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This chapter introduces the central notion that Mexico and Mexicanness are constructs, shaped and performed through multiple modes for interfacing nationalist and tourist agendas. Establishing the focus on two specific practices, the Dance of the Old Men and Night of the Dead, from islands on Lake Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, discussion centers on ways in which both were appropriated for, and deployed as efficacious, iconic embodiments and referents of Mexico and Mexicanness from the postrevolutionary era of the 1920s to the present day. Issues concerning designations of indigenousness and folklorico, and the ideological movement of indigenismo are introduced, particularly relating to the P'urhépecha peoples. The term performism is coined to frame the discussion, engaging with the broadest conceptual understandings of performance, performing, and performativity, with the aim of drawing attention to the multiple cohering and cumulative political, ideological, epistemological, and aesthetic ideas, processes, actions, and strategies.

This chapter discusses films inspired by internal conflicts in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s, as divisions between young and old, black and white, and left and right became increasingly polarised. This can be seen as the period of Hollywood modernism, in which a series of films and filmmakers displayed the influence of the international art cinema. It can also been seen as one in which Hollywood cinema incorporated other cinemas, containing their threat by absorbing that which was threatening. In political terms, this can also be seen as both an era of political radicalism in which a whole series of aspects of American culture and society were criticised and as one of conservatism in which there was an attack on the claims and gains made by the left. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing Night of the Living Dead’ (1968) by Kevin Heffernan, which uses the film to open up a series of issues about distribution in the late 1960s.

This chapter examines George A. Romero's traditions as a filmmaker. Romero was hailed as the director of Night of the Living Dead (1968), a film popularly associated with initiating the gore and special effects syndrome affecting contemporary horror films such as Scream (1997) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1998). However, the name of George A. Romero really owes much to that relatively brief moment of independent commercial cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. The era saw the emergence of a renaissance in the American horror film characterized by significant works by directors Larry Cohen, Wes Craven, Brian De Palma and Tobe Hooper, which promised revitalization of the Hollywood film industry. This chapter considers literary naturalism and its association with Emile Zola's literary and theoretical explorations, along with the portrayal of zombies in cinema and how the methods used by human survivors in Romero's films differ from those within naturalistic novels. It also discusses Romero's comic book style, especially that relating to 1950s EC Comics.

This chapter scrutinizes the structure of George Romero’s Living Dead films in light of Friedrich Nietzsche’s distinction between passive and active nihilism. The films analysed include Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead. It is argued that in this series there is a progressively building ambiguity in Romero’s attitude toward the passive forces of the zombie invasion and the active efforts of the human survivors. Initially, Romero’s sympathy seems to be with the humans; especially with minorities, women and the disabled. Yet as the films progress, sympathy shifts toward the undead, who are increasingly depicted as targets of human cruelty and abuse. What begins as a nightmare of nihilistic passivity eventually ends with a nightmarish scenario of nihilistic activity, exposing the awful potential of human power unleashed from moral constraint.

This chapter assesses the emergence of American independent horror, looking at George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). By the mid-1960s, the traditional Hollywood studio system was responsible for only around 20 per cent of America's film production. The remainder came from independent film-makers and from films made outside of the United States, where labour and locations were cheaper. The 'New Wave' movements in countries such as Japan, France, Britain, and Czechoslovakia introduced new styles of film-making to American cinemagoers, who found them an attractive alternative to the classical Hollywood feature film. As such, the late 1960s saw enormous changes in American cinema, including within the horror genre. Influenced by social, political and cultural upheavals occurring in the country at the time, 1968 is often cited as the dawn of the 'modern American horror film'. The chapter considers how political and social turmoil in America led to a growing number of independent film-makers actively working against the industry establishment, taking advantage of the heavily diminished influence of the major studios, and producing films which rejected Hollywood conservatism and deliberately pushed the boundaries of acceptability.

George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) depicts the futile attempts of a group of people to survive a zombie outbreak by barricading themselves in a farm house. Romero’s film introduced the modern horror zombie, a reanimated, rotting corpse that feeds on the living, travels in hordes, and is contagious. This chapter argues that Romero’s implausible monster is highly effective because it triggers defensive adaptations in human evolutionary psychology, especially adaptations to predators and contagious substances. The zombie’s counterintuitive aspect, its undeath, makes it especially salient. Romero used the figure to probe human reactions to disaster and to paint a vivid picture of the inevitability of conflict and defeat, especially in terms of social, psychological, and organic breakdown. It resonated especially with disillusioned moviegoers at the time of its release, but the film’s monsters and themes continue to engage people because of their evolutionary salience.

The first digital 3d horror films are analysed along with the technologies used to photograph and exhibit them. The suitability of horror films for 3D and the enduring appeal they perennially hold in visual culture is discussed.

This chapter analyses how William Shakespeare's Macbeth offered Roman Polanski scope for a realisation of the evil inherent in the human conditioning its setting of eleventh-century Scotland and the story of feuding, warlike tribes. It explores Polanski's idea of the underlying desire for power in the human condition that leads to evil in the film Macbeth by making extensive use of blood and gore. It also explains the sight of blood and gory effects that provide an unhealthy stimulus for the gratification of the coarser natures of the audience. The chapter mentions Mario Bava's Black Sunday (1960) and George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), which were introduced as a new type of horror that made full use of grisly effects. It reviews critical responses to the presence of violence in horror films that are dismissed as unaesthetic.

The home fallout shelter is an outsized presence in American culture around 1962 despite the fact that relatively few were actually built. There are a number of reasons this happened; the reason that dominated the imaginary around individual private shelters was the moral concern it raised. Like the family unit held together by strong atomic forces and unable to be split up without cataclysmic effects, the suburban house was imagined as self-contained and fortified, while able to be grouped effectively in larger clusters, a social agglomeration without the concomitant dangers of collective action or public space. The dissonance between a contained, feminized home shelter and a fortified, masculinized bunker recurs in fiction from the period and in fiction looking back through it. There was little space within the dominant nuclear imaginary for articulating contrarian thoughts; but we do find them in places where it was conventionally harder to take those thoughts seriously: in the frivolous behavior attributed to children and women, and in the frivolous spaces of containment where children and women were allowed to play at being serious grown-ups.