects with Dawn of the Dead, etc.. The second is his social commentary, particularly critiques of consumerism and capitalism. This is not so beneficial to him. His horror innovations are confined within his genre, for one, and are more mechanical than central to his vision. Whereas his social commentary is criticized, rightly, for being heavy-handed and just too sincere to be artistically serious (Oscar Wilde once said that all bad poetry is sincere).

What, then, is Romero's strength? It is at the level of the pen, first of all; and it is in a particular area, to wit, dialogue. And not just any dialogue, but the dialogue of heated debate, i.e. arguments. No-one, in the history of cinema, has written more realistic, grueling arguments amongst their characters. Many have tried, but have always written themselves down to the level of cliches--whether literary or cinematic--Romanticism, and poetic stylization.

Romero's arguments occur at all levels: between the protagonists and the perceived threat, amongst the protagonists themselves as a group, between individuals within the protagonists' group, and perhaps even within protagonists themselves. In what follows, I'll present an overview of the role of argument in Romero's films.

II.
Romero's use of argument naturally begins with Night of the Living Dead. The living dead don't talk, they just keep coming. They never stop. Fighting against the zombies is not entirely unlike being trapped in an argument with a relentless opponent; the stubborn opponent who will never give in, no matter how well you've made your point.

The zombies, a physical manifestation of argument, mirrored by the real arguments within the farmhouse. At first leadership is gladly yielded to Ben. But when Cooper arrives, there is a constant atmosphere of tension, poised for or in the midst of argument amongst the protagonists. They argue heatedly, realistically, without succumbing to the pressures of cooperation, kindness, and apology that plague most films--including very good ones. There is a sense that neither side is willing to give in a little, not even to the point of listening to what the other is saying.

The Crazies takes this approach to another level. Not only is there a form of zombie on the loose, but there are multiple factions of heroes; and all are in argument with one another. The townsfolk are in argument with the military, violently protesting. The military agents are each in argument with the town leaders. The scientists are in argument with their military employees. The protagonists, fleeing from the military, are arguing amongst each other. Worst of all, the virus causes spontaneous violence: sudden, inexplicable argument. Out of all of these people, nobody is really listening to what anyone else has to say. It can be quite uncomfortable to watch all the heated arguments; one wants to withdraw, or to step in and command these people to be reasonable, to stop, to "smarten up" and be reasonable. This is, of course, testament to Romero's skillful writing.

Dawn of the Dead follows a similar approach to Night of the Living Dead, with the exception of the brutal arguing in the broadcast center at the beginning of the film and is therefore not worth dwelling upon.

Day of the Dead, however, is the pinnacle of this early period. The arguments are so heated and so relentless that they, as Ebert noted in his review, upstage the zombies. The zombies still represent the relentless, stubborn nature of human argument. They're always at the gates, pressing at the boundaries, just waiting to break in; and they never stop. Inside the compound, the constantly shouting characters create a hostile environment of such reality that many reviewers openly despised the film. Why? Because arguments are unpleasant; they are unpleasant to be in, unpleasant to hear, to watch, to the point that arguing parents can traumatize children. What the reviewers of Day of the Dead missed is how these arguments represent real humanity at its worst: stubbornly arguing. It is frustrating, as frustrating to watch as being involved in the real argument. While Romero doesn't work with the best actors and he has never brought out the best acting with his direction, his writing and his direction brings out the fullness of the tension between them and between they and us. Never has human argument been rendered so truthfully on screen.

With later efforts, like Monkey Shines, Romero made this notion of heated argument much more subtle. It is here represented not as human nature, but as the dark, primal side of humanity that is normally hidden. The monkey's presence draws the primal rage out of the protagonist and he begins lashing out heatedly at everyone who gives him the slightest reason.

This writer, alas, has not seen Martin--arguably Romero's most personal film--nor Romero's post-millennial films and is therefore unable to comment on this trait of argument in Romero's more recent films. It should be noted, however, that Romero's two King adaptations (Creepshow and The Dark Half) did not contain this trait; to claim they did would require mental gymnastics of a self-defeating order.

III.
What we may derive from the above light analysis is that the Romeroan worldview, as it were, is a rather cynical one. Even before it happens, one knows the scientist's discover in The Crazies will never make it to its destination. And this cynicism derives from this World In Argument depiction pervading Romero's early films. As long as people continue to argue, they damn themselves. When there is free exchange of views and ideas and the struggle for domination is relinquished, his characters stop arguing and start surviving. Hence the conclusion of Day of the Dead, which offers some hope.

The great breakthrough in Romeroan cynicism comes with Monkey Shines, a minor masterpiece. Romero no longer seems to see humans as doomed to relentless argumentation, as represented by his zombies. Rather, their struggle for power and for ideological domination and position is seen as an animal instinct that can be overcome; and it's overcome by respect of others as equals.

Respect, in Romero's films, comes in a variety of forms, but it has always been there. It receives one of its most positive expositions in one of the few calm interludes in Day of the Dead's madness, when our female protagonist allows the pilot and engineer to express their views even while she disagrees. What they say is not as important as that she listens.

Whereas in Monkey Shines, respect takes a sexual form. It is the respect males and females accord one another as males and females, not berating, challenging, or struggling, but an equal regard. The protagonist, whom we see in the beginning has a trophy girlfriend, is not treated as an equal male force throughout the film. He thinks he is by one female, the monkey, who turns out to be a master manipulator. The conclusion shows a male and female in a relationship of respect.

Again, this dynamic of argument and respect does not arise in Romero's King-written films; and their presence in his post-millennial films will be left to the reader to discover.

IV.
In short, what's so great about Romero is that he's developed, both in a semantic taxonomy involving flesh-eating zombies, evil monkeys, doppelgangers, amongst other things, and in his creation of fully emotional characters, a truly complex and fascinating worldview embracing a dynamic of conflict and respect with the natural consequences each of these entails. That, I hope I've supported, deserves respect.

I expect to revise this in the future, once I've seen Romero's complete oeuvre.

Monkey Shines: Mann's Females

An alternate title to Monkey Shines could have been Man and His Females. Perhaps with a deliberate pun on 'man,' seeing as how our protagonist is named Allan Mann.

We are first introduced to Mr. Mann in an idyllic moment: he rises in the beautiful morning sun, smiles at his beautiful girlfriend's beautiful curves, he stretches his beautiful body, then goes for a run and is hit by a truck.

Suddenly this perfect man who had dominated the world is rendered totally impotent. All he can move is his head. He depends upon a machine to move about, but this machine is limited. For everything else, he has only women.

Female 1 - Linda: Linda is his girlfriend. She seemed to be totally his, totally in love. She was his as long as he had power, vitality, a future, and offered her security. She is a purely primitive female. She exchanges her now impotent male for the very doctor that repaired (ineptly, it turns out) her ex-boyfriend's spine. Strike number one against Allan's masculinity. One testicle gone.

Female 2 - Dorothy: Dorothy is the obsessive mother. Where Linda saw in Allan's impotence something disagreeable, Dorothy sees an opportunity. Many years ago she, like most mothers, lost her little boy to the independence of adulthood. Now Allan is like a child again. He could well need her to feed him, to bathe him, to do everything for him. And to feel needed, like she has her baby who depends on her again, she will do everything. This is emphasized in how her first act when she has Allan alone is to watch old childhood videos of Allan. She's exploiting his weakness and rendering him utterly weak. Strike number two against Allan's masculinity. There goes his other testicle. He's totally emasculated.

Female 3 - Maryanne: Maryanne is a lazy harpy. She is not cut out to be a nurse, yet she assumes caring for a quadriplegic will be an easy task while she gets to live in the luxury of this man's house and live off the luxury of his mother's money. Allan is at Maryanne's mercy and since he's emasculated is totally dominated by her.

Female 4 - Ella: Ella the monkey is the final straw. She is a feminine power so potent that Allan risks entirely being subsumed by her. His mind begins to be linked up with hers. He begins to have mood swings. All the while it appears he's in charge, in fact this is the passive dominance of Ella. By the end she's turned the tables. She effectively removes all the previous females to become the dominant female of Allan's life. However she cannot cope with Allan becoming a whole man again. It is ultimately Allan's recovery of power (sheer motor skills) that triumphs over Ella.

Female 5 - Melanie: Melanie is the female that offers Allan the potentiality of his masculinity. Because she regards him as a masculine power, she imbues him with the subjectivity of a male force; and in doing so gives him the power to regard her as a subjective female force. She restores his testicles as it were when she sleeps with him. And he returns the favour when his recovery of motor skills allows him to remove Ella. The film ends with Allan restored to his masculinity, albeit humbled, more the equal than the possessor of his female mate--and yes, the film does encourage us to see humans in this scientific manner.

There is no denying that Monkey Shines is, despite the description above, a tragedy. While there is a traditional comedy ending of the male and female protagonists together, promising marital bliss, the truly major female of the film has been savagely betrayed and even more savagely murdered by her insecure male. The tragedy is, of course, that it could not have ended happily for Allan and Ella; it was destiny.

A Terse History of Gore in Horror Cinema

Pre-Cinema (thanks to Chris, Scarecrow, and tbirkhead):
0.1 Although not given public spectacle, early Greek tragedy sometimes included elaborated descriptions of off-stage gore. This is especially true of Euripides' The Bacchae, which includes descriptions of animals and people torn limb from limb by ecstatic women. Found in the Roman drama of Seneca are the horrible acts of the House of Atreus, including Atreus' butchering his brother's children and secretly feeding them to him in a banquet.

0.2 The first instances of gore as a spectacle come with Jacobean revenge tragedy, which was heavily influenced by Seneca. For instance, the nihilistic conclusions of The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy, and Shakespeare's almost comedic violence in Titus Andronicus, including lopped-off limbs, cut-out tongues, rapes and murders.

0.3 Also notable, particularly in England, were the public executions, which attracted large mobs.
The Grand Guignol theater, opening in 1897, not long after photographs of the grisly murders of Jack the Ripper made the papers, moved the display of gore to the fore, making gore the raison d'etre of the plays being presented. This lasted until 1962--just one year before Blood Feast--when cinematic gore had already rendered the Grand Guignol theater redundant. The Grand Guignol tradition, by then, had been absorbed by the cinematic medium.

Cinema:
1.1 Cinematic gore has its roots in some experiments in historical re-enactments by Edison Laboratories, particularly in their beheading videos. The beheading of Mary Queen of Scots is one such instance, occurring a full two years before the Grand Guignol even opened in Paris, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ES7ujycXo. It is also rumoured that some Grand Guignol performances were filmed. (thanks morebrains)

1.2 The first instance of gore in a feature film is probably Griffith's Intolerance (1916), which features two on-screen decapitations and a spear bloodily transfixing a soldier's body. A few years later, Dali and Bunuel infamously sliced an eyeball on screen and had ants crawl from a wound in a hand in their surrealist short, "Un chien andalou" (1929) (thanks Chris).

2.1 Where gore began to be used in horror films I can't say for sure. But Carl Dreyer's fascinating Vampyr (1932) was notoriously censored for its graphic depiction of the staking of a vampire woman at its climax. All other horror films at this time rarely featured even blood.

2.2 Two years after Vampyr, an American poverty row exploitation film, Maniac (1934) included a horrific scene of a cat's head being squeezed until it's eyeball popped out, which was then eaten by the titular maniac. (thanks Chris)

2.3.1 The most traditional starting place for gore, however, is given as capitalist extraordinaire Herschell Gordon Lewis. Yet five years before Lewis made gore an official part of the horror film--a profitable part of the horror film--with Blood Feast (1963), Fiend Without a Face (1958) had a splattering climax of exploding brains.

2.3.2 While I don't know fore sure if Fiend Without a Face is the first real gore film, it's a pretty good contender. Similar proto-gore films include Eyes Without a Face (1955), with its explicit face-transplant scene, Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959), The Ghost Story of Yotsuya (1959), and of course the infamous shower sequence in Psycho (1960), with its blood running down the shower drain. (thanks Franklfw, t-birkhead, and annamae)

2.3.3 At the same time, Hammer Studios in the UK were bringing colour to gore, particularly with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Horror of Dracula (1958), influenced as they were by the Grand Guignol tradition. (thanks leroy gomm)

3.1 Come 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, Romero gave gore an eerie reality, with his living dead chewing on what appears to be real flesh. Since then, the pairing of George Romero and Tom Savini took gore to a new level with Dawn of the Dead (1978) and the gut-pulling finale of Day of the Dead (1985).

3.2 Carrying on the tradition in Europe was Lucio Fulci's Romero-influenced gore films, in which latex resembling skin is melted, eaten by spiders, torn, pierced, and all that good stuff. Mentionable, too, is Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox (1981) for pushing the gore to a level rarely seen save in Mondo films.

3.3 At the same time, the gialli were giving gore-spattered death-scenes a stylish elegance that gave it a legitimacy not easily swallowed, but eventually influential. This is especially true of Mario Bava's Bay of Blood (1971), a subversive extension of the giallo genre that he himself more-or-less invented, that puts the destruction of that awful human race at the forefront.

3.4 The experimental horror of David Cronenberg, during the '70s and '80s, revealed human flesh, in the world of cinematic horror, to be a malleable stuff, subject to graphic, horrific mutations and modifications, memorable depicted in Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986). (thanks scarecrow)

3.5 Somewhere along the line, the realism Romero brought to gore was lost. This is especially apparent in the comic gore in Evil Dead II (1987) and reaching its apex in Peter Jackson's wild, record-setting gore flood in Dead Alive (1992).

3.6 At present, a return to realism--obsessive, clinical realism--prevails with films like Philosophy of a Knife (2008) and the August Underground series, which brings an unprecedented reality to the cinematic destruction of the human body. More cinema-friendly applications of this same principle have resulted in the genre some call 'Torture Porn.'

3.7 Meanwhile, the German splatter movement, exemplified by Andreas Schnaas Violent Shit films, bridges both movements, having both the clinical realism and the involvement of human sexuality as a component of the core that is a part of the clinical gore tradition, as well as the ridiculous excess of '90s splatter comedy.

0.0 Competing with such films is the reality, in the form of viral videos on the internet, depicting brutal murders, offensive acts of masochism and sadism, violent deaths in accidents, as well as executions, attracting, just as the public executions of old, large crowds.

Death Tunnel (2005) - 1.5/4

I can't explain the plot of Death Tunnel without giving away some spoilers. However, since the director edits to telegraph every future revelation in the film far ahead of time, I don't think it matters.

It is pure contrivance. There is a university somewhere in America. In this university, there are some very pretty people: five girls and one guy whose only facial expression is "indignant grimace." There's also a sanitarium that used to house incurable plague victims; bodies were disposed through a tunnel--forgive me, a death tunnel. The pretty girls and the pretty guy all end up in the sanitarium and the one way out is the death tunnel.

Now there are five floors to the sanitarium, five girls, five hours, five ghosts (actually, more like six or seven ghosts, so the ghosts lied about that), and five ancestors to each of the girls and the guy who had some position in the sanitarium.

So there you go. A perfectly contrived situation. You'd think it would play out quite simply with the ghosts dispatching each of the pretty girls--showing a few tits along the way--and the lead girl and pretty guy can kiss and escape.

Essentially that is what happens, except there's a lot of obtrusive editing going on. The director Philip Adrian Booth proudly announces in credits that he has "written, shot, edited, and directed" the picture, but the picture might have been better served had he hired an editor. I'm all for stylish editing, but this is Adobe Premier gone wild. Scenes are occasionally sped up, turn into sepia, we actually see some sepia footage occasionally, there are flashbacks to five minutes ago, flashforwards to somewhere near the end of the film, and some pretty abstract shots that seem to be occurring outside time and space. As if that weren't enough, but the terror of the situation is ruined by the editing and Booth's need to use only jumpscares. I do think Death Tunnel holds a record for the most jump scares per minute. You can tell when a jumpscare occurs, because there's a set jumpscare sound effect that tells you you're supposed to jump. A cloud of blurry fog suddenly looks vaguely human-shaped: cue jumpscare noise.

I believe I understand what the director is trying to do with the editing. He's trying to establishing links between the ghost world, the present world, and the past world. (He's probably trying to hide a low budget, too.) This all comes together in the film's conclusion, which is taken, along with its major monster, right out of Fulci's The House by the Cemetery.

In fact, I think Fulci would have liked Death Tunnel. That's about the highest praise I can think of for this film, make of it what you will. It has a lot of House by the Cemetery and The Beyond in there. Gore shots, a confusing storyline that seems to be an excuse for the visuals, and the bizarre relationships between past and present--that's all Fulci.

Ultimately, it's nice to see a horror film that tries to do something new. The contrivance I spoke of is not necessarily a bad thing, either. It has a certain mathematical elegance. The plot points and some of the dialogue is just preposterous, however. And while some of the jump scares may catch you offguard, most of them miss; and the overarching terror is diffused by the editing. It's not an awful film, just mediocre; the equal of The Messengers, a much larger-budgeted picture.

The Resurrected (1992)

Lovecraftian horror, an elaborate mythology of the unseen and the incomprehensible forces of ancient, eldritch terrors that lurk in unspeakable nooks of forgotten time, hidden space, and unimaginable dimensions. It also involves a lot of adjectives. This is all notoriously difficult to represent in the cinematic medium, and those few that have been successful are worth clinging to with religious fervor.

I present to you, then, The Resurrected (AKA Shatterbrain) (1994), an all-too-neglected masterpiece of Lovecraftian horror and generally a very good horror film. It succeeds where many have failed. It brings The Case of Charles Dexter Ward to the screen with a fair number of alterations, but they all work; it shows as much as it can, but it all scares and leaves one thinking that this was only the tip of the iceberg.

Director Dan O'Bannon also happens to be the screenwriter behind Alien, The Return of the Living Dead (which is also his only other directing credit), and Total Recall, amongst others. As a screenwriter, his talent has been established a strongly coherent fusion of grotesque, all-too-visible horror, action, intelligent characters, and excellent suspense. Although not the obvious choice to adapt Lovecraft, this was clearly a personal project for O'Bannon.

O'Bannon's technique in The Resurrected is to fuse Lovecraft with his contemporary pulp writer Dashiell Hammett, bringing together the weird tradition with the hardboiled tradition.

Naturally, then we begin the story--after a gripping, gory frame segment--in the office of a private detective being visited by a gorgeous, classy dame. She informs him that her husband might be in trouble. It seems he's looking rather ill and has been holed up in an old house he inherited with an Asian heavy guarding the door.

The private detective's investigation takes the role of the reader in any Lovecraft story. One digs deeper into information that seems at the surface almost innocuous, if a little creepy, until its full horror detonates in one's mind. So does our detective dig himself down deeper until he finds himself in the midst of alchemical experiments and a long-dead necromancer's sinister designs.

As stated before, O'Bannon's modus operandi is to show rather than suggest. The horrible mutations are brought to life in full-bodied latex creations. These may seem a little hokey to some, to others, who still have a place in their heart for traditional horror special effects, they will be truly unsettling.

A testament to how deft the direction is, there is one scene in nearly pitch black, lit only with a match, that is so frightening it had this reviewer with his head against his knees in the middle of the day. It shows just enough and hides just enough to immerse one in the full primordial fear of the dark.

While The Resurrected has gradually been undergoing a favourable critical reevaluation since released on DVD, it still doesn't get the attention of many lesser horrors of the '90s, or indeed of many lesser Lovecraftian horrors. As a uniquely successful fusion of two diametrically opposed trends--suggest-don't-show from Lovecraft and the show-it-all from O'Bannon--this is film is particularly worthy of a wider audience and greater scrutiny.