“You’ve seen news reports and documentary material dealing with the plight of the elderly. We will not repeat what you have heard. The amusement park which you are about to visit illustrates some of the many problems people of my age face on a daily basis. We intend for you to feel the problem, to experience it, and we ask for you sympathy as you watch. And when the film ends we hope you will have the concerned interest to take action.”
These words are spoken by veteran actor Lincoln Maazel as part of a lengthy and direct address to the audience which opens The Amusement Park, the supposedly “lost” horror film from the late pioneer of the genre George A. Romero which was finally made available earlier this year. Although lost may be a bit of a misnomer, and horror film may be a bit questionable; the film was actually shelved by the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania who originally commissioned the young director (barely a decade out from helming Night of the Living Dead) to produce the film for them as part of a campaign to bring awareness to the mistreatment of elders. The protracted monologue Maazel delivers, preaching how the “oldest citizens of this world represent a much misused natural resource,” isn’t so much an artist’s statement on the behalf of Romero as it is the message upholding the very production of the film. Pound for pound, The Amusement Park was conceived, shot, and originally exhibited as a moralizing educational film and was perceived by Romero as little more than a paycheck even up to its rediscovery in 2017.
You would not realize the director’s dismissive attitude towards the project or the origins as a commissioned educational film, however, if you were paying attention to the coverage and promotion of the newly discovered Romero film. Obtained by Shudder with exclusive streaming rights from the George A. Romero Foundation, the rollout of The Amusement Park and the shape of its subsequent discourse has effectively reframed the once earnest teaching aid into some kind of forgotten masterstroke from the horror icon. In many cases, the film’s original educational merit was rarely if ever discussed in favour of reaffirming its genre as a “psychological thriller.” Despite the intent of its production to spread awareness of the rampant mistreatment of the aged in contemporary society, the interesting reclamation of Romero’s forgotten commission work under the auspices of genre fandom raises the interesting question: do we as the audience even care if it is at all effective in its original pedagogical mission?
The rediscovery of educational/instructional/propaganda films within the arena of popular culture often results in these films’ morals being discounted, usually as comically ineffectual in hindsight. Think of Louis J. Gasnier’s Reefer Madness (1936) and its hyperbolic moralistic hand wringing over the inventive side-effects of smoking marijuana and how it was embraced by pot smokers decades after the fact when it was rediscovered in the 1970s. Or Anthony Rizzo’s Duck and Cover (1952) and how when viewed in the contemporary period it crystallizes the hysteria surrounding cold war fear-mongering instead of providing any actual benefit of protecting yourself from nuclear destruction. Even the Red Asphalt instructional series (1964-2006), produced by the California Highway Patrol, and their almost gleeful parade of graphic car accidents have been reconstituted as Faces of Death style entertainment after they screened outside of the confines of a driving school classroom. In all such cases, the effectiveness of delivering its message is placed on the proverbial backburner while new entries into appreciating these cultural artifacts are found.
Of course one could see why reclaiming The Amusement Park as a forward facing horror film over an educational film found such easy reception. Unlike most of these forgotten pedagogical pieces, Romero’s signature direction shines through the lecture and the central metaphor of a twisted Amusement Park used as a standin for the elderly experience where every ride and attraction seems to cruelly remind him of his age. The manner in which bodies constantly shuffle by the camera and fill the foreground claustrophobically in front of Maazal is not dissimilar to how Romero handled the hordes of the undead in his various zombie films. And how he directs emphasis with his sharp and abrupt edits between the horrified visage of Maazel and whatever surreal mistreatment of his fellow elderly is heavily reminiscent of jumpscares meant to overwhelm the audience. For an educational film, much of Romero’s eccentric style — paired with Bill Hinzman’s unsettling cinematography — feels targeted to disorient the audience with its surreal digressions and visual flair.
Moreover, Romero’s filmography and the often blunt interpretations of the society in which they are produced has proven him as an inherently didactic director. A reason The Amusement Park has been so easily accepted as an entry in the director’s genre oeuvre is that Romero has always been forceful with his message. You don’t need to apply hefty analysis to Dawn of the Dead (1978) to see the critical stance he takes towards the rampant consumerism of the late 1970s when it heavily features mindless ghouls mobbing an abandoned mall. An attuned critical eye is not necessary to see how Romero weaves a critique of post-9/11 classism around Land of the Dead (2005), a post-apocalyptic vision of a Pittsburgh where the affluent squirrel away in a luxury hotel stronghold while the rest live in precarity among the shuffling undead. Throughout his career, Romero has never been subtle with the interpretation meant to be taken away with.
Yet, looking past how his film has been fully embraced as a psychological horror at its recent rediscovery, I think it is still important — or at the very least worthy of inquiry — to take Romero’s film at the original purpose behind its creation. While there is not a single way to evaluate a film (even when its production was underlined by an explicit intent) in all of the review coverage and discourse surrounding the much hyped The Amusement Park, whether or not its form of pedagogy was effective was rarely if ever brought up. Focusing instead on the film’s sinister vibes and its surreal imagery to create terror and unsettle its audience, the discussion over Romero’s unreleased film rarely touched on if today’s audience rediscovering would be walking away with a new found empathy for the elderly. Considering the Lutheran Society that commissioned the film shelved it pretty quickly after using it as a teaching tool only briefly, can we infer that Romero’s lost film was in some regard a misfire?
Befitting the in-your-face didacticism featured in the rest of Romero’s filmography, The Amusement Park lays it on thick, so to speak, with its concept. The titular park serves a microcosm of how larger society treats the eldery wherein every ride, event, and confrontation experienced by the sharply dressed Maazel within its confines is meant to be a not-too-subtle metaphor for the day-to-day trials of the aged. Maazel drifts from one attraction to the next, only to be bluntly confronted with a disparity in treatment between people of his age bracket and the more youthful guests who are given free-reign of the park. What little subversion there is in the fanciful idea of a place of joy being presented as a place of horrors decidedly runs out of steam even across the brief 54-minute runtime of Romero’s film due to how forcibly the point is hammered down.
And speaking of these attractions masquerading as metaphors for elder abuse, the execution of the central concept tends to be so contrived as to border on the comical, strange, and confusing instead of the educational. A purely didactic approach designed to guide the audience through the eccentricity of the idea and come away with the message would lean on the proven (if basic and uninspired) tools of educational filmmaking. The omnipotent narrator enforcing the moral with every new scene, the implementation of real-world statistics and examples pertaining to the mistreatment of the elderly, a direct address to the audience to implicate them in the importance of the message. These obviously make for some truly sterile and bland filmmaking which would never be able to match the style and intrigue of Romero’s final product with its constant sense of experimentation, but we could assume at the very least it would get the lesson across without diluting for the sake of presentation.
Take when Maazel goes for a spin on the bumper cars, for example. After a long queue where the elderly patrons are forced to prove they are in good health and have valid driver’s license to participate, there is an “accident” when a younger driver collides with an elderly woman as Maazel looks on. The police arrive and wind up arresting the elderly driver as it is assumed the more youthful driver is less accident prone and more in charge of their faculties than someone older. The lesson gets across…except when you remember they were in bumper cars and hitting others is the primary objective of the attraction, muddying the intent due to the central metaphor.
In another scene, Maazel and other elderly park-goers are shepherded into an attraction specifically for them, a “Haunted House.” The inside turns out to be a medical fitness center where bored looking geezers do rudimentary exercises (which are probably very important to maintain their health). Romero shoots this scene frantically with Maazel’s visage twisted into a horrific grimace rapidly intercut with disorienting close-ups of workout equipment and elderly bodies stretching and bending, and the effect is rather funny. The forcefulness behind the direction to frame something so benign (and likely beneficial!) as exercise as terror-inducing wraps around and has the opposite effect of inducing laughter. The intent of the scene is clear due to Romero’s abilities to foreground the film’s moral, but filtering it through his misplaced sensibilities as a horror director dulls the effectiveness.
At times, the whole amusement park concept seems to be left to the wayside entirely. In one scene, Maazel is seen struggling to carry a bag of groceries while other patrons are shown to have no issue. In another, a predatory salesmen hocks scam home renovations while another salesmen wanders through the crowd and pickpockets the elderly in the crowd. At one point, Maazel is just randomly and mercilessly beaten by a Romero signature: a roaming gang of leather-clad bikers. Again, we understand the intent behind these segments and how they confer the didactic theme of the film and could inspire greater empathy for the elderly, but something feels off in the presentation. The manner in which the structure seems to skate from one idea to the next while the central concept becomes less and less important to them is unfortunate.
One can see why there was a rush to accept The Amusement Park as a forgotten horror film instead of a forgotten educational film because at the end of the day, it works much better as a surreal piece designed to unsettle with its strangeness than a proper lesson in elder abuse. The slapdash attitude Romero expressed toward it before his passing as little more than a paycheck shines through if we take it at face value as a serious film extolling a serious lesson, but of course we do not have to. This piece was just an exercise to open up an angle of evaluation for the film that was primarily lost when it reached a mass audience that, by all accounts, it was never meant to when the film was first conceived. As much as anyone can judge it by this metric, it is a bad educational film. But it’s undoubtedly a Romero film — and for that, it proves to be a greater curiosity than its utility would have you believe. The true draw is not whether it can teach you to have empathy for the aged members of society, but that it exists at all and at such a ready availability today where once it languished in storage because it wasn’t educational enough.
