Life and Death

To my eyes, these are both films about the very thin line between life and death.

In Romero's gloriously low-budget, brutally trimmed schlocker, there's no explanation of the source of the Zombie manifestation. Soldiers (ignorant, coarse, desperate) and scientists (flaky, egg-headed, nerdy) are trapped underground, harvesting Zombies occasionally from the surface for the boffins to experiment on, and fruitlessly speculate over. At one point, one of the Zombies, called "Bud", is essentially being trained to be human again, as if death, or un-death, is nothing worse than a very severe case of amnesiac learning difficulty.

The survivors at the desert-island finale, in terms of representing that which in living humanity might be worth sparing a munching (and Romero certainly threw a good proportion of his dollars at the fake-flesh and blood FX department), are a white female scientist, who alone has managed to engage with the slouchingly violent and sniggering soldiery, a black philosophizing Caribbean helicopter pilot, and an alcoholic Irish radio operator. The ethnic and sexual economy of all this is pretty two-dimensional, but Romero should get some credit for a radical re-scaling of human value.

Conversely, in the Ring, the abrupt and terrorised deaths of a variety of young Japanese are found to be the result of a century-and-a-half old curse visited by the daughter of an unjustly persecuted female psychic. The moral economics are similar but on the other side of the life/death divide. The long-dead "mad" woman (or scientist, as she might have been seen in the mid nineteenth century) holds the ethical burden of an un-avenged, un-remarked death (the suicide of her mother). I don't have the cultural focus to interpret the precisely Japanese significance of the mother's suicide on the daughter; however the character able to reach across the life/death border here is a dead young woman, trying to drag others back across with her.

In Romero, it is the Zombie "Bud", in shooting the deranged soldier, who travels in the opposite direction, trying to follow the human escapees.