2014 Was the Year of the Living Dead

Is there is an astrologist who can show me the jagged map the stars and planets traversed this year so that we can all understand why it was so fucked up? I'll take anything, even a hokey astrology chart. For some, including myself, it could have been worse. For others it was the worst it could get. A lot of good things, foundations in our lives, folded abruptly and a lot of baffling injustices made any remaining faith in humanity brittle. It makes me think of George Romero's remarkable Night of the Living Dead.

I first saw it late one night in the early 2000s while still in high school. I lived in Penn Hills, a large suburb of Pittsburgh, next door to Monroeville where one of the nation's first malls still lives, where the follow-up to NOTLD, Dawn of the Dead, was filmed. NOTLD was also filmed in the then-rural areas East of the city in Allegheny and Westmorland counties. These were places pocked with lose towns populated by farmers, volunteer firefighters, coal miners, steel mill workers, and all of their mothers and who had last names that ended in -cci, -sky, and Gentile -ann. A UFO crashed in one of these towns in the early 60s, but that's another story.

I rediscovered NOTDL after stumbling upon the above video. If you haven't seem the movie yet, maybe you shouldn't sit down and watch it here, but it's still a pretty cool video. The user must have thought it was clever to couple the film with The Suburbs album's lyrical theme, I'm sure. I find it a little too obvious. The music doesn't match rhythmically with the movie, but at times it works in a disturbing, off way. At times, the deceptively upbeat and polished indie rock clashes a little too well impending doom on screen.

Yeah, if I could sum up NOTLD in one word, it'd be DOOM.

When I first saw my opportunity to see it back in the early 2000s, I assumed a gory zombie flick, a kitschy teen scream film that might have accepted it was bad at the time. I was surprised by how sophisticated the storytelling is and enthralled by its terrifying embers that explode in the last few minutes. It's GOOD. The film reveals what it's really about in its last moments, and it's like waking from a nightmare of magical mayhem into brutal, real life swathed in unforgiving sunlight.

I'm debating over whether I want to get into it with a spoiler or not. Okay, I'm not. I think you should just watch it and discuss.

So, what is Night of the Living Dead about? What or who is the real enemy in Night of the Living Dead? Will 2015 be the year of the Dawn of the Dead?