Why Horror Seduces by Mathias Clasen

Author:Mathias Clasen
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780190666514
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 8.1: George A. Romero’s seminal zombie film Night of the Living Dead (1968) capitalized on an authenticity aesthetic to more effectively disturb audiences. It looked like a documentary film about the undead walking the earth. The film was shot in black and white, evoking newsreel footage, and ended with grainy still images that suggest news photos.

Central to Night are, of course, the eponymous monsters, the “ghouls” or zombies. Not that the film’s characters realize what they are up against, at least not initially; the film uses restricted narration to withhold background information from characters as well as audience, and it is only forty minutes or so into the film that we are told—via a diegetic newscast—that the ghouls eat their victims. Moreover, we never learn exactly what causes the uprising of the ravenous dead. Some scientists think it has to do with “high-level radiation” from space, but other scientists are shown contesting this hypothesis. Night’s zombies would have been disturbingly mysterious to contemporary audiences. They are pale, dumb, animalistic, and aggressively predatory; some have facial disfigurations that appear to be the result of violence, maybe early decay (see Figure 8.2). The zombies of Night are less visually disgusting, less decayed, than are most contemporary zombies, such as the rotting, walking cadavers of The Walking Dead (Darabont 2010–) (or even the Technicolor zombies of Tom Savini’s 1990 remake of Night). Like non-human animals, they are afraid of fire. And because the radiation has somehow “activated” their brains, the walking corpses can be killed with a shot or a blow to the head.

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