"The Battle Inside: Infection and the Modern Horror Film," a recent
Cineaste article by Richard Harland Smith, is a useful annotated list of movies influenced by George Romero's 1968 drive-in classic
Night of the Living Dead and its potent vision of "infection over evolution as a vector for change" via "a viral apocalypse downsizing the number of available protagonists as it supersizes the apportionment of antagonists." Smith writes:
However they vary the recipe, these infection films lean heavily on established Romero-isms: windows are boarded up, barricades are assaulted, human relationships erode, and disease prevails.
Thanks to
Claire's earlier post, I now read that as a pretty good description of Romero's most significant precursor, Poe's
"The Masque of the Red Death":
And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
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Smith's words do indeed directly surmise the "aftermath" of Red Death, which ensnares readers in a much more horrifying manner than Night of the Living Dead because of the historical fact it draws inspiration from. I have not once had to fight off a zombie feasting on my brain, but have always encountered evidence of diseases wiping out populations in my history books.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that drawing from historical actualities necessarily makes the Red Death more horrifying than Night of the Living Dead. It's a pretty terrifying thing, I'd think, to have your numbers gradually reduced by the rotting enemy - and not just reduced, but actively converted to the enemy's ranks. That feeling of being part of a smaller and smaller island of humanity in the midst of all those zombies would be pretty awful.
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