It’s more than a little unusual to walk into a comic-book store and find that “Night of the Living Dead†has its own series, but it’s downright baffling to see that it includes a holiday issue. With three special covers, it’s pretty hard to miss – if you don’t care for the one with the zombie Santa heading for some unsuspecting family’s chimney, you can get the blood-spattered homage to Coca-Cola advertisements that shows Kris Kringle with a bottle sticking out of his eye socket. If you’re partial to the one with Mary and Joseph cannibalizing Jesus, you’re probably due for a talk with your inner child.
You can’t judge a comic by the lewdness of its cover, though. (Besides, the other two aren’t that bad.) What counts is how it approaches the material, and given how the film it’s based on took an absurd premise and found the urgency beneath, you can tell by all the colorful calamity that this isn’t one of those in-name-only retreads. Not far from the Pennsylvania farmhouse where the movie’s set, two couples spend Christmas Eve at a friend’s cabin in the woods, the kind of secluded place where heroes in horror stories always wind up when zombies are after them. Say what you will about the undead – they’re smart enough to travel in packs.
With both couples at a point where they don’t need mistletoe to start making out, the only one not getting any is Molly, who lets her sister in on the news that her husband wants a divorce. What she doesn’t let her in on, though, is how she reacted when she caught him with another woman, or where she buried the bodies after shooting them. Had she known radiation from space was about to bring the dead to life to eat the living, she might’ve picked someplace more remote than the barn next door.
All the bloodshed is appropriately satisfying, right down to the fate of the no-good widow who gets what’s coming to her. The real beauty, though, is in the atmospheric artwork, which makes everything look colorful and eerie at once. In that light, it shares a kinship with the source material, which took a brand of monsters who always looked campy and approached them in a way that made them more frightening.
Here, the zombies creep about with a pallor that makes the glow of the principal characters that much more attractive, giving the tone a spirit it wouldn’t have had otherwise. If you think about it, that actually makes the film even more impressive – it manages to do the same thing in black and white.
This article originally appeared on AllMediaNY.com
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