In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

17 Part One Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero It is fitting that George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead begins in a cemetery. On a surface level, the location of the opening sequence in Night makes atmospheric and narrative sense. In terms of atmosphere, the aging and isolated cemetery draws upon the gothic aesthetic commonplace in horror films since their inception, and in terms of narrative , it makes sense that one of the first places people would encounter recently reanimated corpses would be in the place where they were laid to rest. But at a deeper level, the cemetery is the perfect location for the beginning of Romero’s career. Not only are cemeteries the places in which we deposit the corpses of the departed, but they are also the epicenter of the complex set of relations we have with our own bodies. Romero’s filmmaking is preoccupied with the body. Of course, horror filmmakers have long focused on the body, but where Romero’s emphasis differs is on his attention to the points of intersection of cultural norms and the obstinate human bodies against which they are deployed. Thus, as suggested in the introduction, Romero locates the intersection between the cultural mechanisms of repression and those impulses that are repressed within the physicality of the human body. Thought of in this manner, the horror in Romero’s films emerges from the unconstrained body—that body which is no longer subject to the norms or laws that we believe constitute our reality. In some ways, this unconstrained body can be seen at the center of most horror narratives, and so both the reanimated corpse (which violates what we take to be natural laws) and the sociopathic killer (who violates our cultural norms) are equally monstrous.1 In the more traditional horror films, especially Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero 18 those appearing before Hitchcock’s seminal Psycho, the appearance of the unconstrained body serves as a threat to the cultural structures of civilization, and the subsequent narrative serves to reinforce and protect those structures from that threat, which ultimately must be vanquished to restore normalcy.2 In the 1980s, another form of unconstrained body emerged around what scholars have called “body horror,” a subgenre championed by filmmakers like David Cronenberg in which, as Philip Brophy puts it, the film “plays not so much on the broad fear of Death, but more precisely on the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it.”3 In many of the films of Cronenberg—like The Brood (1979), Videodrome (1983), and The Fly (1986)—the body takes on a fluid plasticity through which both the physical and psychological integrity of the victim is challenged. Cronenberg’s films, as with others of his era, employ a fantastic body within which the laws of corporeal reality twist and bend so that videotapes can be inserted into a human stomach (Videodrome) or a person takes on the physical qualities of a housefly. Romero’s films also use a version of body horror, though with a less fantastic bent. While Romero’s films are filled with animated corpses, they are generally still bound by the inevitable law of physical decay. Where Cronenberg utilizes the fantastic body as a means of imagining what Kelly Hurley calls “the human-becoming-other,” Romero’s bodies function more as a point of critique of what the human has become already.4 The body, in Romero’s films, serves as critical leverage through which he seeks to pry loose certain tendencies in contemporary culture for inspection and, often, condemnation. In this way, the cemetery and the funeral rites performed within its confines mark an important initial point of intervention for Romero. As Charlton McIlwain notes, “From the time that human civilizations transitioned from nomadic life to permanent communal settlements , the meaningfulness of death was marked by the living. Whether a pile of rocks and sticks, vast pyramids, or large blocks of granite with linguistic inscriptions, people throughout time have erected mediums signifying the death of a member of the family, clan or larger human community.” These spaces, in turn, became “a place of contemplation for the living looking forward to their certain future, a place in which they could maintain a continuing connection with the ancestral community .”5 The cemetery, then, can be thought of as a cultural space of central importance, a place in which we maintain a connection with...

Share