https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5390-night-of-the-li...
Shuffling drug addicts is one influence I have no recollection of Romero ever mentioning.
A fistful of tropes indeed :)
Whether intended by Romero or not, according to the documentary A Century of Black Cinema (and other related print works) the film had a profound impact on many African American viewers of the time .. because of the lead, because of the story, etc.
I'd like to put in a rec for https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053454/ "The World, the Flesh and the Devil", which is an apocalypse movie with a slightly different premise: what if the only survivors of an apocalypse in apartheit 1950s America were a black man and a white woman? Contains some great shots of deserted New York and some very intense performances.
The modern (21st C) vogue for zombie apocalypse movies pretty clearly stems from two sources: Japanese video games in the 1990s; and a pair of British films in the early 2000s: Resident Evil (based on one of the aforementioned Japanese video games) and 28 Days Later. (It's a bit hard to argue that both the Japanese and the British were acting out some deep-seated fear of a black slave uprising.)
You apparently missed the explicit references to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Detroit_riot and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Newark_riots
both of which have been cited by Romero as events he watched while writing the film. I'm guessing that perhaps you skimmed over those and mentally bundled them in with the Kent State shootings as "obviously Vietnam war"?
It's... Almost an accurate description of a zombie story. The goal of a zombie story is usually to just say "Yeah, look at us humans. Even when the world falls apart around us, we'd rather still hurt and murder each other for selfish gain rather than surviving and sticking together." Which is an assumption that has been challenged very often, especially on the scale of humans that most zombie stories operate on (usually no larger than 4 or 5 families that the cast interacts with.)
It's also to the point where it becomes very predictable when a group that seemingly breaks the mold shows up, just to show they're much more morally evil than it first seems. Group is well off during the apocalypse -> they're cannibals. Odd friendly loner -> he's keeping a zombie (usually a loved one) in his basement and wants to feed the main characters to it. Safe bastion with surviving humans -> someone offs themselves and it falls apart infighting because of the added zombie. Every "good" group must be punished because it'd defy the logic of the genre.
Personally I don't really believe much of what zombie stories have to say is accurate - reality has shown us that when humans are put through events where the majority of other humans around them aren't available (ie. Natural disasters), that we tend to stick together and survive together.
Shut-in stays in doors to avoid the Edinburgh Festival crowds, fears covid, August 2023 mind you.
Craves human contact and camaraderie, sends out cry for help by vaguely connecting random pop culture tropes to white supremacy to attract others of his ilk to his comment section.
Not a peep about such theories before they became fashionable in recent years mind you. I feel bad for this person.
Incidentally anybody can lookup the origin of Zombies which easily predates moving pictures by a couple centuries..
Avoiding crowds is one of the best ways to avoid COVID-19. I don't understand what you're getting at.
> Craves human contact and camaraderie, sends out cry for help by vaguely connecting random pop culture tropes to white supremacy -- as is now tradition -- to attract others of his ilk to his comment section.
As is now tradition? I don't follow this either - can you list a few examples of what you're referring to?
Avoiding crowds is of course also one of the best ways to avoid offline social interaction.
> As is now tradition? I don't follow this either - can you list a few examples of what you're referring to?
"Benign random thing is actually rooted in white supremacy" has become a genre. If you watch a movie like zombieland (https://youtu.be/8m9EVP8X7N8) with a frown instead of a smile perhaps indefinitely staying alone in your room is best for all involved. Plausibly, a padded room.
Specifically, he's talking about avoiding the crowds in Edinburgh during the festival. Either you've seen this, and you know what he means or ...
Maybe one day they'll have a cure for post viral syndrome, until then I'll avoid crowds... like the plague.
In a way it's mindless consumption on the capitalist frame (Romeros film in shopping mall helps) but also represent a broken or wrong search for knowledge, or brains or direction, dysfunction.
Generally zombie movies are really about the non zombies, the humans and their dysfunction.
That certainly isn't correct.
The fear of marijuana addiction epidemics was certainly part of the popular consciousness in the 1930s, pushed in part by Hearst's yellow journalism and Anslinger's propagandizing. We see echos of that fear in the movie "Reefer Madness."
The same for heroin.
There's even earlier moralizing against opium and opium dens, connected with "yellow peril" xenophobia as ensnaring white people into addiction.
I dunno about that. Years ago, I was (very stupidly) wandering alone in a very bad part of town, and the only other people on the street were the homeless drug addicts, scattered here and there and shuffling about slowly, only dangerous if you let them get within biting range, and I thought, "is this where the zombies thing came from?"
Night of the Living Dead (1968) kicked off the modern zombie trope, and that was around when drug addiction epidemics entered the popular consciousness as well.