Night of the Living Dead does not strike me as the gore fest that the initial reception by the audience held it back then. The AVClub article proclaims, “[the film’s] status as a gore champion has long since been superseded.” Romero uses buckets of blood splattered onto his actors to ignite gore, but comparatively to today’s films, that practice would not be up to par to the standards of horror. But perhaps, appealing to popular belief, its popularity proves the weight of it opening the doors in the aspect of gore in horror.
In the Bright Lights article Night of the Living Dead: Reappraising an Undead Classic, Stephen Harper mentions that the movie was shot “over seven months on a shoestring budget.” Harper displays the evolution of film production in how a film took a longer timespan to shoot—especially one of a low budget film like George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. However, it does not take anything away from the film; in fact, it amplifies Romero’s ability to stretch the budget.
Roger Ebert says that the audience seems to be majority of kids under 16 years. Once the “gore fest” in the film started, Ebert observes that the audience, especially the kids, were unfamiliar with the gore. On one hand, I cannot blame Ebert for being troubled about the how these kids will live their lives from then on; but on the other, I cannot help but find it absurd to find the movie disturbing from the lens that I have. Ebert misses on accurately projecting on the generation outside of his. It is very possible that the kids he observed have a more mature understanding that the feeling gore induces.
Romero opens the doors to a specific sub-genre of horror—gore. The audience’s reception and the critique assumes the progress that the film industry has made on two aspects: visual and an audience’s stomach for gore. The amalgam of the two says that as film has evolved visually, an audience tends to evolve what we accept, even the diction Ebert uses in his review is outdated. If constructing the binary in film watching creates the side on camera and the side of who is watching outside of that camera, Night of the Living Dead shows how the medium evolves on both sides.
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