Wednesday, October 18, 2017

This is from the summer, but Vishnevetsky's writing on George Romero over at the AV Club is perfect, and just in time for Halloween:

Romero’s true genius shone in the way he wrested the conventions of horror away from the drawing-room-and-fireplace set and into the hands of the working and middle classes. He put horror behind the roll-up garage door and in the shopping mall, and made the Rust Belt town and the suburban nowhere as important to the genre as the romantic Carpathian mountainscape and crumbling castle had been to the gothic tradition. Though his zombie films, as well as movies like The Crazies and Martin, Romero tore down the wispy, billowing curtains and put up plastic blinds; blew out the candles and replaced them with dangling bare bulbs; swapped the cobwebbed grand staircase with the creaky basement stairs, the iron portcullis with the plywood door, the horse-drawn carriage with the Amtrak. Everybody owes him some kind of debt.

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