Horror as satire

On the Fangoria web site, while writing a review of what is imho the best film of the career George A. Romero, there was the casual mention of how satire need not be confined to humor.

Romero has made a series of films, starting in 1968 with The Night Of The Living Dead that are perfect examples of this notion. The Living Dead series, should your life been spent beneath some rock somewhere, has a basic premise: for reasons unclear, the recent dead are rising and consuming the flesh of the living. The bite of the recent dead bears a fatal infection (interesting: HIV was unknown in 1968, and yet casual contact via bite... Romero The Prophet), and the two best and reliable means of returning the dead to inanimate condition are fire and head trauma.

For lack of better words, but then Walt Kelly was a brilliant satirist in his own right, We have met the enemy and he is us.

We are the dead. We just don't know it yet.

When Romero released Dawn Of The Dead a decade later, the satire was so forcibly presented as to almost overtake the film entirely. Consumer culture was shown as an empty deathtrap. Again, interesting that a decade before mall culture corrupted the American landscape Romero saw it clearly. The only thing missing would have been some young thing doing the Oh Mi Gaw, gag me with a spoon...

Day Of The Dead shows the military having totally corrupted science, a film that was brought to us in the era of Star Wars technology. The military men have attempted to completely take over, but the dead are simply too great in number. Science, as shown in the character openly sneered as Dr. Frankenstein (Romero is many things but sublte falls short of that list), is at first shown as a doddering old fool, but later is shown as far more than that.

Land Of The Dead is a dead end corporate world, falling apart, and the dead slowing starting to show some level of intellect. Hopeful, that: I think Romero had the idea that We The People were starting to come to an awareness, but that hope was brief. Again, the corporate super rich sit in comfort and make everyone else beg. Point made, if with the subtlety of a flying sledgehammer.

Diary Of The Dead ... well, that could be the end of the series. Shot entirely on digital hand held camera, the story line advances with the characters, and the single camera is joined by another, then webcasts and surveillance cameras, until we are watching the characters, and thus by extension ourselves, from every possible angle. It is the ending, though, the last scene, the punch line of sorts, that allows Romero to put forth his current view of humanity, and it ain't pretty. The image at the end takes that digital camera Youtube type of image and becomes totally high def, and that last line makes the point that he has been making from the very start.

Are we worth saving?