I want to say I was 12 years old at the time, although time had dulled my memory somewhat, and I might’ve actually been 13. For the sake of the reminiscence here, I’m going to stick with 12. A lot of things that are magical and sublime at age 12 lose some of their luster when one flips over into 13. When you’re 13 you’re a teenager, and no longer a “child.” And for some reason, relating this to you from the eyes of a 13 year old isn’t as profound, although it may be the truth. But what funs is the truth? Let’s be honest … we remember things not as they were, but as we were. And we are what we want to be in our memories.So I’m going to be 12. And I’m going to tell you about the first time I saw George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, on Halloween night. This is one of those singular events in my childhood that has defined who I am to this day. It ranks up there only with a select few other watershed moments: the first time I saw Star Wars, the first time I saw Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the first time I ever read a Stephen King’s It and Pet Sematary, the first time I heard the PIXIES’ "Dolittle" or RUN DMC’s "Raising Hell".
As I said, it was Halloween night. Since I was 12, it was 1985. Even then horror films were my obsession. Only problem was, I had a very strict set of parents who would not let me watch them. Sure, I could see the PG ones, and some of the PG-13 ones. But if it was R, then no way. So while I could see Poltergeist, Critters, The Gate, Gremlins or Jaws, I couldn’t see Alien, The Thing, Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street. I had to sneak copies home of those movies that my friends recorded from cable, or I had to go over to their houses to watch them. But “hard” horror was rare for me as a child. I fell in love with so many movies just by staring at their box-art, or their ads in the movie section of the newspaper. (And to be honest, in some cases, this unrequited love was all the more satisfactory, as a lot of those movies I longed to see were actually quite shitty once I got to see them, thus ruining the crush I had on them. I mean, The Outing and Mortuary looked great in grainy, black and white newspaper ads, but actually watching them …oh man.)
I was a smart kid. Early on, I caught on to the fact that some horror movies didn’t get ratings, if a movie said UNRATED on it, I could sometimes con my mom into renting me the movie with the “Well, it’s not R” justification. Surprisingly, it worked. I got to see Re-Animator and The Toxic Avenger that way. However, if the movie had a particularly lurid, or obviously demonic moniker, then no matter what I said, she wouldn’t let me see it. I mean, a movie called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre just had to be evil, even if it wasn’t technically rated R. A movie like Pieces just sounded awful. And anything with “dead” in the title? Forget it. Which pretty much ruled out Romero’s living dead triology. God, how I pined for those movies. My only exposure to zombies at that point had been in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video (yeah, yeah, laugh it up, fuzzballs!), and while those zombies had freaked me out, once they started dancing I checked out.
I was obsessed with death as a child, and to get deeper into that is a whole other piece. I’ll save that for the bar sometime, if ever we sit down for drinks together. My obsession lead me to get my
friends to lie down in the yard and play “cemetery,” complete with cement chunks at our heads, and some volunteer (that I chose) to read Psalms over our prostrate forms. Yes, I was demented. I’ve accepted it, so can you.Obsessed with death as I was, it was only natural that I wanted to see a movie where dead bodies were walking around. You must also understand that a lot of this was catalyzed by my religious upbringing. While a lot of people resent the fact that they were inundated with the scary stories of the Old Testament as children, I loved it! All that blood and guts! And then later on, in the New Testament, those creepy stories about the dead rising from their tombs … Let’s not even get into Revelations! But these admittedly freaky, violent stories from the Bible inspired in me an obsession with horror that has lasted to this day. There’s a reason The Exorcist is one of the scariest movies ever made, and it wouldn’t be scary if so many of us hadn’t heard all those stories in Sunday school.
All this made seeing one of those zombie movies absolutely imperative! My life would not take on any kind of meaning until I came face to face with celluloid resurrection. I’ll admit it, the thought of seeing a “living dead” film scared me like you wouldn’t believe. As much as I wanted, no, needed, to see one of them, the thought of actually doing it wouldn’t keep lying awake at night, unable to shake thoughts of the cemetery just down the street, and of dirt and grass erupting from beneath the headstones, followed by worm-eaten hand, reaching, reaching … My mom wondered why a 12 year old needed a damn nightlight. “So I can see to get to the bathroom, mom, jeez.” And, you know, see if there’s any fucking zombies lounging around in the hallway.
I finally got my chance on Halloween night in 1985. See, here’s the other catch in my early horror film watching that I didn’t tell you about: if it was on network TV, then I could see it. My folks figured that if it was on TV, all the bad stuff must be cut out, so then it was OK. Well, that particular Halloween night (I remember it being a Friday or Saturday night, because I was allowed to sit up late and didn’t have school the next day), guess what happened to be on TV? Just a little flick called Night of the Living Dead.
Man, I tell you, 10:00 pm couldn’t get there fast enough that day! The Halloween parties, the trick-or-treating, the candy and costumes … all of that was just an almost unbearable prelude to what really mattered: Night of the Living Dead was going to be on TV and my parents said it was OK for me to see it! Thank you God! My time had come at last! After that night, I would graduate to a new level of understanding of … of … well, who cares! I would graduate to a new level of something, I could just feel it. I was going to be a part of something bigger than myself. I was going to see and know something that others had seen and known. A line was going to be crossed. I would no longer only imagine the dead walking around when they should be lying peacefully in their coffins! I would see it with my own eyes … and better yet, NO DANCING.
Somehow, though I can’t even to this day explain why, I knew my life would change. And that scared me. I mean, it scared the hell out of me. All day, as the hours crept by, despite my eagerness to see the movie, I was dreading it all the same. Some part of me hoped that I had read the TV listings wrong, and the movie wouldn’t actually come on, that something silly and innocuous like
Robot Monster would come on instead. Or that, at the last moment, my mom would rescind her permission to watch it and make me go to bed instead. But the day progressed as normal, and nothing appeared to be hindering my date with the dead.At some point, I convinced my brother Matt, who’s about two years younger than me, to sit up and watch the movie with me. Mom said OK to that, too, and for some odd reason, Matt said he’d do it. He was never as into movies as me; he was the jock. And usually getting him to set and watch a movie with me was impossible. He just didn’t care. But he said OK and so I felt a little relieved. I would at least have someone with me when I watched the movie, so if things got too scary, I would have someone to fall back on. You know, “Hey Matt, is this freaking you out, cuz if it is, we can, you know, stop watching it. I don’t really care. It’s cool.” Hoping that, indeed, it was freaking him out and yes he would love more than anything to shut it off. He was younger than me, so he could get away with getting scared, unlike me. Or, at the very least, I could laugh at him if he was scared, and diffuse my own trepidation.
My parents were going to watch a TV program that night, too, and it just so happened to be on at the same time as my movie. And there was no way they were ceding control of the TV to me just to watch some stupid zombie movie. The only other TV we had at that time was a tiny, 9” model, black and white only, with horribly bent rabbit-ears. I didn’t really mind, though. I had watched a lot of movies on that little TV, and even as a child I had an affinity for black and white.
So at around 9:30, my brother and I hunkered down into the basement, where this diminutive TV sat on a rickety TV-tray. We had handfuls of the candy we had scored that night and glasses of Kool-Aid. I sat on the floor, directly in front of the TV set and my brother bundled up under a blanket on the sofa next to me.
I don’t remember what program preceded Night of the Living Dead that night, and I don’t even remember what network it was on. All I remember is that during that half hour leading up to the movie, there were several promos for NOTLD, one in every commercial break. These promos did nothing to alleviate my angst. If anything, they intensified it. What I saw in these promos was beyond my comprehension, beyond any expectations I had had for this experience. Grainy, black and white close up images of faces staring out windows, gasping at whatever it was they were looking at; pallid, somnambulant figures quietly making their way through the trees; Molotov Cocktails; people swinging torches and clubs; shotgun blasts; a bald guy with outstretched arms, warding off one of the torches, with a malevolent yet dead stare on his
face; and some mysterious silhouette of a sharp object being raised in the air and stabbed downward repeatedly.What did all this mean? This movie looked like there was way more to it than just zombies. The impact of these promos has never been lost on me. They teased me and terrified me with equal fervor. I just didn’t know if I had it in me to actually sit through the movie. It looked it was just way too much. I wasn’t ready for this kinda of thing. My parents forbid me watching these movies for a reason. Mom, dad … please, please make me go to bed now … change your mind … save me from this horrible, horrible movie I insisted you let me watch …
The movie began. The movie played. To try and describe what the experience of sitting through that film for the first time would be futile. Impressions are all I have now. But there were two things that happened during the movie that I remember very well. First off was my brother falling asleep almost a half hour into it. Either he was bored or just tired, but off he went, essentially leaving me alone to sweat out this nightmare in the dark. I recall trying in vain to wake him on a couple of occasions, but he slept through the whole damn thing. A couple years later, a close friend of mine would do the same thing to me when I sat down to watch A Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time, with equally nerve wracking results. Maybe it’s because both these films, and the initial experiences seeing them left such indelible impressions on me that I now prefer seeing horror movies by myself.
The other thing that sticks out in my memory is those glorious, horrifying promos. I wish I had those things on tape somewhere. I’ve seen all the trailers that I can for this movie, but these promos were something else. Some announcer-voice would come at the end of the promo saying “Night of the Living Dead … will continue after these messages …” and I wanted it to continue, but I didn’t want it to, because with each commercial break, these promos would get more and more intense, showing me new images that I hadn’t seen before. Images of things that had not happened yet. By the third quarter of the film I was so into these characters and their unimaginable plight that I was highly disturbed by what these promos were showing me. That wasn’t going to happen to her, was it? And why did that little girl have that trowel in her hand? Was she actually stabbing someone? This was a zombie movie, not a psycho movie! Why was someone being stabbed, amongst all this flesh munching? Just how much more was this movie going to throw at me? Wasn’t it through? Hadn’t I had enough? For the love of God, just how terrible and riveting could one movie actually be?
And while I know this movie by heart now, for years afterwards, before I owned it on video and was only able to catch a showing of it here or there on TV or cable, there were many images and scenes that stayed with me, stuck to the inside of my mind like tumors: The gnawed remains of that poor soul at the top of the stairs; the zombies wrestling with the innards of the foolish young couple in
the truck; Cooper being such an asshole; the aforementioned bald-headed zombie, that sort of resembles Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein – this is the zombie, as far as I’m concerned … that dude has been in more of my nightmares than I can count. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, ask me to show you when you come over, or I’ll try and find a picture of him.There was naked zombie, who’s feminine backside was barely visible in the darkness; a woman slinking up to a tree and plucking an insect from bark and shoving it between her teeth; and that little girl slaughtering her mother so callously with that gardening trowel. As if every other atrocity in the movie weren’t gruesome enough, they had to go and throw that in there! Cripes! And then there was the truly haunting, unnerving ending. I had grown to love Ben during the run of this movie, and … well … I don’t like spoilers, and I’m sure there a couple of you out there who have never seen this masterpiece. Shame on you, ok. But I’ll still be nice enough not to ruin the ending. For all of you who have seen it, let me say that to my 12 year old mind, those super grainy, newspaper-like stills during the closing credits are the most sublimely haunting images ever used as a denouement. Nothing in the movies has ever come close to the impact those images had on me as a child. These weren’t images of fun horror, like something out of Gremlins or Poltergeist. No, these images looked real. And there was nothing fun about real. Real was on the news and in the newspapers. Hooking bodies and tossing them onto pyres was just too much for me then. I had never seen any real life, atrocity footage at that time, but those closing frames of NOTLD certainly came to mind the first time I saw images of lynchings in the deep south, or prisoners in concentration camps.
However, as I wind this up here, I must say that the most harrowing part of the movie was the fact that the locations were very familiar to me. I was raised in rural Michigan, surrounded by woods, cornfields and farmland. Rural Pennsylvania isn’t too much different than rural Michigan. There are more mountains in Pennsylvania, but the valleys in between are no different than those where I
spent the impressionable, feverish days of my childhood. That cemetery at the end of the winding road from the opening sequence was no different than a hundred cemeteries I saw a daily basis. The woods and open farmlands were the same as those I gazed upon whenever I stepped out my front door. That farmhouse they holed up throughout the bulk of the film was just like that two story house down the street from my house.Night of the Living Dead could’ve been any night of my childhood. I was used to seeing movies in big cities, the suburbs, or exotic locations like Cairo or Hawaii or Tibet. I wasn’t used a seeing movie, especially a horror movie, that looked like the filmmakers had made it my own backyard, and in a house that looked like any number of houses I had been in while visiting neighbors or yard-sales. It was just too close for comfort. Rural horror came alive to me then, in a way that would be echoed a couple of years later when I began reading Stephen King novels.
Growing up I was terrified of big cities because in the Charles Bronson movies my dad watched, that’s where all the murders and rapes happened. And all the really scary monsters like Dracula and the Wolf Man, well, those were in faraway countries like Germany and Transylvania, places that I would probably never go, places that didn’t actual have any substance to me, outside of a cathode-ray or library book.
But damn, if zombies could pop in a place like the one I lived in, well … shit. Where did that leave me? At 12 years old, on a Halloween night, I realized for the first time in my life that nowhere was safe. Death could come at any place, at any time, at the hands of anyone or anything.
Not an evening went by after that I didn’t gaze ruefully, yet wondrously out at those quiet fields and darkening woods and think to
myself: What’s out there? I mean, really? When that sun finally descends beyond the horizon … what might be staring back at me, ready to make it’s way slowly, but purposefully, in my direction, with rotted hands reaching out …?From then on, I was sold, man. As petrified as I was a lot of times growing up because of the films I watched and books I read, I had become a disciple of the dark. I devoted my life to horror and the fantastic. And that 12 year old boy, happily, still resides within my mind, and in my heart. Never wavering in the face of adulthood. I still stand poised on the edge of the windy field, staring into the darkening recesses of the gloaming … ready to run at a moment’s notice …
For I still believe in the thing staring back at me from the dark, whatever it may be.
Thanks George! Halloween is what it is to me, because of you. God bless you. And to all of you, this is Ryan Lies saying, thanks for sitting up late with me and hope you enjoyed the tale. Have a safe and happy Halloween, and remember … you gotta hit ‘em in the head. Beat ‘em or burn ‘em. They go up pretty easy. Cuz, you know, they’re dead … they’re all messed up.
