Blog Task 12
I think you complain just to hear yourself speak - Barbara

1968 - "the year of the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and the election of Richard Nixon, and with America mired in an unpopular and unwinnable war in Vietnam."*

Codes and Conventions

'Night...' follows most the codes and conventions of the horror genre. The film portrays the themes of:

Isolation – most of the film is set in an abandoned farm house in rural Pennsylvania. The house has a conventional basement

Chaos - with the break down of civilisation. The group in the house who are ‘surviving’ are ones who want to maintain humanity, and characters like Johnny conveys the people who turn into the zombies.

The Protagonist Ben - The lead role of Ben went to unknown African American stage actor Duane Jones. His performance depicted Ben as a "comparatively calm and resourceful Negro," according to one reviewer.[22] Casting Jones was potentially controversial. In the mid-twentieth century it was unusual for a black man to play the hero in a film that starred white actors, and commentators saw Romero's choice of Jones as significant. Romero, on the other hand, said that Jones "simply gave the best audition."[23]

Plot – Follows the Todorov structure to a certain extent. By the end all the zombies are dead, however the death of the protagonist doesn’t create a sense of complete resolution.
“Ben, the only survivor…stumbles out exhausted only to be shot by the authorities – an innocent black man shot by the forces of American law and order, in a telling image of its time.” - Jones, Darryl (2002): Horror A Thematic History in Fiction and Film. London: Arnold Publishers.*

Economical context: ‘Night’s…” financial backers was a local butcher

Social Context: 1960's youth revolt against parental values is conveyed when The Coopers young daughter Karen, feeds on her fathers corpse and then kills her mother with a cement trowel, after being transformed into one of the living dead.

Similarities with Shaun of the Dead
Both texts follows the codes and conventions of the horror genre. There are also smaller similarities that can be identified while watching the texts. Both texts:

-Use radio/TV to drive the narrative and explain the situation
-Use over the shoulder shots
-Have a group of people ho are ‘surviving’
-Have a character that has been bitten by the living dead
-Have a character named Barbara who is in a catatonic state and lost someone to the living dead