When we lost George Romero back in July it only helped to underline this year’s 50th anniversary celebration for the writer/director’s masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead. It’s still two months until Halloween, but I keep feeling like I want to jump-start the creepy cinema season. I’ll be seeing the IT preview this week so maybe I’ll just go with the fright flow and share this dead-eyed diamond. The movie’s Wiki page includes a hilarious “Controversy” section that includes some amazing quotes from Roger Ebert…

Night of the Living Dead premiered on October 1, 1968 at the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh.[47] Nationally, it was shown as a Saturday afternoon matinée – as was typical for horror films at the time – and attracted an audience consisting of pre-teens and adolescents.[48][49] The MPAA film rating system was not in place until November 1968, so even young children were able to purchase tickets. Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times chided theater owners and parents who allowed children access to the film with such potent content for a horror film they were entirely unprepared for: “I don’t think the younger kids really knew what hit them,” he said. “They were used to going to movies, sure, and they’d seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else.” According to Ebert, the film affected the audience immediately:[49]

The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying… It’s hard to remember what sort of effect this movie might have had on you when you were six or seven. But try to remember. At that age, kids take the events on the screen seriously, and they identify fiercely with the hero. When the hero is killed, that’s not an unhappy ending but a tragic one: Nobody got out alive. It’s just over, that’s all.

Response from Variety after the initial release reflects the outrage generated by Romero’s film: “Until the Supreme Court establishes clear-cut guidelines for the pornography of violence, Night of the Living Dead will serve nicely as an outer-limit definition by example. In [a] mere 90 minutes this horror film (pun intended) casts serious aspersions on the integrity and social responsibility of its Pittsburgh-based makers, distributor Walter Reade, the film industry as a whole and [exhibitors] who book [the picture], as well as raising doubts about the future of the regional cinema movement and about the moral health of film goers who cheerfully opt for this unrelieved orgy of sadism…50″[]

One commentator asserts that the film garnered little attention from critics, “except to provoke argument about censoring its grisly scenes

Night of the Living Dead famously became a public domain film when a copyright stamp was left off the film’s prints. You can find it anywhere you look online. Here’s the movie at my YouTube channel. Watch the movie below, and connect at the links at the bottom of the post.

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Looking back three decades to 1987, this is the perfect time to remember that Supreme Court case that saw televangelist conman Jerry Falwell clashing with that sleaze slinging champion of the First Amendment, Larry Flynt. This case wasn’t really about obscenity, it was about libel laws, and the protections afforded to parody. In the age of Trump, Twitter and SNL this is an important anniversary of a fascinating case that reminds us that jokes aren’t against the law, and that offensive messages must always be protected if the voices of progress are to remain free…

While Hustler magazine has always been known for its explicit pictures of nude women and for what many consider crude humor,[2] the prominent fundamentalist Protestant minister Jerry Falwell objected to the parody ad the magazine printed in 1983 targeted at him, in which Falwell related having an incestuous encounter with his mother in an outhouse.[3]

The satire at issue was a takeoff of an advertising campaign for Campari, an Italian apéritif.[4] The real ads were tongue-in-cheek interviews with celebrities talking about their “first time”.[5] The ads, which played off the double entendre in the headline (“X talks about his first time”), initially appeared to discuss the star’s first sexual experience before revealing that the discussion actually concerned the subject’s first time drinking Campari.

The Hustler parody, created by writer Terry Abrahamson and art director Mike Salisbury,[6] featured a picture of Falwell, and a fictional “interview” in which “Falwell” describes his first sexual experience as occurring “with Mom” in an outhouse while both were “drunk off our God-fearing asses on Campari.”[7] In the spoof interview, “Falwell” goes on to say that he was so intoxicated that “Mom looked better than a Baptist whore with a $100 donation,” that he decided to have sex with his mother since she had “showed all the other guys in town such a good time”, and that they had intercourse regularly afterwards.[8] Finally, when asked if he had tried Campari since, “Falwell” answered, “I always get sloshed before I go out to the pulpit. You don’t think I could lay down all that bullshit sober, do you?” The ad carried a disclaimer in small print at the bottom of the page, reading “ad parody—not to be taken seriously.”[9] The magazine’s table of contents also listed the ad as “Fiction; Ad and Personality Parody.”[10]

Falwell sued Larry Flynt, Hustler magazine, and Flynt’s distribution company in the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia for libel, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.[11] Before trial, the court granted Flynt’s motion for summary judgment on the invasion of privacy claim, and the remaining two charges proceeded to trial. A jury found in favor of Flynt on the libel claim, stating that the parody could not “reasonably be understood as describing actual facts about [Falwell] or actual events in which [he] participated.”[12] On the claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress, the jury ruled in favor of Falwell and awarded him $150,000 in damages.[12]

Read more about the case in this description of this YouTube video: hilarious footage featuring Flynt and Falwell arriving at the court and pleading their cases to the press…

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