“Oh boy . . . bloody, slack-jawed, bone-crunching
zombies staggering and lurching around a grim Pennsylvania town in a movie shot
in grainy 16-millimeter, and the three of us [Oates, friend and musical partner
Daryl Hall, and Hall’s sister Kathy] sitting in the old sedan, eyes big as
saucers and brains pulsing on what the fuck is happening. The fact that the
movie was narrated by a well-known local newscaster named John Facenda (who
many football fans will recognize as the longtime NFL films' ‘Voice of God’) made
the jacked-up realism even more intense. In fact, we were more than a little freaked
out, alternating our attention between the undulating outdoor screen and the
car's side windows . . . paranoia washing over us with a growing, genuine
terror that the zombies might actually be right outside the car. . . . ‘Wait ...what was that?!’”—Rock ‘n’ roll
singer-songwriter John Oates with Chris Epting, Change of Seasons: A Memoir
(2017)
I couldn’t let the old year go out without a bit of
a chuckle, and this quote from John Oates’ enjoyable musical memoir fits the
bill nicely.
I never got around to noting the 50th
anniversary this year of George Romero’s legendary low-budget shocker Night of the Living Dead. Scruples
have prevented me from commenting on this film that I have never watched except
for a scene here or there on TV.
But the little I have
seen—plus Mr. Oates’ helpful (not to mention sanguinary) summary—confirms what
a close relative told me back in the mid-Seventies about the film. “It’s the
scariest movie I’ve ever seen,” the relative said. “The grossest, too. I was
shaking when I got out of the theater.”
How can that heart-popping fear be topped? With the
mind-altering substances that Hall and Oates took in their wild younger days,
of course—days that they can laugh about now when they want to unbend after a
show.
As for me, I don’t need to see this (literally)
scene-chewing mayhem. Reality has its own various and abundant terrors. Do you
think it’s an accident that The Walking
Dead has lasted for nearly a decade on cable TV? Why?
"Zombie fiction and movies, when they're good,
aren't about zombies. They are stories about people and how they respond,"
Jonathan Maberry, author of many zombie books (e.g., Rot and Ruin), told Newsweek’s Raina Kelley back in 2010,
just as The Walking Dead premiered. "A zombie is a stand-in for anything we
fear: pandemic, racism, societal change, depersonalization of humanity,
pervasive threat and how this threat affects people. It's the core of drama and
a never-ending blank canvas."
In zombie movies and television, best friends can
turn on each other, no longer able to recognize their common humanity. Thank
Heaven that didn’t occur in the sedan where Mr. Hall and Mr. Oates sat huddled
against the evil they (wrongly and hilariously) believed surrounded them…
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