Having created the zombie film subgenre as we understand it today, George A. Romero started it all with his 1968 indie horror, Night of the Living Dead. Romero’s 1973 educational film, The Amusement Park, has been recently discovered and restored in 4K 45 years later and is perhaps his most terrifying cinematic installment to date. The Amusement Park stars Lincoln Maazel, who acts as the sole emotional fulcrum of the narrative, guiding the audience through the carousel of life, one terrifying ride after another. Sporting discordant sound design and deliberately surreal visuals, The Amusement Park emerges as a harrowing allegory about the terrors of ageism.
The Amusement Park opens with a prologue of sorts, with Maazel strolling through the desolate grounds of West View Park, which paints a stark, sordid picture from the get-go. Addressing the camera directly, Maazel exclaims how he is lucky enough to be healthy and employed as an aging actor, while pointing the abject neglect, discrimination, and systemic abuse that the elderly undergo on a daily basis. After urging the younger generation to act with empathy, Maazel ends his monologue with an uncomfortable truth, “Remember – one day, you will be old.” Apart from jarring audiences even before complete immersion into the cinematic experience, Maazel’s opening speech underlines the heart of the film in an especially haunting light, evoking a sense of anxiety and doom that gets progressively stronger over the course of the film.
Romero establishes his allegory with the aid of a cyclical visual narrative, which emerges as an ouroboros of pain, violence, and deliberate acts of cruelty. Sitting in an all-white, nondescript room, a bruised elderly man (Maazel) sits utterly defeated, writhing in agony to the point of being rendered speechless. Right then, an unblemished doppelganger, a possible reflection of our incognizant, naïve selves, asks the disheveled man if he wants to go outside. When met with verbal resistance, the doppelganger ventures into the clamoring chaos of the amusement park, which is painted more as a hellscape as opposed to a source of joy and comfort.
Linking elderly abuse to the horror of capitalism and the offhanded cruelty of the young, Romero hurls the viewer into a whirlwind of uncomfortable truths, a sensation accentuated by the claustrophobic shots and frenzied camera movements. Pure terror pervades this nightmarish experience when a figure representing death lurks around the fringes of the screen, mingling with the blissfully happy youth, who go about their way without much thought or empathy. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Amusement Park is the fact that apart from Maazel, all other characters are assumed by non-actors, which surprisingly works in favor of the film.
This, in conjunction with the faded color scheme and fuzzy vignettes, transforms The Amusement Park into a macabre fever dream, a ghost of a memory, or a premonition meant to rattle one’s sense of being. This emotion is masterfully captured in a stand-out sequence, wherein two young lovers peek into a crystal ball, only to be repulsed by the inevitable horror of the near future, wherein love withers and gives away to the pain, neglect, and isolation of old age. The vision attains climax with the onset of madness, the beating of drums, and the erratic thump of a frenetic heart.
By the time one reaches the end of The Amusement Park, all sense of optimistic enthusiasm fades to blank, only to be replaced by the kind of razor-edged cynicism characteristic of most Romero films. Maazel returns to the screen, cementing these unspoken fears with a simple, “I’ll see you in the amusement park.” Needless to say, The Amusement Park is a hellish ride of a lifetime, interspersed with bizarre specters and agonizing truths. Alarmingly, the loop of agony is never-ending.
The Amusement Park will be available for viewing on Shudder on June 8, 2021. The film is 52 minutes long and remains unrated as of now.
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