I'm a big fan of the 1968 horror film Night of the Living Dead. Well, actually something more than a fan. Like a lot of people who saw the film at an impressionable age (nine in my case), I didn’t really experience it as a film at all. For me it was a reality.
It still is, too. No matter how many times I see the film – and I’ve seen it quite a bunch of times by now – I never get sick of it. Though the plot is simple enough – a group of people barricade themselves in a lonely farmhouse to escape a horde of cannibalistic zombies – for me the movie has a kind of bottomless quality to it; one that prevents any of its scenes from becoming shop-worn, no matter how often I return to them.
That a horror movie can occupy such a central place in my imagination for so many years says something about me, of course. I am (to use an expression I first heard at some point in rehab) a fear-based person. World views are like houses. We build them, and then we live in them, looking out through their windows at the world beyond. In a very real way, I LIVE in that old white farmhouse besieged by zombies.
Not that Night of the Living Dead is to blame for this. I was no doubt already a fear-based person before the lights went down in the movie house on that long-ago evening in 1970. What I saw on the screen merely confirmed what I already suspected about the world. That’s no doubt why, in addition to being terrified by it, I also felt so oddly comfortable with the film, and all the horrible stuff it depicts. Of course, of course, some part of me said: This is how the world truly is.
If you know Night of the Living Dead, you know that there’s a town called Willard that the protagonists are very anxious to reach. They learn from the black-and-white TV in the farmhouse that a rescue station has been set up there. It’s not far away. All they have to do is get some gas in the truck out front and drive there.
None of the protagonists make it to Willard, however. Their plan to fill the truck with gas goes awry, and instead they all die, one after another, in a variety of horrible ways.
None of this came as a shock to me – or at least to my fear-based core. After all, in this world of horrors we all live in, no one ever really makes it to Willard.
I’m still a fear-based person today. The world remains for me, essentially, what it was in Night of the Living Dead: a landscape of darkness and terror that I look out at from between the boarded-up windows of my solitary and supremely vulnerable self-consciousness. The lights are on – for the moment. I am safe – for the moment. But the time is coming when the lights will go out, and the zombies will grow bold and start beating on the doors and windows. Finally they will flood in, and all will grow dark. And Willard – that ultimate place of safety where the zombies can’t get me – will remain forever out of reach.
And yet… there’s another side to all this. One reason I still enjoy watching Night of the Living Dead again and again these days is because in doing so I become more and more aware of the fact that, no matter what my fear-based core has to say about it, there’s another part of me – another core, if you will – that the movie speaks to as well.
This is thanks in large part to the fact that I now own the deluxe DVD edition of the film. This edition is full of extras, including two full-length commentaries featuring the people who made it. I’ve grown ever more partial to watching the film with one or the other of these two commentaries turned on. As horror gives way to horror onscreen, the actors and filmmakers laugh and joke and tell stories of all the adventures they had in the course of making the movie. They also point out various little mistakes onscreen – a glimpse of cable here, a narrative inconsistency there – that reveal the film as what I’ve always been so reluctant to believe it is: a fantasy. A story that – amazingly enough – didn’t really happen. In one scene, there’s even a copy of the script that someone mistakenly left in plain sight after the camera started rolling.
These people are – as often seems to be the case with the makers of low-budget horror films – a remarkably pleasant bunch. As it turns out, they all had a great time making Night of the Living Dead. Though it was grueling, it was also a highlight of their lives.
Of course, this doesn’t change the way the movie ends. All the characters still die. Nobody makes it to Willard.
Which is the way it works here in real life as well. As a fear-based person, I know that the world can be a horrible place. But I also know – at least at my better moments – that there’s a level of reality above this world that is, in its way, the equivalent of the commentary feature on my Night of the Living Dead DVD.
Does this mean that I believe all the bad things that happen in life are meaningless, that everything is really rosy all the time?
Nope. I’m still way too suspicious of the world to ever think such a thing. But I do believe that we live in a world that, however terrifying it can be, has more levels to it than I know about. Levels that I get hints of from time to time. Hints that, in their way, are the equivalent of those little technical glitches that the film-makers point out in Night of the Living Dead. Small pointers that what I see in life -- be it wonderful or horrible -- is never all of the picture.