Tagline: "There IS a fate worse than death..."
These days you hear a lot of people complaining about how Hollywood does nothing but rehash old stuff. Old franchises return like cinematic zombies, whether they’re worthy of resurrection or not. While I think said criticism is valid to some extent, and I think it’s also true that most of what we will see until the economy picks back up will be sequels and reboots, I’d like to point out that remakes are nothing new.
For almost as long as Hollywood has been Hollywood, film makers have produced sequels and reboots and rehashes. And honestly? I would say that isn’t always bad. My test case for this assertion would be The Thing, which was first filmed in the fifties only to be remade successfully thirty years later. Waiting that long to do a remake is a smart idea, as A) it exposes the franchise to a new generation who hadn’t seen the old one and B) it allows those who saw it the first time around to relive it in updated format.
I think the 1990 remake of the B-movie horror classic Night of the Living Dead falls under the same category as The Thing. It was a timely update that both preserved the strengths of the original movie and added its own twist to a classic story.
The 1990 version of NOTLD was directed by Tom Savini, the special effects artist famed for his work on Dawn of the Dead, and boasted a larger budget than the movie that inspired it, which naturally resulted in better visual effects. The film was done in color, as opposed to the iconic black and white of the original version.
Oddly, the facelift actually took away from the movie, in my opinion. Part of what made the original NOTLD creepy was the grainy, black and white film and the in your face camera work – it almost gave the movie a documentary quality that lent it an air of realism. Also, the fact that most of the zombies, at least early on, looked like average people who got up out of their bed and wandered off into the woods after meat made the movie that much creepier. They weren’t deformed freaks with half their jaw missing – they were your neighbors, your family, and your friends.
All of that being said, the remake was able to create and maintain tension in a similar way to the original, although to me it wasn’t as visceral for the reasons I outlined in the last paragraph. This was due to the fact that it stayed faithful to the original script, with a few noticeable differences. The one major difference was that Barbra, who was catatonic through most of the original version, played a bigger role in the remake.
When the movie began she was similar to the original Barbra, but she got it together as the movie progressed and she ultimately devised the best survival strategy of all the conflicting ones the group came up with – namely to simply walk out of the house. Apparently one does not simply walk into Mordor, but one can simply walk out of a zombie apocalypse *shrugs*.
Anyway. In addition to introducing a stronger Barbra, the update changed the movie’s ending considerably. In the original, no one survives (I feel it’s hard to spoil a forty-five year old movie. And I haven’t – after all, I haven’t told you HOW it happens, only what happens). In the remake, Barbra survives, a testament to her revamped, liberated character. Also, the iconic ending involving Ben (originally played by Duane Jones but played by Tony Todd, of Candyman fame, in the remake) was completely changed. The ending was what gave the original its impact. Changing it fit the updated feel of the remake, but it also blunted the overall effect of the movie.
All in all though the 199o remake of Night of the Living Dead was faithful to the original while at the same time being a timely update. It still doesn’t hold a candle to its predecessor, but it can stand on its own as a solid zombie movie.
Andrew Kincaid writes horror, blogs, and watches way too many scary movies.. He’s making the world a stranger place, one story at a time. Get in touch with him on Facebook and Twitter, and check out his debut horror anthology ON DARK PATHS, available on Kindle!
