Entry tags:
Horror films in the time of a coup
I have been watching a lot of classic horror films as part of the Great Queer Rewatch of Supernatural.
If you haven't seen Night of the Living Dead (1968), it fell into the public domain, so some very good copies are around on Youtube, I watched this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw50caHk62g - there are also color version if that floats your boat, but I found the black and white one particularly effecting.
Just now, it's hard for me not to see this film as a lynching movie. It's not, precisely, about a lynching. But it's not not about a lynching.
This film is charming in the way that shoestring budget, actor-focused, tight narratives working with an interesting concept kind of a film are always charming to me. (Similarly, Christopher Eccelston's Doctor Who, Bound by the Wachowski Sisters, classic Twilight Zone episodes)
Our hero, Ben is played by an incredibly skilled actor, literally an acting teacher for most of his career, who makes Ben kind and competent and authoritative without cruelty. He protects people, he is kind to someone who's breaking down under the stress, he's smart and decisive and calls people on their shit. He's allowed to get angry and punch someone who put his life in danger, and we're allowed to cheer him on when he does.
I found out afterwards that the role of Ben had been written for a white actor, and then when Duane Jones auditions, they cast him without re-writing the part. That is important. Because there are ways that Ben behaves that are not allowed for a specifically Black character in 1968, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of them would not be allowed for a Black actor in 2021. ("Allowed" here in the sense of, "someone would find this unbelievable for a Black person to act like a fully human person who is competent and smart, and re-write that, because Black characters are not allowed to be unquestionably heroic in the same ways as a white actor is.")
The fact that they opted NOT to re-write around Duane Jones's race meant that there are scenes at the end of the film where Good Heroic White Men With Guns come to save the day, and they offhandedly kill Ben and they drag his body to be burned in a pyre with the zombies, and all I could see were the photos of murdered Black people that run in Ken Burns documentaries about the Civil War and about jazz, and all I could see were the white supremacists breaking into the Capitol Building with plastic handcuffs.
Having survived the night in a house surrounded by crazed, cannibalistic undead white people who were turned into monsters before they could be buried, Ben has saved himself! He lived! He made it! He saved himself! And then white men with guns showed up and killed him casually, without understanding that he's a human being, because they can kill him at at distance. Because they have guns. Because no one organizes them well enough to make them fucking check who they are shooting at.
I know that George Romero has talked about not re-writing Ben to be 'more black' and deciding not to change the ending, and that he didn't intend to make this a commentary about race. I really, really recommend the movie as being an excellent and touching film, with good performances and sympathetic characters.
And, also, I'm having really hard time not seeing this as a movie about a deeply good man being murdered by a white mob, because that's what's in my head right now.
If you haven't seen Night of the Living Dead (1968), it fell into the public domain, so some very good copies are around on Youtube, I watched this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw50caHk62g - there are also color version if that floats your boat, but I found the black and white one particularly effecting.
Just now, it's hard for me not to see this film as a lynching movie. It's not, precisely, about a lynching. But it's not not about a lynching.
This film is charming in the way that shoestring budget, actor-focused, tight narratives working with an interesting concept kind of a film are always charming to me. (Similarly, Christopher Eccelston's Doctor Who, Bound by the Wachowski Sisters, classic Twilight Zone episodes)
Our hero, Ben is played by an incredibly skilled actor, literally an acting teacher for most of his career, who makes Ben kind and competent and authoritative without cruelty. He protects people, he is kind to someone who's breaking down under the stress, he's smart and decisive and calls people on their shit. He's allowed to get angry and punch someone who put his life in danger, and we're allowed to cheer him on when he does.
I found out afterwards that the role of Ben had been written for a white actor, and then when Duane Jones auditions, they cast him without re-writing the part. That is important. Because there are ways that Ben behaves that are not allowed for a specifically Black character in 1968, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of them would not be allowed for a Black actor in 2021. ("Allowed" here in the sense of, "someone would find this unbelievable for a Black person to act like a fully human person who is competent and smart, and re-write that, because Black characters are not allowed to be unquestionably heroic in the same ways as a white actor is.")
The fact that they opted NOT to re-write around Duane Jones's race meant that there are scenes at the end of the film where Good Heroic White Men With Guns come to save the day, and they offhandedly kill Ben and they drag his body to be burned in a pyre with the zombies, and all I could see were the photos of murdered Black people that run in Ken Burns documentaries about the Civil War and about jazz, and all I could see were the white supremacists breaking into the Capitol Building with plastic handcuffs.
Having survived the night in a house surrounded by crazed, cannibalistic undead white people who were turned into monsters before they could be buried, Ben has saved himself! He lived! He made it! He saved himself! And then white men with guns showed up and killed him casually, without understanding that he's a human being, because they can kill him at at distance. Because they have guns. Because no one organizes them well enough to make them fucking check who they are shooting at.
I know that George Romero has talked about not re-writing Ben to be 'more black' and deciding not to change the ending, and that he didn't intend to make this a commentary about race. I really, really recommend the movie as being an excellent and touching film, with good performances and sympathetic characters.
And, also, I'm having really hard time not seeing this as a movie about a deeply good man being murdered by a white mob, because that's what's in my head right now.