Night of the Living Dead (1968)
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One of the goals of the filmmaker is to engage his or her audience and to elicit some emotional reaction. The horror film is a genre which has as its goal the specific emotional reaction of fear. If a horror film is successful, it achieves this response immediately. To accomplish this, the horror film seeks to evoke primal terrors in the viewer, terrors such as come in nightmares, central fears in our lives, and to do so in a setting touching on the uncanny, the excessive, the supernatural, the truly amazing. Filmmakers use a variety of types of image, fearsome ideas, and primal elements to create the horror film, and this commonly means characteristics such as violence, monsters, evil, unresolved tension, gore, the unknown, disgust, and bloody spectacle. An example of one way of accomplishing this task can be found in Night of the Living Dead, directed by George Romero in 1968. Night of the Living Dead would generally be characterized as a horror film rather than a science fiction film even though there is an element of science fiction in the plot. The latter element derives from the fact that the change that comes over segments of the population begins with a virus from outer space. The central focus of the film is not on technology or scientific concepts, however, but simply on the horror of what those affected become and how they kill and eat victims. Some critics see a moral issue in the film, which they say uses gore and graphic violence in order to show that
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in between attacks taking on added urgency because it is believed that the next attack will be even more horrible and more threatening.
Horror films follow a certain formula in order to create a certain comfort zone for the viewer while at the same time challenging any sense of comfort with images of horror and with fearful happenings. The fact that there is a pattern, though, tells the viewer what kind of film he or she is watching and so what can be expected on some levels. The horror formula is a way of packaging the story. What scares one generation may not scare the next, and so the formula changes over time. Romero uses film techniques such as cross-cutting to generate suspense and to link different images for their horror effect.
Suspense is enhanced in this story with uncertainty as to who will turn into a zombie and attack the others and who will be the next victim. However, suspense in this film gives way to the spectacle of gore as a way of engendering fear and disgust, and often what is suspenseful for the viewer is wondering when the next horrible image will be presented of a zombie eating parts of a human body.
This can be seen in the sequence where one family group disintegrates as the daughter, Karen
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Approximate Word count = 2314
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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