Night of the Living Dead

I really love these old movie posters that seem to specialize in tautology. How can any night in which corpses reanimate and roam the land in search of human brains not "pi[t] the dead against the living in a struggle for survival"? Do the two parties ever sit down to a genial conversation about rococo and sip at their nippits? Do they exchange beauty tips? Watches? Play golf?

Overall this is a good zombie movie and a fair ordinary movie, by which I mean that all zombie movies work in an anagogical no-man's-land, gasping their way toward some ambivalent moral truth between the pockets of logical empty space and the great, heaving hiccups of afterlife mythologies. They are the pitiable but infuriating retarded child who brings you a crayon likeness of yourself in radiant greens and yellows riding a chariot of suns into the ocean, but then rams your crotch with his greasy little head, transforming the entire benign sentiment into a spectacle both publicly awkward and personally painful.

As the genre's architect, Night of the Living Dead sets a pretty high standard, given the inherent limitations of a metier founded on the principle that dead things must be killed. (Does this constraint not violate the Law of Non-Contradiction?) But it also introduces a fundamental zombie flaw that can be overcome only by gently massaging the zombie mold into something more ambiguously human, like an infected, not dead, person. (See 28 Days Later.) This problem is as follows:

Zombies are uncoordinated, brianless thugs, hence their project to acquire human brains and use them to their gustatory and cranial advantages. However, as our hero points out, they're slow as hell and we can outrun them. So if we can diffuse the threat simply by jogging past it, why do we decide instead to make one last stand in the indefensible house surrounded by zombies? This Taoist mystery can never be solved, because its riddlers inhabit the guts of the recently redeceased. As always, when the Oriental sages pose a paradox, I want to hear its opposing concepts reconciled.

Where is your yin, deplorable zombie yang? Oh, what the hell, I like you anyway; you're good people-eating people.