The Horror Virgin #1: Night of the Living Dead

By Elisabeth Rappe

The days following that fateful phone call have been full of encouragement, scorn, laughter, and skepticism – the sort of reactions that real horror movie heroines experience when they tell everyone they have seen a ghost, a vampire, or a horde of zombies. But nothing troubles the Horror Virgin save one thing, and that is her mother's reaction to Dr. Weinberg's first assignment. "Night of the Living Dead? But you've seen it."

What devilry was this? How could she have seen Night of the Living Dead but have absolutely no memory of it? Had it terrified her so much that own her mind had shielded her from the trauma?

She decides it's time she found out. The timing couldn't be better, as it is a cold, gray, and rainy evening. Armed with a pint of Guinness and a down comforter, our humble heroine curls up with her laptop, Netflix Instant Watch, and George Romero.



96 minutes later, our heroine is suitably impressed. She still has no memory of this film (the flesh-eating ghouls she does remember are terrorizing an urban setting), but it has thwarted her expectations. Oh, she knew all the tales of Romero's social criticism and groundbreaking techniques, but it is a different thing to experience such ghastly creations with your own eyes and ears. There's something Greek to all this. The opening scenes are sneers at organized religion and the honors paid towards the dead. These are the kinds of sins that the gods punish ... and here it comes, lumbering towards them, the desecrated dead brought back to life. You damned yourself, Johnny! You damned yourself!

And what's this? A dash of Darwinsm? It's the strongest and most able man who survives the farmhouse. Even his accidental death doesn't completely disabuse that theory because he fails to call out first, and show himself second.

It's not nearly as cheesy as expected. Oh sure, there are drippy heroines, clumsy dialogue, and unneccessary romance. But the use of shadow! The silence! The eerie moans and wails of the undead! The nature of terror that comes from news broadcasts and being denied such access! The young girl wielding a shovel with such dead-eyed, chilly accuracy. It doesn't scare her, but she wishes she could have seen it in 1968 when it would have. Now it makes her laugh in the character of the sheriff and his zombie hunting party, who have figured out how to kill the hordes with backwoods efficiency. ("They go right up!") Now she gets the origin of society's current obsession with "zombie humor," the kind of shotgun blasting jokes that was between every other line of Jane Austen. While she will never be a big zombie fan, or hope for a zombie invasion, a glimmer of understanding now exists. There is something very appealing about blasting a squishy member of the undead back to the hell that spawned it ...

And so, The Horror Virgin has survived the Night of the Living Dead. Even more surprising, she has actually enjoyed the experience. Our heroine waits anxiously, dying to know her next assignment, fear and excitement mingling so closely that she cannot separate them ...