The Big Red One! Rural ramblings on The Living Dead at The Manchester Morgue.
In my last blog I rambled through the landscape of The Blood on Satan's Claw. This blog is more of the same I'm afraid, but on The Living Dead at The Manchester Morgue. It's not a horror film that is as widely appreciated as it should be. Ostensibly a zombie film, it is quite unlike any other I've seen (although I wouldn't call myself any sort of authority on the category). I never really took to the zombie film, perhaps with the exception of Victor Halperin's 1932 film, White Zombie.
Before Romero redefined the category, it was Halperin's film that set the standard and many of the conventions. Set in Haiti, the film foregrounds the plight of the black slaves; even in death they can never be released from servitude, they are resurrected as robotic cadavers to serve the white plantation owners. However there are delicious,ambiguous possibilities in Halperin's film (I won't explain them all here), specifically the possibility that Legrende's (Béla Lugosi's) motivation for helping Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer) is, at least, partly driven by his desire to possess Beaumont as his male concubine (I don't know if this term actually exists, but wikipedia assures me this can also be a concubinus, so take your pick) Check out the film yourself if you want to see how this is all played out. I don't think you'll be disappointed.
Jorge Grau’s The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (1974), is a film that owes more to Romero's reinvention of the category, but it sketches out some interesting connections between scientific intervention in nature and the phenomena of the undead. In a brief and wordless opening, we are introduced to George (Ray Lovelock), who seems to be some sort of art dealer, (although this is never clarified by the film). We see him carefully, perhaps reverently, place some form of spiritual/maternal figure, possibly a religious icon from a foreign culture onto a cabinet before he leaves on his ill-fated holiday. Although he is often initially acerbic, dismissive and casually sexist, his character matures as the horrific events unfold. Within the broader framework of the film he seems to be the last bastion of the mystic and the spiritual.
As he leaves on his bike, the film adopts a montage strategy, buses, cars and exhausts pump out toxins into the air.
The images unambiguously highlight the way modernity and pollution dominates the cityscape. The effect of this pollution are made starkly clear with a close-up of a dead sparrow.
While a number of the public are shown wearing surgical masks.
The film's attitude to urban life is made abundantly clear as they grey, grim shots of urban life are intercut with shots of a verdant natural landscape, although even here Grau's sounds a note of caution as we see litter beginning to contaminate this idyllic pasture. Within this city sequence a young woman, suddenly strips and runs across a busy road in an apparent act of spontaneous elation and a desire to escape this grim, grey, toxic society.
This act of joy is met with nothing but indifference by the other members of the populace, who look on, apparently zombified. Grau’s urban sprawl is filled with emotionless, joyless human-beings; the real horror is not located in the zombie ‘monsters’ these inhabitants mimic, it is located within our modern, infected society.
The film develops this dimension as George escapes the city into the countryside, yet even here he cannot evade the creeping tendrils of modernity and technology, which is ultimately responsible for creating the film’s ‘other’ zombies. The rural landscape and soil is mutated by human intervention in the form of a cumbersome red, technological monster
which has been developed by The Ministry of Agriculture to increase commercial profit for farmers; as so often in horror or science fiction films, the important point is not merely the presence of man-made technology, but the inability to control it, or fully foresee its implications and effects. Seek the film out if you can.
