Night of the Living Dead (1968)

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 

“there was this graveyard just 
outside Los Angeles, which for
sheer exquisite sensitive beauty
surpassed anything she had
seen of that kind”—Evelyn Waugh 
The Loved One

I was visiting Maplewood Cemetery just outside of Emporia. There I was having lunch in the graveyard sitting next to a giant erect granite monstrosity dedicated to some wealthy powerful forgotten Emporia personage.

Maplewood Cemetery is by no means a swanky Forest Lawn Cemetery like the one in Los Angeles. As far as I knew, no famous movie stars were buried there in that grim flat gravel-road lined Maplewood Necropolis of Emporia. 

I was just finishing my ham on rye sandwich and a tall cool one—when like in that opening scene in George Romero’s classic horror movie, “Night of the Living Dead,” something very strange happened to me. 

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw somebody or something shambling its way through the maze of tombstones like some inebriated, much-too-drunk person out for a stroll. I shrugged it off as some poor mourner suffering from a broken heart for a dearly departed dead Loved One. 

Little did I know that it wasn’t a mourning visitor but rather one of the actual dead Loved Ones themselves. Because as the drunk interloper interrupting my lunch got closer and closer—I could see that he was in a state of rotten decay and stinking decrepitude like somebody just having been exhumed from the grave.

I tried hiding behind the giant ornate granite edifice standing next to me—but the dead Loved One already had my number. I was fresh meat on the hoof and a meaty din-din on a plate as far at the dead Loved One was concerned.  

Somewhere along the shambling way the Loved One had shed its false teeth and the mere thought of being gummed to death by a dead man was simply too revolting for me to even think about for even one little second. 

The smell of the dead Loved One downwind was enough to gag a maggot, so to speak, and I could actually see busy moiling maggots wiggling away in the guy’s empty eye-sockets as he got closer. How the fuck could the dead man see without eyes, I asked myself desperately. He could smell me…

I was starting to get much too overly excited by the whole sick scene. My car was parked a short way over there by the Columbarium. And here I was starting to be stalked by a piece of Gothic Americana that didn’t know it was dead. Somehow it had uprooted itself from its grave six feet under and was laying its doom routine on me. Why?

Were the ancestral Kansas spirits displeased with me for some reason? Was it a sacrilege to have lunch in a cemetery in Emporia? The Loved Ones had come back like the Living Dead to enjoy the spoils of being alive again? Had something happened I didn’t know about—a Mayan Zombie Apocalypse or something? Or was it a tacky Memento mori reminder that all was not well for me—that I was doomed?

I got back to my car and rolled up the windows. I locked the doors and turned on the radio. A satellite had fallen to the earth into the Tyson meat packing plant—and contaminated with alien microbes and some kind of radiation all of Emporia. A deadly disease had been let loose—a plague of the most horrible dimensions.

Instead of killing people—it raised dead people from the dead. It was a reverse Memento mori situation in which the dead Loved Ones somehow remembered being alive and were being resurrected by some kind of death-defying virus with an evil dark mission—to destroy the stupid living human beings—and return the dead Loved Ones back to power again.

I was safe in my car—thank goodness it wasn’t a convertible. But then I couldn’t find my keys. I must have dropped them in my haste to get my ass outta there. So what could I do but just sit there—waiting for the Living Dead creature to shamble its way to get me. My cellphone went dead. What bad luck.

Then the living dead Loved One Creep found my car. He leaned toward me and leered through the window. He was literally falling apart right before my eyes. One side of his ugly puss was already sliding down the side of his face—oozing its way toward the gravel roadway. He pawed the window desperately trying to get in.

I called him “Mr. Joyboy” because of the grim gothic grotesque death-grin on his stupid decrepit decaying face. He was leering at me and trying to gum me to death through the window that’s for sure. It was simply awfully pitiful but still horrible and disgusting at the same time. 

There was No Escape from Maplewood Cemetery!!! I was stuck and it was beginning to get dark. I felt utterly violated and profaned—like poor innocent Aimee Thanatogenos in “The Loved One” (1965). Ending up in the foul perverted clutches of “Whispering Glades” Jonathan Winters—playing the jaded sex-crazed Reverend Wilbur Glenworthy. 

Not that “Joyboy” was capable of getting any kind of  obscene “boner” to violate and ravish me with—but rather the dead Loved One was slowly turning into a pile of old bones right before my eyes. 

I was no lover of Mother Nature—not if she could come up with such a horrible thing as a Living Dead Loved One like him. Even if that Living Dead thing had once been a living breathing breeding dearly beloved Emporia denizen from way back whenever. 

Now is what counted—and it wasn’t very pretty being pawed at through my window by whatever it was. These newly resurrected Living Dead Loved Ones were surely aesthetically and spiritually the ugliest things in the world—obscene disgusting weird foreigners from some other dehumanized and lost Dead Land. 

Wherever they came from—they were hungry and starved carnivores and blood-thirsty man-eaters who craved living meat. And I was definitely on the menu.

Could it be that these Living Dead creatures—were the result and manifestation of modern day’s various sinful perversions and decadent culture? That we’d frustrated the processes of nature—and queered the human existence as we once knew it on Earth?

The perversion of man had infected death itself—so that we’d ended up de-evolutionarily degraded and shamelessly “all too human” for our own good?  We were suffering from complete and utter spiritual bankruptcy—as well as horrible degrading aesthetic poverty?

The Living had always enjoyed a certain vicarious intimacy with death by ignoring it—the kind of thing to be expected in the world as we know it today.

We’d removed ourselves from any sense of physical death—by using Funeral Parlor words like “inhumement, entombment, inurnment, immurement and insarcophasgusment.” 

Forest Lawn, Maplewood Cemetery and Whispering Glades—had become places for happy deceased Loved Ones sleeping comfortably away in waterproof bronze and steel coffins. With TV remote cameras installed—to catch the still life-like smiles of the now dead Loved Ones on Xmas and holidays.

But there was also a monstrous Living Dead Thing—lurking somewhere among the marble draperies and quartered escutcheons of the tombs…….

And then I realized it was me—I was the one waiting in the wings. Waiting for the inevitable Maplewood, Forest Lawn, Whispering Glade denouement of what I was, what I’d been and what I’d never ever be again.

Here I was trapped in my beat-up dreary old Camero—by nightfall I was now surrounded by dozens of dearly Beloved Dead Zombies pawing at my car to get a taste of me.

Most of them were old withering retirees and retired burnt-out denizens of Emporia. Especially the old Living Dead widows who’d lived to be 100—and could barely hobble down through the graveyard paths. 

“But wait!” I said to myself finally. 

“Why should I wait and postpone the inevitable dearly beloved Loved One Ending any longer?” 

“Why wait until I’m old and withered and so decrepit that I can’t have fun stalking the Living and freaking them out? All those stupid Human Beings still alive?”

So I unlocked the car door and they dragged me out. Pretty soon they’d gummed me to death pretty good—so that I too was now one of the Living Dead. 

It wasn’t so bad after all—I had the whole night to be have fun and stalk the streets of Emporia. I knew just the ones I wanted to eat—just the right succulent ones that knew their time was up. Sensing they were mine. 

All mine—to have, too hold and to hungrily eat like a nice tasty juicy filet mignon!!!