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Psycho and the Zombie Movie

posted 5 years ago by ecarle (14979)
16 replies | jump to latest

swanstep has a nice thread going here elsewhere about movies after Psycho that used Psycho in their advertising as the standard by which to be judged.

One such movie was 1968's "Night of the Living Dead."

I remember it well. I think the poster said "the scariest movie since Psycho."

And in certain and particular ways...it was.

For Psycho never quite really got a movie "special" enough to match it for a number of years in the 60's. Castle's knockoffs(Homicidal and Strait-Jacket) were cheapjack rip-offs; Aldrich's Baby Jane and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte weren't really interested in horror(though the latter film had more blood and gore than the former.)

Christmas of 1967 had "Wait Until Dark" to make people scream and make big money, but it lacked the raw creepiness of Psycho, and the blood.

The summer of 1968 had perhaps the first landmark classic to match Psycho in Rosemary's Baby, but that one was a "thinking woman's thriller" with no gore and a Satanic bent. It was a suspense film, but not a gory one. It also brought fairly graphic sexual content to the big screen in a way that Psycho could not.

"Night of the Living Dead" hit screens later in 1968, after Rosemary's Baby, and, given its VERY cheapjack(shoestring) origins, likely felt a need to connect to Psycho in the advertising that Wait Until Dark and Rosemary's Baby refused to share.

For Psycho and Night of the Living Dead were connected in specific ways. Both in black and white(WUD and Rosemary's Baby had been in color.) Both low budget(except Psycho was low budget for a big Hollywood movie; I think it cost about four times Night of the Living Dead.)

And both with an emphasis not so much on story, but on visceral impact. The murders in Psycho were slaughters. The killings in Night of the Living Dead were....eatings.

"Back in the day," rather than nation-wide broadcasts of commercials for movie releases, local communities played "local" commericals that had the feeling of a projector at the TV station sputtering away to show the commercial, and of tinny sound.

That's how the commercials for "Night of the Living Dead" were on Los Angeles TV. Raw, tinny, as crummy in their way as we felt "Night of the Living Dead" might be.

I mean there were NO STARS in "Night of the Living Dead." Psycho had at least had Perkins and Leigh. And Wait Until Dark had Audrey Hepburn a big established star. And Rosemary's Baby had a big new star in Mia Farrow(from Peyton Place AND from Frank Sinatra's marital bed, though Rosemary's Baby ended that; Mia was served with divorce papers on the set by Frank.)

I was pre-teen in 1968, a bit sheltered at home and yet exposed to all sorts of gory movie talk at school. Thus had Psycho grown and grown as "unspeakable horror with bloody murders" in my minds eye -- and "Night of the Living Dead" was far worse. Soon the word was out: these zombies were human beings risen from the dead, "reanimated"(from outer space in this movie) and on a rampage to kill the living. And eat them. And to turn them into zombies, too.

I recall reading an article on NOTLD in Reader's Digest...at my grandmother's house. The article posited NOTLD as sick beyond anything that had been allowed on American movie screens...an outrage, a public danger. /The author lingered on a scene where zombies eat intestines like spaghetti and a human arm like a chicken leg. I tell you, I'm pretty sure that Roger Ebert wrote this Readers Digest article, back when he wasn't so cool . Anyway, that article put in my mind the following sentence: "I probably can't see Psycho until I'm older, but I'll NEVER be allowed to see Night of the Living Dead. And I don't want to."

Well, one man's unspeakable stomach churning horror is another generation's cool genius of horror and...thus it has become for Night of the Living Dead.

You could say that George Romero, with that one movie, invented a genre and its rules practically on the spot.

Some "zombie rules"

Zombies are our human friends, relatives, grandparents...CHILDREN..brought back to life but in the rotted condition of the corpses they have become, with the wounds of their violent deaths when that occurred.

Zombies "keep on coming." They are coming for YOU, for ME. In groups. We can't run, we can't hide. We can board up our house against home invasion, but they will break in. Somehow. And we will be overrun.

Zombies eat human flesh, and human body parts. The cannibalism on display in Night of the Living Dead went to a place that Hitchcock was NEVER going to go, even with Psycho. (The actors ate chicken legs and entrails, gruesome enough.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Here's a tricky one, and it matches up the George Romero Zombie with the modern-day vampire. It seems that sometimes, the vampire(or zombie) simply kills its victims, and they mercifully die.

But SOMETIMES, the bite of the vampire -- or the zombie -- turns the victim INTO a vampire. Or a zombie. I'm not sure either genre ever got the rules right on this one. You're attacked by a zombie. You're attacked by a vampire. So -- you die? Or you come back to undead life AS a vampire? Or a zombie? I'm not sure these two genres have ever gotten that straight.

Another rule from NOTLD: you CAN kill a zombie. You gotta shoot 'em in the head, in the brain. It discombobulates the outer space activation of the dead brain. This has been a key rule for all zombie movies and a reassuring one, except there's a problem: there always seem to be more zombies than bullets available. They still overrun the victims.

It is time here to notice the nexus between Night of the Living Dead and a Hitchcock horror movie that is NOT Psycho. The Birds, of course. The connect points are key: both films are ultimately about "the siege of a house." Doors and especially windows, boarded up. The humans trapped within. The birds/zombies slowly breaking through the defenses and attacking the people within.

But The Birds also has this connection to NOTLD: bullets can kill zombies, we can assume bullets can kill birds -- but there are just too damn many of them. By the thousands. By the millions. The human race is overrun.

I suppose you could say that the original Night of the Living Dead mixes Psycho(blood, gore, and black and white) WITH The Birds(the factors above) so that the film has a past and some grounding.

But George Romero made up a whole buncha other rules for the zombie movie. Night of the Living Dead isn't as well made or acted as Psycho but it is just as landmark, just as historic. And MORE long-lasting as a genre than the slasher movie, it would seem.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Note in passing: are the zombies in Night of the Living dead ever CALLED zombies? Or are they just "living dead"?

This might matter. For before Night of the Living dead, the American zombie genre was non-gory and somewhat of a racial one: "zombies" were often shown to be "persons of color" found on Caribbean islands, the dead brought to life(and looking fine; no wounds or gore dripping off of them) and walking around as if in a trance.

As I recall, the serious "zombie" movie of this type was "I Walked With a Zombie." The funny version had Bob Hope.

There was even a 1965 or so "Man from UNCLE" episode where Solo and Kuryakin went to a Caribbean island and encountered hypnotized Caribbean zombies.

Night of the Living Dead changed all that , but perhaps it took until the late seventies/early 80's and a movie actually CALLED "Zombie"(a foreign film, and filled with the worst human-entrails eatin' imaginable) to set the pace.

George Romero stretched his franchise over time: "Dawn of the Dead" gave us 1979 hard R gore, color, and a deserted shopping mall for some consumerism spoofing.

And did not Romero run out of gas with "Day of the Dead"?

It seems like we've had so many zombie movies in the past 20 years. All pretty much playing by the same rules, with the same tropes. But somehow, each one has had a gimmick:

"Shaun of the Dead": British. Comedy. Zombies walking so slow that our comedy heroes take them simply for friends who are drunk. And one of our heroes is bitten and finishes the film as the "zombie pet" of his best friend...on a chain.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"World War Z": The CGI supermovie, complete with superstar: Brad Pitt. This one gives us zombies who move FAST, and that's terrifying. It also uses the famous "CGI overkill" effect to show us THOUSANDS of zombies overrunning the walls of a fortress like so many millions of ants. The humans bearly have a chance. There's also a great, terrifying , opening scene of people running desperately and cars crashing into one another -- as people try to escape thousands of UNSEEN zombies who are "coming this way" --blocks away, but moving fast and drawing closer. The terror is palpable until the zombies indeed finally arrive -- superfast, swarming, no way to get away from them(rather like a raging wildfire.)

"From Dusk Til Dawn." An anomaly. Billed as a "vampire movie," when the vampires arrive -- by the dozens -- they really act like zombies. No genteel bites to the neck for THESE vampires. They rip apart their victims and eat away -- but, in the vampire tradition, some who are bit "come back" as vampires. This one has a script by Tarantino, actors Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney as vicious robber-brothers who turn into reluctant heroes, and a "dusk til dawn" battle in a Mexican strip club that turns into a gorefest.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

"Zombieland." This is possibly my favorite zombie movie. It opens with nifty "floating credits and zombie rules" that take the basic rules of zombie movies and elaborate on them(Rule Number Four: Be careful in bathroom stalls; Rule Number Ten: Stay fit enough to outrun a zombie -- your fat buddy will get caught first; etc.) The famous rule about shooting zombies in the brain to kill them is elaborated into the "double tap" --TWO shots to the head to make sure that the undead stay dead. The cast is fine: a pre-Oscar Emma Stone, Woody Harrelson at his country coolest, and that deadpan young guy Jesse Eisenberg as the hero who yearns for Stone -- plus Abigail Breslin as Stone's sister; Breslin had Oscar nom cred back then. AND: a "big movie star," playing himself, who has a lot of fun here. The "Birds" like idea of a vast wasteland of post-Apocolypse terrain adds in the idea that a major movie star might just hole up in his Beverly Hills mansion to fend off the zombie hoards.

Zombieland came out in 2009. It's going to have a sequel -- with the cast intact, Oscar winners and all -- ten years later. This year. 2019. I'll be there.

And of most recent vintage: "The Dead Don't Die." This year. Last week as I post this. I'll lead with something maybe you don't know -- the title "The Dead Don't Die" was first affixed to a rather "meh" NBC TV movie of 1975. I recall watching that movie -- in hopes of "real" horror that didn't arrive. It starred George Hamilton, and there was a vampire-type role for Reggie Nalder, the creepy-looking assassin of The Man Who Knew Too Much looking even creepier(I think Nalder was in the commercials for the broadcast, another reason I watched it.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Well, somebody must have liked that title (The Dead Don't Die) because here it is 44 years later on a zombie movie, where it fits fine. And it even is the title of a twanging country western tune(The Dead Don't Die) by a REAL country singer named Sturgill Simpson. This tune plays all through the movie -- to the point where even as one character breaks the fourth wall and identifies it on the radio("Its the theme song") and another character destroys a CD of it("I can't stand that song any longer.")

I saw The Dead Don't Die with friends, and one of them reported via e-mail that the next morning when he turned on his car radio, the song playing was...no lie...The Dead Don't Die.

About the movie: The director is Jim Jarmusch, and I'm surprised this movie got mainstream release, because he's really an art film/indie guy. I suppose the release is because the stars are Bill Murray and Adam (Star Wars) Driver. That Driver guy took some getting used to, with his eccentric facial features and head, but I've now seen him in enough movies to accept his looks and "dig" on his deadpan style(in the movie, he and Murray are small town cops, and a woman says of Driver -- "He's the younger, physically attractive one." OK.) I liked him in Logan Lucky a coupla years ago, too.

So, Bill Murray and Adam Driver. And zombies. Playing so much by the "usual zombie movie playbook" that one wonders why Jarmusch bothered to make this. I suppose the idea was to make a deadpan, shambling zombie movie with a mumbling style, a comedic heart --- and yet, a dead serious approach to how deadly the zombies are. (When they kill and eat, we see all the innards, that's for sure. The movie is R-rated gory.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Murray and Driver are supported by some names, few of them in the movie very long, but certainly recognizable. You got Chloe Sevigny as the scared female cop supporting Murray and Driver. You got Danny Glover. You got Steve Buscemi(as an irittable right-winger with a "Make America White Again" cap. ) You got..Rosie Perez? (What ever happened to her?) as a local TV reporter(who repeats a funny mantra everybody says early in the picture before zombies are identified as the killers: "The victim seems to have been attacked by a wild animal. Or several wild animals." This is said, deadpan, over and over and over until you realize: hey, its a running gag.)

You got Tilda Swinton, an Oscar winner just this side of Cate Blanchett in over-use and prestige, free to use her Scottish accent with pride and comic effect. And she wields a samarai sword with skill -- you can also kill zombies by decapitating them.

Indeed -- and this was in the trailer -- when Adam Driver uses a machete to chop off some zombie heads, Bill Murray is supportive: "Hey, those were some good cuts. You used to play minor league ball, right?"

Oh, and you got Carol Kane(whatever happened to her?) as a zombie girl who keeps requesting "Chadonnay." Her favorite drink as a drunk in her human life.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

As zombie movies go, The Dead Don't Die is rather ridiculously slight and unsurprising. One feels Jarmusch just going through the motions, plot-wise. We don't really see anything we haven't seen before, and its much more cheaply done than in Zombieland or World War Z.

But it has a little fun with the motif. The characters break the fourth wall, and refer to the script and the director. Outer space UFOS are brought in, because -- hey, why not.

And Bill Murray -- one of the true movie stars out there, and one of my favorites since at least 1979 on screen -- is BILL MURRAY. His every line reading is wry and perfect -- Murray doesn't do the manic goofball anymore, his tired wry guy is just as funny. I think he did this movie because he's pals with Jim Jarmusch and the movie was filmed about 30 miles from one of Murray's homes(this one in upstate New York.) And he's worth every penny. And Adam Driver keeps pace with him.

But this:

In the trailer, we get this hilarious exchange(to me):

Murray: What do you think this is? (Referring to the first dead zombie victims found.)
Driver: I'm thinking zombies. (Pause) The undead. (Pause) GHOULS.

God, Driver says that line funny. In the movie, the take is backwards and not as funny:

Murray: What do you think t his is?
Driver: I'm thinking zombies. (Pause) Ghouls. The undead.

Hey they should have gone with the other take!

A complaint: the first zombie kills end up as dead bodies only. And yet the "name" actors in the movie get attacked by zombies and come back AS zombies. What gives? What are the RULES? (I'll guess, and this goes for vampires too: the vampire or zombie can CHOOSE to kill a victim, or CHOOSE to let the victim come back "undead." Its all I got.)

[–] MizhuB (165) 5 years ago

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Note in passing: are the zombies in Night of the Living dead ever CALLED zombies? Or are they just "living dead"?

========

I'm 99.9% sure they're never called Zombies. I've even heard and read that on sites about the movie. I haven't seen it in years, but I recall that the news reports in it only say something like, 'These people aren't staying dead. They're somehow coming back to life and attacking the living'. Something like that.

---

Thanks for joining in 'mid-screed" MizhuB. Yes, I don't think "Night of the Living Dead" ever announced itself as a zombie movie. Again, zombies were generally a 30s/40/50s genre with a Caribbean bent and non-messed up zombies.

I suppose it was that movie of 79/80(?) called "Zombie" that turned Romero's living dead conceit into a type of monster. (The zombie -- ala Zombieland.)

But it was a great idea that Romero had. The idea (also taken up in Pet Sematary) of dead corpses coming back out of their graves as monstrous versions of their human selves is quite profound. We bury the dead; we don't want them back.

I believe the sheriff in Living Dead says of the living dead to a news reporter: "Ah, they're dead...they're all messed up." hah.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

A bonus post on "Psycho" AS a zombie movie.

Psycho really isn't a zombie movie , of course, but pieces of it rather foreshadow the Romero zombie to come:

Take Mrs. Bates herself. The REAL Mrs. Bates. Like Romero's zombies, she returns from the grave as a corpse and is placed among the living. Now, Norman dug her up, and stuffed her, and she is inanimate. But some of the "yecch" factor is still there: the dead are supposed to stay buried. We are not to see their decayed remains again.

Along the lines: when Lila first spins Mother around, and we see Mother's face -- a skull with tight gray skin on it, open eyesockets, bared teeth -- the audience for perhaps one half of a second thinks: is this THING what has killed Marion and Arbogast? Were they killed by an inhuman monster? A zombie? (No, it turns out it was Norman in drag, but just for a moment we think: Zombie Mother.)

Mother in murdering mode is very much like the zombies of later movies: she moves FAST, with one desire only: to kill. I'd say when Mother attacks Arbogast, she has the moves of a zombie: fast, killing on her mind, no mercy. (The shower murder is perhaps more measured, less of a zombie-type kill.)

Steven King said that some kid once gave him the perfect definition of a horror movie: "Its a movie where the monsters get you!" The scariest moments in any zombie movie are when the zombies get their victims; same goes for Mrs. Bates (who LOOKS like a zombie) in Psycho.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

And here's a weird one to try on: the final image of Psycho is Marion's car emerging from the swamp and it makes us wonder: that trunk isn't going to open up, is it? We're not going to see Marion's rotted, chopped up body, are we -- however mercifully washed in swamp water?)

No, we aren't.

But imagine, for one chilling moment: the idea of Marion AND Arbogast, as zombies, returned from the dead, she nude and punctured(The Dead Don't Die has one nude woman zombie), him punctured in his suit and tie, with an open gash down his forehead. Those would be two scary zombies coming for their victims.

But I digress.

A toast to George A. Romero, who evidently made "Night of the Living Dead" on weekends using local news crews and amateur acting talent and gave us a movie "that started it all." It belongs high on a list with Psycho.

And Psycho was used to advertise it.

[–] swanstep (2715) 5 years ago

A near-great zombie film from the '80s: Return of the Living Dead (1985).

Wittily scripted and directed (imitation-Coens, -Raimi?) by Dan O'Bannon who'd written Alien, ROTD introduced:
* Humor/Fun (Zombieland's and Shaun's irreverent tones start here - ROTD begins with a disclaimer "The events portrayed in this film are all true. The names are real names of real people and real organizations." & in the movie Night of The Living Dead was based on a real incident of a military chemical spill in Pittsburgh!)
* Zombies can run, are smart & can operate machinery ('That movie lied to us!')
* Zombies eat only brains not flesh, and can talk, including 'Braainss!' - motivation offered that eating brains makes the constant pain of being dead recede for a little while.
* Connection to punks & goths & also to tasty gratuitous nudity is made. Lots of punk rock on the soundtrack. Fun!
* Zombie infection principally spread by chemicals rather than zombie wounds

& lots more innovative points I've forgotten. It's really ground zero, taking over from Romero, for what the zombie-movie has become. Recommended!

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

A near-great zombie film from the '80s: Return of the Living Dead (1985).

Wittily scripted and directed (imitation-Coens, -Raimi?) by Dan O'Bannon who'd written Alien, ROTD introduced:
* Humor/Fun (Zombieland's and Shaun's irreverent tones start here - ROTD begins with a disclaimer "The events portrayed in this film are all true. The names are real names of real people and real organizations." & in the movie Night of The Living Dead was based on a real incident of a military chemical spill in Pittsburgh!)
* Zombies can run, are smart & can operate machinery ('That movie lied to us!')
* Zombies eat only brains not flesh, and can talk, including 'Braainss!' - motivation offered that eating brains makes the constant pain of being dead recede for a little while.
* Connection to punks & goths & also to tasty gratuitous nudity is made. Lots of punk rock on the soundtrack. Fun!
* Zombie infection principally spread by chemicals rather than zombie wounds

---

& lots more innovative points I've forgotten. It's really ground zero, taking over from Romero, for what the zombie-movie has become. Recommended!

---

I was sure that I forgot some other zombie movies and now that you mention it, swanstep...I saw that one on cable TV in the 80's I think, and I dug the humor of it. It was like the zombie movie had had this coming...

The idea of changing (or modifying) the zombie rules is fairly funny, too. I believe there are a few "books" out there called "The Zombie Survival Guide" and some such.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

And this(incredibly): a true story about a psycho stepfather("Dirty John") was made into a minor mini-series recently. Both the real life story and the mini-series conclude the same incredible way: when the stepfather actually tried to kill one of his stepdaughters -- she fought him off with a knife using "zombie survival techniques" she had been studying for REAL. Key: kill the brain. She did. She stabbed her psycho stepdad in the eye...(honestly, I didn't believe this either. But evidently true.)

---

I'll have to research this, but some years ago I saw some zombie movie that ended -- alongside the end credits - with "found video footage" of human survivors escaping a coastal town and taking a boat to an island to survive. The last image: zombies attacking the humans ON the island...

(Was this maybe a remake of the Romero original? HAS there been a remake of the Romero original?)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

It occurs to me in my litany of zombie movies, I forgot the Biggest Zombie Story of The All:

The Walking Dead. That AMC series that seems to be walking dead itself. It came on the air not too long( a year? two?) after Mad Men on the same network and has been playing ever since. AmIright? And there's a spin off series, right (Fear the Living Dead? or something like that.)

And I've never watched any of it. Even though -- by osmosis -- I know that it made a macho cable TV star out of one of the wimpiest characters in Love Actually (see how that movie lives on?) and picked up as an ultra-villain one of the more charismatic actors out there today (the guy from Watchmen, what's his name?)

Why haven't I watched it? I think the idea of an endless zombie apocalypse just sort of depressed me. Most of these movies don't end well(as Adam Driver predicts himself in "The Dead Don't Die") -- the idea of watching a series go on like that for scores of episodes -- I just couldn't do it. A coupla hours at the multiplex is about all I can stand.

I expect somebody somewhere must have written about why modern gory zombie movies have become so popular as horror. I expect the main issue is the return of the dead coming back as inanimate decayed remnants of their former selves. The idea of a soul enters in, in its own way.

Recall that Hitchcock wanted to do a more romantic version of this story with "Mary Rose" -- he wanted it billed as "A Ghost Story By Alfred Hitchcock" and a beautiful woman comes back to...not much.

Hitchcock told Truffaut: "The theme is...if the dead came back..what would you do with them?"

Time magazine critic Stefan Kanfer answered with: "You'd call it Topaz."

But seriously...that's what zombie movies are about. They come back. What do you do with them?

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Other variants:

The 28 Days Later films (virus makes zombies.)
That one with the Scottish guy playing a zombie who is kept as a butler and a pet by a rich family.
This year's Sandra Bullock Netflix thriller, "Birdbox"(something is driving people mad)
The Happening(M. Night's, not the 1967 Faye Dunaway thriller with the great Supremes theme song.)