As the conversation escalates about what to do with “all these dead bodies” in a world with increasingly less space, one can’t help but look back on 1968’s Night of the Living Dead as a metaphor for how paying respect to the dead is a toll on the living. One that can end up costing a person their own life. In fact, it seems that a great many horror movies speak to the trope that all sources of pain stem from visiting a graveyard. For, despite wanting to “honor” the dead by going to a cemetery, it appears as though the dead want the space all to themselves, hence constantly haunting or outright attacking anyone who infiltrates it.
In George A. Romero’s seminal film, that “source of all pain” for the living is how the film immediately starts out, with Barbra (Judith O’Dea), the ultimate useless white woman, and her brother, Johnny (Russell Streiner), visiting their father’s grave in rural Pennsylvania—much to Johnny’s dismay. Especially since they drove three hours all the way from Pittsburgh to do it. Romero’s slow build to their drive into the cemetery is punctuated not only by the eerie Spencer Moore theme (“Driveway to the Cemetery”), but by the presence of an American flag whipping in the wind as Barbra and Johnny approach the site, where the burden of visiting a father they never really knew hangs heavy. That American flag waving over a dead body (buried beneath the headstone), at that time, serves an undeniable semiotic importance to spotlighting the bodies that kept coming back from Vietnam. This creating a larger, undercutting social commentary about how bodies become particularly immaterial when they’re racking up—treated so disposably—no matter how much people (read: the government) try to “respect” them by putting them in an “appropriate” environment and then essentially “worshiping” them. Or rather, their memory.
To the point of the Vietnam War infecting horror movie commentary during this period, Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, is also rife with Vietnam-oriented political symbolism. And yes, it also opens with a cemetery scene wherein the bodies have been desecrated. Hung up and fashioned into a grisly “corpse sculpture.” The horror that visits Barbra and Johnny while they visit the cemetery is, let’s say, slightly more subtle. With that first zombie appearing “harmless” enough…until he isn’t. It only adds to Johnny’s staunch belief that he’d rather be anywhere else than a spook show of a joint like this. Indeed, the moment they park, Johnny is already complaining to Barbra, telling her, “You think I wanna blow Sunday on a scene like this?” Ah, such 60s parlance to call a cemetery a “scene.” And yet, that’s precisely what it is. A manufactured “comfort” for the dead that’s supposed to benefit the living in that they can continue to “pay their respects” to those they’ve lost when, in reality, it becomes a cross to bear to keep visiting the cemetery regularly (especially if you’re not a kook or a spook who feels naturally at home there). Or as regularly as the distance will allow—as mentioned, Johnny is also sure to bring up how fucking far it is to get there.
Johnny’s cynicism about being at the cemetery (only obliging the task on behalf of his mother) persists when he mocks the ceremonial arrangement they brought along to place on the grave, reading the words on it that say, “We still remember.” He balks, turning to Barbra to assert, “I don’t. You know, I don’t even remember what the man looked like.” This blunt admission, which of course scandalizes Barbra, raises the question about how, if someone in your life dies when you’re so young and can’t even remember them (unless you’re Madonna losing her mother at five), is it a matter of genuine sentiment or forced duty to visit their gravesite? Barbra is convinced that it is the latter, devoted to the concept that the one thing that truly separates humans from animals is their ability to mourn the dead, to “show reverence” for those who came before them, those without whom they wouldn’t be here today. Johnny, on the other hand, displays total contempt for the entire frivolous practice of mourning. Of how death has become yet another racket through which opportunists can delight in their hungry capitalistic tendencies.
So it is that Johnny notes to Barbra, after placing down the cross-shaped memento with flowers on it, “Each year we spend good money on these things. We come out here, and the one from last year is gone.” Barbra, too naive and pure to buy into what he’s saying, replies, “Well, the flowers die, And the caretaker or somebody takes them away.” Johnny ripostes, “Yeah, a little spit and polish, he can clean this up, sell it next year. Wonder how many times we bought the same one?”
His general scoffing about this entire “visiting the grave” ordeal is something that, in the past, would have been considered disrespectful, but, more and more, it seems as though Johnny was ahead of his time in branding the entire practice of mourning the dead (and the according existence of cemeteries) as totally bogus. Not just because there are so many other less involved, less invasive (literally) to the living ways to honor the dead, but because the entire “death industry” has so patently become about squeezing as much money as possible out of people. Not about providing them with services and “accommodations” designed to furnish them with the most “emotional support” and consolation possible.
And yet, as Johnny has no trouble pronouncing, there is nothing consoling about this arduous, often creepy process. Barbra might not have agreed from the outset of their visit, but by the time she sees her brother die at the hands of a flesh-eating zombie (knocking Johnny down so that his head hits a gravestone), she’s undoubtedly converted to the camp that believes no good can come of cemeteries (most notably thanks to climate change increasing the flooding of such locations that will turn Mother Nature into an unwitting “grave robber,” digging bodies up arbitrarily).
Considering that, if Johnny and Barbra hadn’t bothered “paying their respects,” they might have both ended up surviving the ephemeral zombie apocalypse that took hold of the nation after, apparently, some radiation fallout (more social commentary on Romero’s part), Johnny was certainly vindicated from the beginning about not wanting to blow his Sunday on a scene like this.
