‘That’s one more for the bonfire.’ There is something inherently disturbing to a film those scariest creatures are not an army of flesh-eating resuscitated cadavers, but the living human beings that are in fact their victims. More than its extravagant gruesomeness and unrelenting pace, the slow reveal of how things one would give as granted deeply overturn is what makes Night of the Living Dead so brutal, creepy, and clever. A complexity, not least sociopolitical, that Romero never apparently sought—but then again, intuitions, not intentions make an artist great.
As I was recently browsing through some articles on the case, I found an interesting one by Roger Ebert1 that I don’t think I had come across before. Writing a few months after the theatrical release of the film, his didn’t literary review it, but rather recounted the experience—one that today seems unrealistically far in time, with people showing up early to get the best seats, queueing eagerly to see what word of mouth had already made into a sensation and, as the film rolled, screaming in horror, turning quiet in shock, or crying. Having noticed the young age of most in the audience, and one little girl in particular weeping motionless a few seats away from him, Ebert made a point on the loose rating of the film. Making clear that censorship is never an answer, he argued that the lack of regulation was possibly due to a cynical box office strategy. ‘Maybe that’s it,’ he concluded, ‘but I don't know how I could explain it to the kids who left the theater with tears in their eyes.’ No need to explain, I dare belatedly replying. Because those are the kids who fell in love with cinema. And among them, perhaps some of today’s filmmakers.
1.The Night of the Living Dead, Roger Ebert (Reader’s Digest, 5 January 1969).
What never ceases to fascinate me of the films made in the fortunate decade that starts around the end of the Sixties and conventionally ends with the infamous production experience of Heaven’s Gate, is that on top of being daring both technically, visually, and narratively, they are weird to the bones in a way that we have almost forgotten. Or at least largely has contemporary cinema.
Using the disturbing imagery of an industrial poultry farming machinery as a loosely metaphorical background, Death Laid an Egg follows a typical love triangle degenerating from boring daily inertia to havoc. As the theme of genetic manipulation is randomly dropped to provide some sort of secondary narrative leverage, the final part of the film gets a little clunky and unfocused. But what still makes it successful, and so inherently unsettling, are not its preposterous avian features, but rather the inner contradictory monstrosity of all its characters. A tormented man helplessly cornered by a convenient marital stability that plans a horrific murder otherwise showing a sturdy ethical sensitivity. A loving if superficial wife turning out to be a ruthless entrepreneur. A sweet and caring, almost childish, young lady seduced by trivial material pulses. A cynical scientist, a fake publicist, and a bunch of hooligan workers. None of them is empathic. They are all in some way disappointing, nauseating, obnoxious.
Dealing with more domestic demons than Elio Petri’s soon to be conceived Trilogy of Neurosis, Giulio Questi’s satire delves into moral and intellectual human aberrations with the same anxiety and scepticism that are intrinsic to a certain disenchanted way to look at modernity, and therefore the future.
In Questi’s words, ‘Industrialization was a rising tide that overwhelmed everything, a hymn to the future, a frenetic packaging of products without distinction between inanimate and animate, that still alive screamed in terror and pain. The big farms were a symbol of this. Each chicken was a man, each hen a woman, each chick a child. Wealth was built on them. And the egg triumphed over everything, white, smooth, perfect, with the life closed inside. Sexual perversion remained the only possible way out.’
