Night of the Living Dead Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Night of the Living Dead - Essay Example So in what way are Vietnam War and Night of the Living Dead connected? First word that comes to mind in an attempt to answer this question is violence. Both this artistic and historical events are based on violence in its pure and essential form. Remembering ‘Nam we surely must say that children were murdered, civilian peaceful villages burned, young girls raped, prisoners of war tortured etc. Elliot Stein of The Village Voice said: "it was not set in Transylvania, but Pennsylvania – this was Middle America at war, and the zombie carnage seemed a grotesque echo of the conflict then raging in Vietnam". The Vietnam War shown in The Night of the Living Dead as a symbol or, better put, the Vietnam War and its perception by people are what moved George Romero towards creating such a movie. They are similar in details (for example search and destroy operations) and make viewer feel and see the impact of the war not in facts but in the whole structure of the film. To prove thei r connection a very popular underground comics Bulletproof Coffin by Shaky Kane and David Hine is inspired by The Night of The Living Dead and in this comics we can actually see war against zombies in Vietnam. So the connection is really there but of course the story and plot can be interesting without them. It is a horror and slasher film which makes action and violent gun shooting seem spectacular. But that is all and in the movie there is nothing else. But if you seek for symbols you should connect the movie with the time it was made and by that you achieve a seeing of a fiction that presents the feelings of those times. But the film which we discuss has a connection not only with Vietnam War. The main hero Ben played by Duane Jones is an Afro-American and up to that time the struggle for racial equality was near its culmination. Martin Luther King jr. was horribly assassinated the same year The Night of The Living Dead was released . It is a very interesting detail that both two main