The most frightening specter this week may not be the walking dead, but the living. We gather tonight with the Ashland Symposia in Ashland, Oregon, for a different kind of Halloween scare.
While many are re-watching Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, this evening turns to his once-shelved The Amusement Park (1975): a compact commission from the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania, originally intended as an educational film on aging, but Romero’s disturbing treatment led the sponsors to abort the project; the film was never released and remained shelved.
After the under-one-hour screening of this vintage, unsettling reel, we will discuss what lingers—dignity and neglect, public space and power, and the psychological split that allows a society to sustain narratives of might while dissociating from its own fragility.