2 Movies

Night of the Living Dead is often hailed as one of the most influential horror movies. The film starts off with a brother and sister visiting their fathers grave. The atmosphere in the beginning is unnerving to begin with because they’re in a graveyard and theirs loud thunder in the background.  Also, there’s this eerie obnoxiously loud soundtrack that plays in action scenes like when a character is running away or being attacked. As the pair are headed to their car this man, which we later find out is a zombie, attacks them.

The sister manages to get away and reaches a farm house and locks herself in. She is then joined by an African American man who works diligently to barricade the house. Later on, they discover that there are other individuals who were hiding in the basement and they must all try to survive this, unknown to them, zombie attack while overcoming conflict amongst each other. The transition between scenes in this film were pretty bad. They literally just cut from one scene to the next. Also, whenever the African American guy was beating or killing one of the zombies they never actually showed the full scene. They would just show a closeup of his face and upper body with the sound effects.

The next movie, What We Do in the Shadows, is a comedic masterpiece. Within the first five minutes of the movie I was already laughing. This movie is about three vampires who are “flat mates” and are being followed around and recorded by a camera crew to show what the life of a vampire is like. It shows all the crazy and ridiculous situations that these three get into filmed in documentary style. The scene that I think was very effective and really took me aback is the scene where Viago brings the young woman back to the flat to drink her blood.

In that scene he states that drinking human blood is one of the “unfortunate” things about being a vampire. He then goes on to casually say that he likes to basically make his victims feel comfortable by playing nice music and giving them wine since its their last night alive. Afterwards, he proceeds to place newspapers under her feet as he’s asking her about herself and what she does. He then goes on to bite her neck and bright red blood just starts shooting out of it like a fountain. That short scene really impacted me.

I was able to feel two emotions at the same time. First, I felt sadness for the woman because she was describing how she wants to travel and was saving up to go to Spain and London and now she’s dead. Then I was laughing at how Viago was struggling to try to drink the blood from her neck. Then after all is said and done he states that the upside is that he thinks she had a good time which is dark and humorous at the same time.