Horror Madness Round One: Night of the Living Dead vs. Phantasm

See the introduction and full slate here.

This week, the grim nihilism of life in the second half of 20th century America turns literally monstrous, as perhaps the definitive zombie film Night of the Living Dead

Faces off against the spooky cult classic Phantasm:

These are very different films, and I wasn’t sure at first how I would compare them. They’re both horror, obviously, and I put them both in the monster category for a reason - the presence of strange possibly inter-dimensional monsters drives the plots in both films. Yet for Night of the Living Dead especially, the horror is not the monsters themselves but what people do and become in response to them. This led me to figure out how to connect the two films: one is pre-Nixon, and the other is pre-Reagan.

Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968, the year the liberal consensus broke and Richard Nixon - the comeback kid - finally took the White House. The film was written, filmed and released before that happened, but the writing was on the wall: things were unravelling, and no one knew what was going to happen. Martin Luther King was murdered. Bobby Kennedy was murdered. Riots were becoming more common. Crime was going up. The war in Vietnam, far from ending, was seemingly getting worse. It was an open question whether American institutions - the state, the police, the university, the army - could survive intact, and even more frighteningly, it wasn’t clear whether the power of those institutions and their survival even meant safety for people. The establishment lied about Vietnam, and everyone knew it - why wouldn’t they lie about things closer to home? When civil rights activists were murdered, their killers were often protected by the state - how could such a state be trusted to keep anyone safe?

That is the world in which zombies appear in The Night of the Living Dead, and they’re just another horror among many - chaotic and unexplained. The film, smartly, takes a largely ground level view of the events, and the characters we follow never quite know what’s going on, how to stop it, or how to fully protect themselves. They do the best they can - until the law shows up. And the law, predictably enough, makes it worse. The law doesn’t distinguish between a zombie (or ghoul) and a heroic, innocent black man calling for help. The black hero is a body, another monster, fit only to be thrown on a pyre with the other bodies. The country is chaotic and dangerous, but law and order are here - and the law will kill as many people as it feels it need to to maintain order. It’s 1968, and it’s Nixon’s country.

Phantasm is not quite so nakedly political, but that makes sense. 1979, the second to last year of the Carter administration, was defined not by chaos so much as by malaise. Carter gave his famous “crisis of confidence” speech, in which he diagnosed America and Americans as being at a spiritual, mental low point that left them unable to tackle their problems - which were many. Unemployment and prices were high. The war in Vietnam was over, but it had ended without victory or catharsis, and returned veterans were damaged and underserved. The architects and prolongers of the war still enjoyed power and good reputations - nobody ever paid for anything. Nixon had resigned from office in disgrace following the Watergate scandal, but then his successor pardoned him. The feminist movement and a nascent gay rights movement were seeing some cultural success, but the rate of change frightened people - women as well as men - and a backlash was brewing.

You can see echoes of that backlash in the opening scene of Phantasm, in which two youngish people have sex in a cemetery. The young woman’s body is ogled by the camera in a manner that ought to be familiar to anyone who has studied the “male gaze” in film - we see her breasts and other parts as disjointed, objectified pieces. We, the audience, are meant to be titillated until in true conservative horror fashion we’re punished for the arousal the film deliberately provoked. The young woman is actually a man, a monster, who brutally kills the naked young man beneath her. Sex is dangerous, women are dangerous, and in a world like this taken over by feminists and queers, who even knew who was “really” a woman? Men, too, could be victims of sexual violence. The old fashioned values that were disappearing in 1968 seem, by now, gone for good, and violence is what remains.

If echoes of political chaos are in Night of the Living Dead, then echoes of the culture wars are in Phantasm. The historian Rick Perlstein has written that Ronald Reagan’s peculiar talent was making cultural differences and issues that had never seemed political to people before, suddenly seem to be of the utmost political importance. Because of this, in 1979 Phantasm and its gender anxieties, its positioning of bored, aimless young (and not so young) men as vulnerable to predation from the devious and the depraved, might not have seemed like a particularly political film. Looking back from the year ahead, in which an ultra conservative actor would crush Jimmy Carter by appealing to old-fashioned, pre-civil rights and pre-feminist values, it’s hard to see the film as non-political. They didn’t know it yet, but it was already Reagan’s country.

These are, aesthetically, very different films. Phantasm is slick where Night of the Living Dead is rough - George Romero hardly had any budget to speak of. Living Dead feels almost like a documentary, while Phantasm clearly shows the influence of the 70s horror and sci-fi blockbusters that preceded it. Phantasm is reaching for The Exorcist, while Night of the Living Dead is reaching for something like The Battle of Algiers. On execution alone, you’d have to give this contest to Phantasm if only because of its confidence and deliberate artistry, something that Romero would only really achieve in later films.

But there is a reason Night of the Living Dead was as influential as it was, why it continues to resonate so much today, why it’s a classic impossible to ignore. I think you can make a case for Phantasm as a film of its particular zeitgeist, but Night of the Living Dead is so timely, so vital, and so alive with the politics of its era that the ending, even when you’re expecting it, still has the power to shock. Both films have bleak final moments, but the final jump scare of Phantasm is merely that, an almost cliched horror reminder that evil still lurks out there. The ending of Night of the Living Dead upends our entire understanding of what we’d already seen, who the heroes and villains even were, and what was at stake. We thought the monsters were the zombies, but they weren't. The monsters were us, and the forces we use to keep ourselves safe.

Phantasm is a fun, and interesting, horror film. Night of the Living Dead is one of the greatest, and most important, films ever made. I hate to take it away from another Don Coscarelli film - he is a wonderful horror director. But George Romero was a genius, and a visionary, and Night of the Living Dead has to be the winner.