Night of the Living Dead is definitely in the running for one of the coolest movies ever made. When you compare it to its contemporaries – even other indie American films of the time – it’s shockingly modern; ugly and brutal, with harsh shadows crossing across people’s faces. It’s still vividly original, setting the template for every zombie movie from then on. The dead have risen and are voting Republican started killing and eating people. You die or get bitten, you turn into one of them. To stop them, either remove the head or destroy the brain (or set them on fire). Even the basic moral question of the genre has been established: why can’t we all just get along?
It’s a very American question (the movie even has a shot of an American flag in its opening sequence). I often see the zombie genre (or, more accurately, zombie fans) criticized for cynicism; as a whole, it’s dismissed as a fantasy for white men to murder people with impunity and not have to think or care about community. Personally, I think that holding a work’s worst and most miserable fans against it is weak; it’s not the fault of Steven Universe or Ted Lasso that there are people who love it and will viciously bully and harass people with dissenting opinions. I’d rather interrogate the works on their own merits.
Also, and this is going to sound immediately hypocritical: uh, yeah? For the former, I’m not going to apologize for thinking fictional violence is awesome. Quite aside from it working as a metaphor for loudly existing in the world, I’m not going to ignore the pleasures of vicariously experiencing domination and power. That idea of community is where it gets really interesting. Night of the Living Dead is centered around the conflict between the survivors that hole up in an abandoned house, with the main conflict being between Ben (Duane Jones) and Cooper (Karl Hardman).
What’s really interesting is that, whereas the cliche for zombie movie conflicts is whether or not it’s worth abandoning some people to die so that some (or even the self) may live, Ben and Cooper’s argument is purely about the tactics of allowing everyone to live; that is to say, Ben believes they should stay up in the main house and Cooper argues for staying in the basement, and the conflict mainly comes down to the fact that Ben is calm and charismatic and Cooper is an abrasive asshole who tries to berate people into going along with his plan. One of the compelling points of NotLD is that Cooper turns out to be completely correct; they wouldn’t necessarily all have lived, considering Cooper’s child was bitten, but Ben ends up forced into the basement during the climax and ends up surviving the night.
It’s a more interesting take on Humans Are The Real Monsters than most because nobody is really aiming to be sadistic or cruel – Cooper’s attitude can best be described as accidentally superior, where the best course of action is so blindingly obvious to him that he’s genuinely startled that anyone would think differently. Watching Ben and Cooper argue now is uncomfortable to me because I can see past versions of myself in both of them; one, so self-righteous that he shoots himself in the foot by treating everyone around him as a moron; the other, so irritated by someone with a basic human failing that he ignores good advice almost to spite the guy and keeps escalating the conflict with him.
I’ve been happy for the first time in my life for the past five years or so, which has caused me to reflect on things I have and have not achieved and the different ways I could have acted, and I’ll concede how frequently I’ve been a deeply antisocial guy, particularly when it comes to my politics – I’ve felt personally challenged by the rise of Zohran Mamdani, who has managed to bring about radical policy change in his city by, uh, doing the exact opposite of things I’ve been doing – and to be honest, things I’d rather not be doing even now. In a limited and metaphorical way, I am the real monster.
At the same time – and I recognise how this sounds – I know that what I’ve been doing has been the right thing, even if it hasn’t brought about the leftist revolution. Critics of the zombie genre often frame their criticisms as “who would be so stupid as to think and act this way”, which ironically makes them both Ben and Cooper at the same time in this metaphor; I believe my attitude, when directed correctly, has led to some interesting pop culture criticism and funny jokes, and will lead to interesting works of fiction. I think the critical attitude also ignores that these emotions are coming from a real place; I don’t want to frame all my social problems around the fact that I’m probably autistic because they also come from having developed personal ideals that aren’t always in sync with the people around me.
One could say that comparing my ideals of good fiction, scifi, surrealist humour, and somewhat idiosyncratic leftist policy to being attacked by zombies to be somewhat melodramatic; at my most Cooper-like, I would ask such a critic if they were even slightly aware of what the concept of a myth, metaphor, or fictional exaggeration of a feeling was like. Antisocial people are going to be around forever, and we’re not going to be berated or shamed out of existence, and we’re gonna be looking for movies to watch as well. Movies with zombies in ‘em.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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What you might call "edgy ambient".
Year of the Month
This is the angriest a book has made me since that fucking Ayn Rand book.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Ghostbusters I and II
The second one has a stupid reset of the premise to tell the same story over, but line for line, it’s much funnier.
Lord of The Rings: Fellowship of the Ring
This is cut so fast compared to the fantasy it influenced. Each shot has a single purpose, and when done, the movie moves on. Perhaps the greatest dichotomy between the quality of a work and the quality of things it influenced, next to Pulp Fiction?
Happy Endings, Season Two, Episode Eighteen, “The Kerkovich Way
“Cheesy crust is back!”
“I ended up talking to a man named Chaz who tried to sell me homemade cough drops!”
“I saw God. He’s… black.”
“There were eleven more donuts in that box!”
“You coming off your breakup and me about to eat floor pie.”
“This mannequin is not regulation!”
“You’d think baby number three would just fall out!”
“I want to make sure there’s no more clues in here.”
“Parking cars is my passion. Showbiz is for the birds.”
“I bet she can’t krump like I can.”
“Flood the target.”
“Target?”
“Target. Victim. Loved one. Whatever.”
“Let’s just say he’s one MRI away from a free MRI.”
“The same Alex that thinks the TV and computer are friends?”
“Year of Penny!”
“Years been over a couple of months, Penny.”
“Not the fiscal year! Suck it, taxpayers!”
“Whereas I’m partial to karate and brief nudity.”
“Get your Bobby Kennedy hands off me!”
“A baby committed a hate crime on another baby.”
“I’m into feet. Big feet…”
that’s accurate about FOTR, but also very funny given the bloated pace of Jackson’s the hobbit.
The Fortune – Somewhen in the 1930s, Warren Beatty has Jack Nicholson marry Stockard Channing so he and Stockard to go to California and not be arrested for violating the Mann Act. Before long, the three have a very uneven triangle, and just when she is ready to ditch both, it turns out that she is about to inherit a fortune she doesn’t want. So the men put aside their differences to kill her. Supposedly a comedy, this is just s slog that tries and fails to have Jack play someone a lot less with in than usual, and otherwise looks great and sounds great and that’s it. If Mike Nichols was ever a good director, it’s just barely on view here. That said, Stockard Channing is excellent in a thankless role.
Night Watch (1973) – Liz Taylor, remarried after her first husband was killed in a car crash in the arms of a much younger woman, is sure she saw a corpse with a slit throat in the creepy house next door. But new hubby Laurence Harvey, after the police come and go and find nothing, is sure Liz is cracking up. And is also sleeping with her best friend Billie Whitelaw. By the end, we learn things are not what they seem. A minor British thriller with a strong (if bloody) twist ending, directed by Brian Hutton (Where Eagles Dare) and shot by Billy Williams (Gandhi). Liz seems to have a ton of fun here, and has good chemistry with her long time friend Harvey.
Elementary, “How to Get a Head” – Rule of thumb: if a city councilman with a bad toupee tells you that a headless body of a friend is that way because of some weird ritual, odds are the councilman is the killer. Especially if the actor under the toupee is the well known and usually bald Michael Cerveris. But a fun mystery involving corruption and alcohol taxes. (I think this is the third or fourth elected official arrested for murder.) Meanwhile Holmes is looking someone to be the next Marcus Bell but his choice doesn’t pass muster with Gregson since she cuts corner. And Gregson makes it clear that he wants whoever takes over for Bell to be just as honest, as a break on Sherlock’s tendency to break rules (and laws). While I would like for there to be more repercussions for Sherlock’s attitude towards constitutional rights, at least the writers never hide it. And even if the show is copaganda, it doesn’t pretend that a lot of “good” cops don’t follow the rules either.
MASH, “Hanky Panky” – BJ’s friendship with a woman in a dying marriage turns into something else for a night. And he is torn up by guilt. Meanwhile, Margaret is worried sick when her fiance checks into a hospital but doesn’t say why. The latter plot seems designed to make sure her marriage won’t last. The former is an interesting idea, but seeing as we never saw the nurse before or since, it lacks much oomph. The later episode with Susan St. James (RIP) that covers similar ground, is much better.
Barney Miller, “Asylum” – When Wojo helps a Russian musician in NYC with a ballet company escape from a Soviet consulate car trying to grab him, he offers the man asylum. Which creates all sorts of messes and also a moment for the detectives to follow their own consciences and not the proper procedures as spelled out by the State Department. Oh, and the asylum seeker is gay, which bothers Wojo a lot less than returning guest Marty being gay. Lots of funny lines from the Russians, from an overmatched federal bureucrat, and from the cops. Dietrich’s oft kilter view of things really is coming into focus, and plays very well of Nick’s.
I mean, Virginia Woolf, speaking of Liz Taylor, is a hell of a movie.
The People Under The Stairs – Goofier than I expected and a lot of fun compared to many of the “social thrillers” it spawned, with a likeable kid protagonist and Everett McGill and Wendy Robie happily chewing the scenery as the baddies. There’s a clear sense of rage at the core here that these white rich people have drained the area around them, to the extent that they’ve trapped people in their own house, taking even the outdoors away from them. Probably a rewatch for Spooktober at some point.
Absolutely Fabulous – A bit broad but pretty funny and Saunders and Lumley make a good comedy team; there’s a classic duo dynamic here of the messy weirdo and the unflappable straight woman. Jane Horrocks is great as the dumb blonde.
That kid protagonist makes People very interesting, there is some gnarly stuff here but the fact our hero is so young shifts the tone down a bit into more outlandish fable mode. Which makes the metaphorical stuff stronger! It’d be more plodding with an adult, I think — or at least in this situation of being trapped in a house it would be.
Agreed, it also gives him more of a bond with Alice that an adult wouldn’t necessarily have. Impressive what Craven does with a single location, making the house’s spaces feel endless.
Live music — local hero Dennis Brennan playing a birthday show for a guy who owns one of the local venues, he got his old band back together including the great guitarist Duke Levine, and he and fellow guitarist Kevin Barry tore it up. Barry plays a great slide and Levine has a beautiful tone and the fleetest fingers around, but can also dial it back into a more plaintive mode and one solo in particular really hit, a lovely moment in a night full of great tunes.
Paterson — a film of lovely and melancholy moments, revisiting this I was caught off-guard by how Driver is so clearly going to say how it’s nice to meet a fellow poet to the young girl he encounters, but swallows that and says “real poet” instead, excluding himself as a peer and artist. His denial and recognition of this is a major throughline of the movie and it comes from the outside, just as he recognizes poetry in others (and his brief encounter with William Jackson Harper at the end makes another connection, two artists who have been rocked by dissolution, and considering how Harper has been largely comic in his wallowing this hits surprisingly hard), but there are so many threads to focus on here if you want to. And of course there is Marvin, one of cinema’s great antagonists — I busted a gut laughing at his portraits and Driver is wonderful in his ability to play off a dog. Who is in some ways as expressive as the taciturn Driver, but on the other hand Marvin does not begin each day (save one) by quietly touching the person he loves, a connection that is intimate and anything but routine. What a great movie.
Where The Sidewalk Ends — Dana Andrews is a cop who beats the shit out of people and is told to knock it off, he tracks down a witness to a mob killing and when the witness attacks him Andrews knocks him out and accidentally kills him. Whoops! So he covers up the killing (while still trying to find something to pin on the head mobster, who he hates) and winds up in a relationship with witness’ ex-wife Gene Tierney as he “investigates” the murder. “Guy investigating crime he committed” is always a great premise and I’m fine with the dissonance of rooting for him to get away with it, what pulls this down is the larger contradiction of Andrews wrestling with his brutality and the other cops embracing it in various ways, and how the romantic angle with Tierney winds up serving as absolution for all of this. There is the subtext of how straight arrow cop Karl Malden is just as ruthless as Andrews and even more despicable in his priggish actions (it is very easy to map Bud White onto Andrews and Ed Exley onto Malden and I’m sure this was an influence) and then there is the text of Malden beating the shit out of a crook, leading to Andrews being rescued and therefore redeemed, and I don’t really buy the latter’s darkness when the former is just sitting there. What it put me in mind of was The Big Heat, which has an ending where the text says one thing and the subtext running throughout the movie clearly says something else, and both of these align in what happens to the “hero” cop’s allies and love interests, if that is cruel it feels stronger than the sap this movie ends with. Looks great though!
Hell yeah, Paterson. I love that he chooses to share the poetry of the young poet that he met rather than his own. I have a lot of thoughts about how poetry and creativity is depicted in that movie and I feel like they’re going to keep on evolving across further viewings, if it’s not my favourite movie at this point then it’s certainly on the absolute highest tier.
Small things echo — Method Man is in this, as in the character is literally “Method Man,” but the credited actor is Cliff Smith, aka Method Man but appearing under his own name here when he usually doesn’t. Art and artist separated? Laura learns a song on guitar and it’s “I’ve Been Working On The Railroad,” which is a pretty accurate description of her husband, right? All the live long day, just to pass the time away.
Live Music – an all-day event on Saturday, once again motivated primarily by my girlfriend’s band being on the bill, but it ended up being a really interesting one overall. There were a couple of solo acts on first, one of whom was bizarrely a former Eurovision Song Contest entrant (for Ireland)!? There were a couple of more experimental acts later on, I enjoyed the electronic noise duo and their folk-horror costumes but the penultimate act were a sort of performance-poetry collective who proudly stated at the start of the set that they had never played before and everything we saw would be improvised, the results were – charitably – fucking awful, with the poetry being full of embarrassing “lol this is so random” psychedelic imagery and the musicians having no chemistry whatsoever. Inevitably they played about half an hour longer than their allocated time and wrecked the schedule for everyone else. Luckily, the belated headliners, Stealing Sheep were absolutely incredible, a lo-fi pop trio who I’ve somehow managed to never see before in their 16 years of touring but fell for immediately, which was a little bittersweet as this was their last ever show… under this name, before starting a new project, which will hopefully be just as good.
Sunday night I got to see another Philadelphia indie-rock act, in my attempt to become an honorary native of the city or something. Anyway Greg Mendez has released a couple of kinda Elliott Smith-leaning melancholy guitar albums that I’ve enjoyed quite a bit and I was curious whether the live show would tip me over from a casual fan to a dedicated one. Turns out I’ll probably maintain my level – he was very good and I admired his ability to know exactly when a song should be done, some of his stuff is basically verse, chorus, out. But definitely a solid act I’ll continue to casually follow rather than one I’ll evangelise to others.
“the results were – charitably – fucking awful, with the poetry being full of embarrassing “lol this is so random” psychedelic imagery and the musicians having no chemistry whatsoever” — ha ha! Eat shit you dumb losers! “Inevitably they played about half an hour longer than their allocated time and wrecked the schedule for everyone else” — A N G E R Y. This shit is infuriating, it’s one thing to not respect yourselves or even the audience but to fuck over the other performers in a setup like this really pisses me off. I’ve been holding a grudge against Reverend Horton Heat for 30 damn years because of this! Don’t you have a Wicker Man you can shove these people into? Everyone else gets a WOOOOOOOO LIVE MUSIC though.
It was deeply infuriating, if they’d been annoyingly, self-confidently shit for 40 minutes or whatever then I could have written it off as “not for me” but that extra half-hour they played because their message (elephants can wear stilts and play basketball lol, haha what if HAIR was a currency?) was so incredibly important made them really curdle into my deepest enemies. They kept bringing out new band members to join in as well, and they did a long “thanks” section at the end where they were primarily thanking themselves, of course.
“a sort of performance-poetry collective who proudly stated at the start of the set that they had never played before”: in other words, you saw a rehearsal
Godzilla Minus Zero . Astounding. The effects work is great. The aerial chase is amazing. Min Tanaka and Yoshioka (the older scientist and Professor Noda) really stand out in the cast. Minami Hamabe (Noriko) gets a lot to do in this one and she’s great. Ryuunsuke Kimiki (The pilot Koichi) doesn’t have as much meat to his role as last time, but he’s still good.
The plot is pretty similar to 2019’s American Godzilla King of the Monsters, but instead of Bradley Whitford’s flippancy the characters take what’s happening seriously.
Thematically, the movie is about the cycles of violence and revenge and breaking them. I do have two criticisms here, one minor and aesthetic and one minor coming from me but would be major if I were Korean or Chinese. The minor criticism is that they make the subtext very, very overt. Godzilla minus one or even the original 1954 godzilla are comparatively subtle. In fact, Godzilla himself is more subtle. But this is a quibble of taste.
Min Tanaka, who is amazing, has a fantasy sequence in the movie where he uses Godzilla to get revenge on the U.S. The sequence is maybe a little indulgent. While the movie is explicit about breaking cycles of violence, the fantasy sequence seems to be saying “Let’s get revenge. Just kidding. Unless???” Which is fine. The atom bomb, even assuming that
level of destruction was necessary to end the war, is still a world-historical atrocity. I will not begrudge someone daydreaming about giving Americans what we have coming.
But maybe, just maybe, while contemplating the cycles of revenge and reprisals, perhaps the scientists who worked in weapons for imperial Japan should also remember that there are people who might revenge against them. Breaking the cycles of revenge isn’t a purely altruistic act when you’re both victim and perpetrator. Obviously, there’s a huge selection bias in what Japanese media I end up seeing, and it’s hard to conceptualize someone (especially yourself) as both victim and perpetrator, but I think it’s important to do so. It’s not a flaw to the movie that it’s more concerned with US-Japan than with Japan- mainland Asia; it doesn’t need to become bloated with metaphors*; it is a perspective that would be interesting to see in another film.
My proposed solution: in the next one, Godzilla plus one, we get a Chinese mothra that gets a little revenge on Godzilla but then they team up to beat American Mechagodzilla.
*coincidentally, I just read the Poppy War trilogy by RF Kuang, which is pretty solid and is likewise about wwii unleashed horrific forces beyond human control, but with an emphasis on the sino-japanese theater (and the civil war and the century of humiliation) from a chinese perspective. It would make a great hbo show. But thematically you could use the same ideas in a kaiju movie.
banshees of inisherrin. . Mcdonagh’s stage background is really evident here. I really want to see Farrell and Gleeson do waiting for Godot, but this is halfway there. Pray for my wife because I’m gonna talk like these guys for a week. The wee fella, barry keoghan, he was great. I’m not 100% sure the movie adds up to as much as Mcdonagh thinks it does, but maybe. Colm’s response to confronting his mortality is basically pathological, but so Padraic’s codependency.
What did we play?
Gears of War, Act One, Chapter Four, “Fork In The Road”
Nothing related to the story happens in this chapter. One of the interesting things about gaming as a storytelling medium is that, with very rare exceptions, you are always trying to achieve something. Like, basic storytelling right there – someone is trying to achieve a goal and something is stopping them. So even a weak story can be carried; rarely did you get something genuinely meaningful, but you at least get something functional. (Kind of ironic then that walking simulators have become popular, though they do often still have you trying to achieve something)
The flipside of that is, of course, sometimes nothing of note is actually happening. I happen to be playing through the Metal Gear Solid series, and it’s remarkable how many stories are being told at once as you pass through; emotional attachments being established or developed, stakes rising, that kind of thing. I wouldn’t even describe what’s happening in Gears as unpleasant or without any value, but it is, again, the bare minimum of what you’d want from a piece of art. What’s especially frustrating is that, unlike those walking simulators, you’re also learning nothing about the world you’re moving through; you can compare this to the Portal series, where you’re constantly seeing evidence of the personality and motivations of Aperture Science and their ludicrous inefficiency, incompetence, and insecurity.
If there’s a specific pleasure in Gears outside the gameplay, it’s in going through the motions in a world you don’t terrifically care about purely to commit ownage. Even by the low standards of trashy entertainment, I can compare this to other, better games – Starcraft is aiming for trashy entertainment, and it has a much more detailed and weird world where I’m fascinated by the lifecycle of aliens and how the tech works and whatever, as well as characters I actually care about whose lives develop. If there is value in Gears – and I believe there is – it’s in representing that specific feeling of alienation, where it’s like ‘yes, this is how the world often felt to me as a teenager and sometimes does now’. It’s amazing how this specific kind of trash has the same kind of appeal as some arthouse, right down to being kind of boring and slow and that being some of the appeal.
This also has a few mistakes in the gameplay. There’s a major one that the series would never make again in the sequels: the chapter opens with a sequence where Marcus and Dom are separated, which is meaningless in single player but devastating in co-op, because it takes away your ability to revive each other when you’re downed, which is the whole fun of co-op. The other mistake is more subtle: the climactic section is one where you advance against some Locust who have a turret and high ground, and once you defeat them, Locust appear behind you. It’s a more open area with more smaller bits, like a spotter’s nest high above you on the right.
This section is kind of fiddly and annoying to play, especially on the highest difficulty. One major problem is that you have no control over whether or not your AI allies die, and they always die in a really inconvenient spot where you’ll definitely die if you help them. This is something the future games overcome by having AI allies pick each other up, of course. The other problem is harder to fix: enemies will often move forward past boundaries almost at random, but I found myself able to pass the section much more easily by staying up in the spotter’s nest because the enemies never come up there.
The problem with this is actually the same as the story problems this chapter: it creates a lot of dead time. This is a game that, more than anything else, rewards endurance over skill or tactical intelligence – you sit in the back and wait for the enemy to get into a prime position. You can compare this with Left 4 Dead, which is intentionally designed so that you have no safe position where an enemy won’t hurt you, and thus you’re always on edge and always thinking about the problem in front of you. I think this is also a big reason it got so popular, as weaker gamers could, with sheer persistence, find themselves winning the game and feeling tough, on top of it reflecting their personal realities.
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Baker Street Irregulars – I’ve had a few sessions of this deduction-based board game with friends before but this was from a new set of cases we hadn’t tried before, and I believe the first that was written in English rather than translated, which has been the source of some (fairly minor) frustrations in the past. We still did quite poorly, following leads that kept fleshing out a subplot but missing a major clue for the main case we had to solve, which in this case was a kidnapping. A lot of fun though, looking forward to one day solving a case in a number of turns that doesn’t absolutely disgust Holmes.
Arcade Archives SUPER PUNCH-OUT!! on Nintendo Switch
Beat the Canadian Bear Hugger, then got beat by the Bruce Lee clone. “But didn’t Bruce Lee use his legs? Wouldn’t that be fighting dirty in boxing?”, you’d ask. And you’d be right.
Super Mario World – Super Nintendo Entertainment System – Nintendo Classics on Nintendo Switch
Played a few levels on Vanilla Dome on handheld mode for my six-month old to see. She smiled and laughed a lot, and tried to grab Mario from the screen with her hands, which I think are good sings.
Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound on Nintendo Switch
Beat a couple more levels. The two main characters are sort of merging into one at this point, which is very interesting, though it does kind of reset the learning curve and means this particular pair of levels aren’t as cool as the preceding ones, or as, presumably, the next few are set up to be.
Year of the Month updates:
This November, you can write about anything from 1968 — here’s some lists of movies, albums, books, and TV to get you started.
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Black Lizard
TBD: Cameron Ward: Horus, Prince of the Sun
Nov. 13th: Gillian Nelson: Understanding Stresses and Strains
Nov. 14th: Cori Domschot: Yours, Mine, and Ours
Nov. 19th: John Bruni: The Swimmer
Nov. 22nd: Tristan Nankervis: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
And then we’ll be wrapping up 2026 with a look back at 2020! Here’s some lists of movies, albums, books, and TV to get you started.
Dec. 3rd: Cori Domschot: Underwater
Dec. 4th: Gillian Nelson: The Owl House
Dec. 11th: Gillian Nelson: Prop Culture
Dec. 18th: Joseph Finn: The Queen’s Gambit
Dec. 25th: Gillian Nelson: COVID closings at the Disney parks