The Amuse­ment Park

Ush­er­ing in a new Gold­en Age of hor­ror that would last through­out the fol­low­ing decade, George A Romero’s 1968 fea­ture debut Night of the Liv­ing Dead shift­ed the genre from the goth­ic cas­tle to America’s present-day back­roads, invent­ed the mod­ern zom­bie, and remained for many years the most prof­itable hor­ror film made out­side the stu­dio sys­tem, while becom­ing a sta­ple of the bur­geon­ing mid­night movie scene.

Romero had well and tru­ly arrived, and imme­di­ate­ly estab­lished him­self as an issues-led direc­tor whose hor­ror, for all its explic­it vio­lence and gore, offered a con­fronting reflec­tion of sociopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions (the civ­il rights move­ment, the Viet­nam War, the gen­er­a­tion gap) ripped from the head­lines of con­tem­po­rary America.

After 1971’s roman­tic dram­e­dy There’s Always Vanil­la and 1972’s genre-adja­cent fem­i­nist char­ac­ter study Sea­son of the Witch, Romero made a full-blown return to hor­ror in 1973 with The Cra­zies, anoth­er Viet­nam-inflect­ed apoc­a­lyp­tic alle­go­ry of an Amer­i­ca vio­lent­ly at odds with itself, and his rep­u­ta­tion as a thought­ful chron­i­cler of America’s dark­er side was now cemented.

In fact, Romero made anoth­er film in 1973, one that would take four-and-a-half more decades to see the light of day. The Amuse­ment Park was com­mis­sioned by The Luther­an Ser­vice Soci­ety of West­ern Penn­syl­va­nia and the Pit­cairn-Crabbe Foun­da­tion to be an edu­ca­tion­al film high­light­ing ​‘the plight of the elderly’.

Its dura­tion of just over 50 min­utes and the overt didac­ti­cism of its dra­ma may evoke an ABC After­school Spe­cial, but Romero, giv­en a spe­cif­ic issue to tack­le, evi­dent­ly could not help con­vert­ing its inher­ent hor­rors into the idioms of genre. Romero’s night­mare vision of age­ing in Amer­i­ca proved alto­geth­er too dis­turb­ing for his financiers, who shelved the film. It would remain undis­cov­ered until 2018, a year after the death of its direc­tor at the age of 77, some six years old­er than his film’s geri­atric protagonist.

The Amuse­ment Park comes with two frames. The first involves the lead actor Lin­coln Maazel (who lat­er starred in Romero’s psy­cho­log­i­cal rein­ven­tion of the vam­pire myth, Mar­tin) intro­duc­ing him­self direct­ly to the cam­era, lay­ing out the film’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with ​“the many prob­lems which peo­ple of my age face on a dai­ly basis,” and end­ing this for­mal pro­logue with the words: ​“Remem­ber, as you watch the film, one day you will be old.”

In oth­er words, the film sets out its present as the viewer’s future – much as in a lat­er scene, a hap­py young cou­ple will vis­it a for­tune teller to ​“see the future”, only to be shown a vision of their old age togeth­er mired in pover­ty, ill­ness and abandonment.

The film’s sec­ond frame, book­end­ing the cen­tral nar­ra­tive, takes place in a bare, ster­ile white room. There sits the unnamed char­ac­ter played by Maazel, his white suit dirty, his hair unkempt, his face bloody and ban­daged, when his cheerier dou­ble arrives, with white suit immac­u­late, hair neat, face unmarked. It is as though we are look­ing at a before-and-after pic­ture, as these two old twins respec­tive­ly embody inno­cence and experience.

Once again, in the decrepi­tude and defla­tion of his oth­er, the man who has just arrived is get­ting a glimpse of his own future. ​“You won’t like it,” the trau­ma­tised old man warns his chip­per dop­pel­gänger of the world out­side this weird wait­ing room, ​“There’s noth­ing out there.” But still the new­com­er heads out, and we with him, curi­ous to see for him­self the excit­ing, fright­en­ing world beyond, fig­ured as an amuse­ment park.

After a series of bizarre encoun­ters in this fun­fair set­ting, he will, like any pas­sen­ger on a ride, end up right back where he start­ed, and we will now under­stand how he has come, on this cir­cu­lar trip, to look so disheveled and defeated.

The amuse­ment park is all at once a real place (Pennsylvania’s West View Park) and an alle­gor­i­cal space, where each enter­tain­ment rep­re­sents a dif­fer­ent way in which senior cit­i­zens are humil­i­at­ed, mar­gin­alised or abused. Old peo­ple exchange their trea­sured belong­ings for tick­ets. A sign out­side one ride states ​“Must have indi­vid­ual income over £3,500” as an entry require­ment. An elder­ly cou­ple rid­ing the dodgems find them­selves being has­sled by the younger dri­ver of anoth­er car, by a police­man and by an insur­ance agent.

The prizes that our pro­tag­o­nist wins at a sideshow are bags of gro­ceries, but he can­not find any­one to help him car­ry them away. The ​‘Boot Hill’ attrac­tion, with its wel­com­ing ​‘Senior Cit­i­zens pre­ferred’ sign, is a care home and rehab cen­tre. Hawk­ers tout deals to swap homes for retire­ment prop­er­ties. At the freak­show, cur­tains are pulled to reveal that the freaks are just the elder­ly. And the Grim Reaper is spot­ted sev­er­al times cir­cling patient­ly in the background.

The Amuse­ment Park tracks its age­ing protagonist’s jour­ney from assur­ance and opti­mism to dis­ori­en­ta­tion and despair. Car­ni­va­lesque both lit­er­al­ly and metaphor­i­cal­ly, it is a sur­re­al affair, but for all its unnerv­ing strange­ness, the depress­ing sub­text is spelt out very clear­ly. When we return to Maazel at the end, he advis­es us, ​“Con­sid­er now, that the man in the amuse­ment park is a mir­ror image of your­self, sep­a­rat­ed only by the pas­sage of time,” before con­clud­ing, ​“I’ll see you in the park, some day.”

Now we final­ly can see him in this 4K restora­tion of the lost film, although not until Maazel, Romero and even West View Park are all them­selves long gone. Their loss serves as anoth­er reminder of mortality’s inevitable encroach­ment – the very age-old theme that this pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment shares pre­cise­ly with the hor­ror genre.

Yet the film’s cut­ting, abstract, often upset­ting satire sits odd­ly with its po-faced pleas to view­ers to vol­un­teer with organ­i­sa­tions that help the elder­ly, and per­haps this haunt­ing study of senes­cence and soci­ety works bet­ter now as an eccen­tric curio in Romero’s fil­mog­ra­phy than it ever would have as a Luther­an pub­lic aware­ness campaign.

The Amuse­ment Park streams exclu­sive­ly on Shud­der from 8 June.