5 ms·

> Zombies, for example, show us something really ugly about embedded white supremacist terror of a slave revolt I dunno about that. Years ago, I was (very stup

by gary_0 3y ago

> Zombies, for example, show us something really ugly about embedded white supremacist terror of a slave revolt I dunno about that. Years ago, I was (very stupidly) wandering alone in a very bad part of town, and the only other people on the street were the homeless drug addicts, scattered here and there and shuffling about slowly, only dangerous if you let them get within biting range, and I thought, "is this where the zombies thing came from?" Night of the Living Dead (1968) kicked off the modern zombie trope, and that was around when drug addiction epidemics entered the popular consciousness as well.

defrost 3y ago
If you're intent on imagining a subtext to Night of the Living Dead a movie which never mentions zombies and features the (undead) neighbours harrass a black man who is ultimately shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy then you might also want to recall it was conceived in the aftermath of the Detroit and Newark riots and released to audiences who had just seen National Guardsmen shoot antiwar protesters to death at Kent State University. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5390-night-of-the-living-dead-mere-anarchy-is-loosed https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5390-night-of-the-li... Shuffling drug addicts is one influence I have no recollection of Romero ever mentioning.
- gary_0 3y ago
  I'm not saying that movie in particular had that subtext. Rather, the zombie trope quickly took on a life of its own in the years after Living Dead (and split into the fantasy/cursed and scifi/infected subtropes). It's hard to say why it resonated but there are definitely some interesting parallels with other cultural trends.
  - defrost 3y ago
    It's an interesting film, as an Australian who came to it later (I think I first saw it in 1992 ish) it was a while before I apprecriated a whole other perspective it had for some (early case of a film with a black lead, early use of graphic horror, lead character being killed, etc). A fistful of tropes indeed :)
- mrob 3y ago
  According to Romero, Duane Jones got the lead role because he gave the best audition, not because the role was written for a black man.
  - defrost 3y ago
    The thing about tropes in movies and literature is that they are often identified and become part of the legend of a work without the intent of the autor. Whether intended by Romero or not, according to the documentary A Century of Black Cinema (and other related print works) the film had a profound impact on many African American viewers of the time .. because of the lead, because of the story, etc. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1381270/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1381270/
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Whether it was the original plan or not, by the time the movie gets to the end credits the parallels to a lynching are incredibly explicit. I'd like to put in a rec for https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053454/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053454/ "The World, the Flesh and the Devil", which is an apocalypse movie with a slightly different premise: what if the only survivors of an apocalypse in apartheit 1950s America were a black man and a white woman? Contains some great shots of deserted New York and some very intense performances.
- Keysh 3y ago
  It's kind of interesting to read about contemporary reactions to Night of the Living Dead, which included "it's obviously a commentary on the Vietnam War" and "a critique of American capitalism". The closest anyone got to racial issues was the observation that at the end, the (black) main character is killed by a (white) posse led by a sheriff -- which seemed to some people to be an obvious commentary on the Civil Rights Movement and the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X. The modern (21st C) vogue for zombie apocalypse movies pretty clearly stems from two sources: Japanese video games in the 1990s; and a pair of British films in the early 2000s: Resident Evil (based on one of the aforementioned Japanese video games) and 28 Days Later. (It's a bit hard to argue that both the Japanese and the British were acting out some deep-seated fear of a black slave uprising.)
  - defrost 3y ago
    > The closest anyone got to racial issues was .. You apparently missed the explicit references to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Detroit_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Detroit_riot and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Newark_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Newark_riots both of which have been cited by Romero as events he watched while writing the film. I'm guessing that perhaps you skimmed over those and mentally bundled them in with the Kent State shootings as "obviously Vietnam war"?
Biologist123 3y ago
I’ve started to wonder whether zombies are metaphors for bad ideas that refuse to die, as they become wired into culture and belief. A few examples: crypto, carbon offsets, some might say certain religions. Other examples welcome for my own filing system.
- noirscape 3y ago
  Most zombie stuff is largely made for cheap shock rather than anything else. Few zombie stories are about the zombies themselves. The original author almost hits the nail on the head - the "Elite panic" stuff is a closer understanding of what these stories are about. It's... Almost an accurate description of a zombie story. The goal of a zombie story is usually to just say "Yeah, look at us humans. Even when the world falls apart around us, we'd rather still hurt and murder each other for selfish gain rather than surviving and sticking together." Which is an assumption that has been challenged very often, especially on the scale of humans that most zombie stories operate on (usually no larger than 4 or 5 families that the cast interacts with.) It's also to the point where it becomes very predictable when a group that seemingly breaks the mold shows up, just to show they're much more morally evil than it first seems. Group is well off during the apocalypse -> they're cannibals. Odd friendly loner -> he's keeping a zombie (usually a loved one) in his basement and wants to feed the main characters to it. Safe bastion with surviving humans -> someone offs themselves and it falls apart infighting because of the added zombie. Every "good" group must be punished because it'd defy the logic of the genre. Personally I don't really believe much of what zombie stories have to say is accurate - reality has shown us that when humans are put through events where the majority of other humans around them aren't available (ie. Natural disasters), that we tend to stick together and survive together.
earnestzombie 3y ago
[flagged]
- flangola7 3y ago
  > Shut-in stays indoors to avoid the Edinburgh Festival crowds under the pretext of fearing covid. August 2023 mind you. Avoiding crowds is one of the best ways to avoid COVID-19. I don't understand what you're getting at. > Craves human contact and camaraderie, sends out cry for help by vaguely connecting random pop culture tropes to white supremacy -- as is now tradition -- to attract others of his ilk to his comment section. As is now tradition? I don't follow this either - can you list a few examples of what you're referring to?
  - earnestzombie2 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - gilleain 3y ago
      > Avoiding crowds is of course also one of the best ways to avoid offline social interaction. Specifically, he's talking about avoiding the crowds in Edinburgh during the festival. Either you've seen this, and you know what he means or ...
      - earnestzombie2 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - ImHereToVote 3y ago
    You do know COVID is never going away don't you?
    - Turskarama 3y ago
      Sounds like a great reason to continue being careful! Maybe one day they'll have a cure for post viral syndrome, until then I'll avoid crowds... like the plague.
SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
It's possible that he's speaking less about "Night of the Living Dead (1968)" as an early zombie film, and more about "White Zombie (1932)" as an influence on later films, as it earlier and more clearly on topic: Set on a sugar cane plantation on Haiti, with voodoo, etc. As the title suggests, the shock is not just that there's a zombie, but that ... this time, she's White!
thinkingemote 3y ago
Stereotypical movie zombies are brainless but crave brains to consume. They can only die by destroying their brain. They look like humans but are no longer human but a kind of automatic animal. They are innocent in that it's not their fault they are like this and have no interior malice in their actions. In a way it's mindless consumption on the capitalist frame (Romeros film in shopping mall helps) but also represent a broken or wrong search for knowledge, or brains or direction, dysfunction. Generally zombie movies are really about the non zombies, the humans and their dysfunction.
mrob 3y ago
Night of the Living Dead is inspired by the 1954 novel I Am Legend, which is based on vampire mythology. And although it's probably not a direct inspiration, it also reminds me of the chapter in the 1908 novel The House on the Borderland where the swine-things attack the house.
eesmith 3y ago
> when drug addiction epidemics entered the popular consciousness That certainly isn't correct. The fear of marijuana addiction epidemics was part of the popular consciousness in the 1930s, pushed in part by Hearst's yellow journalism and Anslinger's propagandizing. We see echos of that fear in the movie "Reefer Madness." The same for heroin. There's even earlier moralizing against opium and opium dens, connected with "yellow peril" xenophobia as ensnaring white people into addiction.
pjc50 3y ago
I would note that the original origin of the zombie trope among Haitians was a slightly different fear: what if slavery didn't end when you die? What if there was no release, ever, from being controlled? That you could be raised from the grave and made to do more work? (hardly anyone does a zombie movie from the POV of the zombies; most people treat it as given that they are dehumanized, the Other that it's safe - no, morally necessary - to kill)

by gary_0 3y ago

defrost 3y ago

If you're intent on imagining a subtext to Night of the Living Dead a movie which never mentions zombies and features the (undead) neighbours harrass a black man who is ultimately shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy then you might also want to recall it was conceived in the aftermath of the Detroit and Newark riots and released to audiences who had just seen National Guardsmen shoot antiwar protesters to death at Kent State University. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5390-night-of-the-living-dead-mere-anarchy-is-loosed https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5390-night-of-the-li... Shuffling drug addicts is one influence I have no recollection of Romero ever mentioning.

gary_0 3y ago
I'm not saying that movie in particular had that subtext. Rather, the zombie trope quickly took on a life of its own in the years after Living Dead (and split into the fantasy/cursed and scifi/infected subtropes). It's hard to say why it resonated but there are definitely some interesting parallels with other cultural trends.
- defrost 3y ago
  It's an interesting film, as an Australian who came to it later (I think I first saw it in 1992 ish) it was a while before I apprecriated a whole other perspective it had for some (early case of a film with a black lead, early use of graphic horror, lead character being killed, etc). A fistful of tropes indeed :)
mrob 3y ago
According to Romero, Duane Jones got the lead role because he gave the best audition, not because the role was written for a black man.
- defrost 3y ago
  The thing about tropes in movies and literature is that they are often identified and become part of the legend of a work without the intent of the autor. Whether intended by Romero or not, according to the documentary A Century of Black Cinema (and other related print works) the film had a profound impact on many African American viewers of the time .. because of the lead, because of the story, etc. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1381270/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1381270/
- pjc50 3y ago
  Whether it was the original plan or not, by the time the movie gets to the end credits the parallels to a lynching are incredibly explicit. I'd like to put in a rec for https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053454/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053454/ "The World, the Flesh and the Devil", which is an apocalypse movie with a slightly different premise: what if the only survivors of an apocalypse in apartheit 1950s America were a black man and a white woman? Contains some great shots of deserted New York and some very intense performances.
Keysh 3y ago
It's kind of interesting to read about contemporary reactions to Night of the Living Dead, which included "it's obviously a commentary on the Vietnam War" and "a critique of American capitalism". The closest anyone got to racial issues was the observation that at the end, the (black) main character is killed by a (white) posse led by a sheriff -- which seemed to some people to be an obvious commentary on the Civil Rights Movement and the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X. The modern (21st C) vogue for zombie apocalypse movies pretty clearly stems from two sources: Japanese video games in the 1990s; and a pair of British films in the early 2000s: Resident Evil (based on one of the aforementioned Japanese video games) and 28 Days Later. (It's a bit hard to argue that both the Japanese and the British were acting out some deep-seated fear of a black slave uprising.)
- defrost 3y ago
  > The closest anyone got to racial issues was .. You apparently missed the explicit references to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Detroit_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Detroit_riot and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Newark_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Newark_riots both of which have been cited by Romero as events he watched while writing the film. I'm guessing that perhaps you skimmed over those and mentally bundled them in with the Kent State shootings as "obviously Vietnam war"?

Biologist123 3y ago

I’ve started to wonder whether zombies are metaphors for bad ideas that refuse to die, as they become wired into culture and belief. A few examples: crypto, carbon offsets, some might say certain religions. Other examples welcome for my own filing system.

noirscape 3y ago
Most zombie stuff is largely made for cheap shock rather than anything else. Few zombie stories are about the zombies themselves. The original author almost hits the nail on the head - the "Elite panic" stuff is a closer understanding of what these stories are about. It's... Almost an accurate description of a zombie story. The goal of a zombie story is usually to just say "Yeah, look at us humans. Even when the world falls apart around us, we'd rather still hurt and murder each other for selfish gain rather than surviving and sticking together." Which is an assumption that has been challenged very often, especially on the scale of humans that most zombie stories operate on (usually no larger than 4 or 5 families that the cast interacts with.) It's also to the point where it becomes very predictable when a group that seemingly breaks the mold shows up, just to show they're much more morally evil than it first seems. Group is well off during the apocalypse -> they're cannibals. Odd friendly loner -> he's keeping a zombie (usually a loved one) in his basement and wants to feed the main characters to it. Safe bastion with surviving humans -> someone offs themselves and it falls apart infighting because of the added zombie. Every "good" group must be punished because it'd defy the logic of the genre. Personally I don't really believe much of what zombie stories have to say is accurate - reality has shown us that when humans are put through events where the majority of other humans around them aren't available (ie. Natural disasters), that we tend to stick together and survive together.

earnestzombie 3y ago

[flagged]

flangola7 3y ago
> Shut-in stays indoors to avoid the Edinburgh Festival crowds under the pretext of fearing covid. August 2023 mind you. Avoiding crowds is one of the best ways to avoid COVID-19. I don't understand what you're getting at. > Craves human contact and camaraderie, sends out cry for help by vaguely connecting random pop culture tropes to white supremacy -- as is now tradition -- to attract others of his ilk to his comment section. As is now tradition? I don't follow this either - can you list a few examples of what you're referring to?
- earnestzombie2 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - gilleain 3y ago
    > Avoiding crowds is of course also one of the best ways to avoid offline social interaction. Specifically, he's talking about avoiding the crowds in Edinburgh during the festival. Either you've seen this, and you know what he means or ...
    - earnestzombie2 3y ago
      [flagged]
- ImHereToVote 3y ago
  You do know COVID is never going away don't you?
  - Turskarama 3y ago
    Sounds like a great reason to continue being careful! Maybe one day they'll have a cure for post viral syndrome, until then I'll avoid crowds... like the plague.

SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago

It's possible that he's speaking less about "Night of the Living Dead (1968)" as an early zombie film, and more about "White Zombie (1932)" as an influence on later films, as it earlier and more clearly on topic: Set on a sugar cane plantation on Haiti, with voodoo, etc. As the title suggests, the shock is not just that there's a zombie, but that ... this time, she's White!

thinkingemote 3y ago

Stereotypical movie zombies are brainless but crave brains to consume. They can only die by destroying their brain. They look like humans but are no longer human but a kind of automatic animal. They are innocent in that it's not their fault they are like this and have no interior malice in their actions. In a way it's mindless consumption on the capitalist frame (Romeros film in shopping mall helps) but also represent a broken or wrong search for knowledge, or brains or direction, dysfunction. Generally zombie movies are really about the non zombies, the humans and their dysfunction.

mrob 3y ago

Night of the Living Dead is inspired by the 1954 novel I Am Legend, which is based on vampire mythology. And although it's probably not a direct inspiration, it also reminds me of the chapter in the 1908 novel The House on the Borderland where the swine-things attack the house.

eesmith 3y ago

> when drug addiction epidemics entered the popular consciousness That certainly isn't correct. The fear of marijuana addiction epidemics was part of the popular consciousness in the 1930s, pushed in part by Hearst's yellow journalism and Anslinger's propagandizing. We see echos of that fear in the movie "Reefer Madness." The same for heroin. There's even earlier moralizing against opium and opium dens, connected with "yellow peril" xenophobia as ensnaring white people into addiction.

pjc50 3y ago

I would note that the original origin of the zombie trope among Haitians was a slightly different fear: what if slavery didn't end when you die? What if there was no release, ever, from being controlled? That you could be raised from the grave and made to do more work? (hardly anyone does a zombie movie from the POV of the zombies; most people treat it as given that they are dehumanized, the Other that it's safe - no, morally necessary - to kill)