Kevin OrniasProfessor Remy
HUM 122
21 October 2014Undead Breakdown
Human kind can only imagine the day when people will start dying and coming back to life and eating the people we once loved. That fear of that happening taunts the world with the word “zombies”. In the film, The Night of the Living Dead (Romaro 1968) presents a crowd of zombies devouring people in sight. The movie consists of elements of mise-en-scene, which is the arrangements of everything that appears in the framing. “Mise-en-scene encompasses a variety of catagories related to the staging of action” (Belton 47). One example is acting, which brings the whole story come to life and makes the audience believe what is happening in the movie into something that could be real. With this successful film, their mise-en-scene covers a broad amount of their scenes with props. Props help the scene become more alive and realistic and with props, acting is involved. Listening to all the small things in the movie can make a big impact on the person who is watching. Sound plays an important role in making this popular flick pop. Acting, props and sounds all come together to make this horror film fill the audience with fear and suspense.
The Night of the Living Dead starts off in a graveyard ready to bury a man that has passed away. The two people that are paid to bury him wanted to look into his coffin to see what he looks like; unexpectedly, the dead man slowly moved and got up. The two men ran away in fear and drove off leaving the site. This starts off the zombie apocalypse in the film and it slowly grew more and more as other people turn into zombies. Later during the movie, one of the main characters, Barbra and her brother Johnny went to the graveyard to lay flowers on their father’s grave like they do every year. Then they came across the zombie that was in the first scene; without knowing, Johnny was fooling around and the zombie attacked him. In fear, Barbra took off and found a house nearby for safety. She went inside and found a dead body upstairs not knowing if anyone living was in the house. Later on, Ben, an African American male came bursting through the door to also find safety since his truck was out of gas. Right away he started boarding up the place and tried making everything secure. Without knowing, people were downstairs in a cellar hiding. One by one, they were dying off by the zombies as they were trying to get to one of the safe sites shown on the television. As of all horror flicks, there must be at least one survivor, which was Ben in this case, but was shot by one of the alive folks in town as they mistakenly took him as a zombie, or did they?
Throughout the movie, acting was essential to making the audience believe what is going on to be terrified in the actors’ point of view. In one of the first encounters with the zombie, Barbra’s facial reactions and screaming puts the suspense in the movie to startle the audience. “In presenting stories on the screen, the cinema relies on actors and actresses to stage events, much as they are staged in the theatre” (Belton 47). Every actor or actress plays an important role for making everything that happens in the film feel realistic.
Getting eaten by a zombie may be gruesome, but is difficult to role play during it. During the scene when Judy and Tom went out to get gas to the truck but had to drive away from it catching on fire, they were over run and eaten by a crowd of zombies. “The star provides the studio with a tangible attraction…” (Belton 89). Belton is stating that the star puts forth something that the audience is craving and wants. When Tom and Judy get eaten, they scream to the top of their lungs making the audience think they are actually getting hurt. How’s that for entertainment? The viewers of horror films expect victims to pass away and want to feel the fear of the actors/actresses.
The feeling of someone you love pass away is one of the most