George Romero is a filmmaker whose most famous zombie films are Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead; yet there were some other movies made by him in 1970s. Even so, Romero wrote and/or directed five non-zombie films from 1968 through to 1978 including romantic comedy. However, this still was largely in horror, with Martin among those that you would hear about more than others for good reason. Out of only three Romero movies I have watched so far, Martin is the one that held my attention better than anything else. This character study/vampire movie messes with our heads by placing us fully inside his head as he kills people and may be himself an actual monster or whatever you want to call it.
Running Overnight Train from Indianapolis to Pittsburgh. On the train, Martin sneaks into the bedroom of a female passenger and uses a syringe filled with narcotics to make her unconscious. From then on, it is all about rape and bleeding her wrist for blood that he drinks as it flows out. Getting off at his station without being spotted, he meets up with his elderly cousin Tateh Cuda at once. Cuda’s house is where Martin moves into an unoccupied room with Tatia who is his niece.
Cuda is someone who believes in old myths of motherland regarding Lithuania as well as calls Martin “Nosferatu”. He then went on to fix a bell above Martin’s door so that each time it opens; he knows when this young man starts moving around. To some extent, Martin also thinks that he is a vampire and usually sees visions of previous life in black & white which may be memories or simply dreams. As the hunger increases, controlling himself becomes more difficult for him; soon he’ll have to feed again soon enough.
Even though the zombie movies are scary, they weren’t as disturbing to me as Martin was. In fact, Romero has crafted a movie that tries to make the audience empathize with an incredibly terrible person and it succeeds. I mean his plans seem amateurish or at least he is always coming up against bad luck- he cannot be a vampire but an extremely unstable human being. An extended set piece at one victim’s home brings Martin into contact with information that he had no access to which could ruin everything for him when it comes to feeding. The tension I felt was not about the victims but for Martin in fact it did an excellent job of staying centered on his perspective for the most part.
I think Romero does well folding ancient horrors & fears into contemporary urban settings. For instance, Dawn of the Dead is a critique of consumerism set in a mall. Martin tells the story of a young man who suffers from intergenerational trauma in which his mental health is ignored by everyone living around him.
Martin is not regarded as a person by the old women who scream obscenities at him while he is at work in Cuda’s market; they treat him like a punching bag. Just Christina, Cuda’s granddaughter and Abbie, one of the customers from the market where Martin works, are sympathetic towards him in any way. I get moved by this movie to feel sympathy for Martin to some extent, but still I worry for those women because I am aware that Martin is hungry and would drink their blood if he could get the chance.
I recalled the movie The Transfiguration 2017 which is about black teenager Milo who thinks he is a vampire actively killing and drinking blood of people around him. Like Martin, Milo has this very intense internalized belief system about himself and how he goes about it. There’s another character who acts to support him as well, the girl character. In both movies, their eventual fate comes suddenly and at a point when they have started to accept their twisted natures. I would bet that there was some part of Michael O’Shea, the writer-director of The Transfiguration, that was at least slightly influenced by Romero’s Martin.
We see this through the low budget and varying degrees of performance by actors but in general Martin drips with urban decay that drew me to The Transfiguration. This is Pittsburgh where the United States was disintegrating due to banks’ greed resulting in issuing bonds for cities so that they can continue functioning.
Take a look at the recent Times Square, before Giuliani’s Disney-ification of it exactly like in other Eastern United States cities where this forced decay of neighborhoods resulted in crime.
Again, today we observe the same decay as fentanyl sweeps through our communities with police once again playing dumb despite being granted record budgets. Such institutions are far more threatening than lone psychopaths such as Martin who can only harm specific people; they have immense power and can destroy whole communities. This might be why someone as pathetic as Martin elicits a tiny bit of sympathy from us; he is nothing compared to the vast extent of things. How could I then fear vampires after observing my country spend billions of dollars bombing people in hospitals on another continent? The final part shows how easy it is to take Martin out of the story. But fixing what’s really wrong with this world? That will take something more than sticking a wooden stake into its heart.”
Martin is a sad man in his heart. Romero can see how sad the world can be. Although I have seen a lot of horror movies, the one that remains etched in my mind is Night where a young girl bitten by zombies ends up killing her own mother. Furthermore, what are the odds of building something reasonable in Day of the Dead? Martin’s character cannot escape from sorrow, just like many other characters do in Romero’s works. I think that Romero’s movies gave rise to a post-modern sub-genre of horror that was linked to the despair of America during and after World War II. However, it is grimmer than H.P Lovecraft because there exist spirits having great influence somewhere else. Unlike our society where everything appears normal but underlies chaos such as revealed by Tobe Hooper’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” film, humans alone are left to rule themselves like smart monkeys without any God; hence, nothing could get more horrifying than that!
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