Birth of the Living Dead - Die Dokumentation

A slightly more ambitious making-of documentary recapitulating how a group of amateurs shot one of the first intentionally socially critical horror movies on a farm outside of Pittsburgh. Instead of behind-the-scenes photos and videos, the talking heads, shots from the completed film and news footage are complemented with comic-bookishly stylised animation that reinforces the guerrilla nature of the production at the time. A larger part of the documentary comprises a shot-by-shot breakdown of the film, particularly from sociological perspectives. The significance of the plot’s racial aspect is overstated, especially in light of the oft-repeated fact that the screenplay originally did not call for a black actor in the lead role. On the other hand, only a few sentences are dedicated to the raw style of the film, whose use of documentary aesthetics was one of the defining characteristics of the work done by the period’s rising generation of directorial rebels. The makers of this documentary nonsensically see the legacy of Night of the Living Dead in perhaps every American action movie of the 1970s, while ignoring the film’s more essential influence on horror titles not only in the United States, but also in Spain and Italy. For a sufficiently critical viewer who refuses to accept this misleading enthusiast perspective (films shot on location with strong black characters were definitely made earlier; see, for example, Shadows), Birth of the Living Dead can still be a satisfactory mapping of a singular phenomenon, despite the reservations detailed above. Let’s hope that it will also be the last such mapping, because there are many more films made in the US at the end of the 1960s that deserve an equally thorough media autopsy. 70% (08.08.2014)