The Amusement Park
**”The Amusement Park” will be available on Shudder on Tuesday, June 8.**
All due respect to the Lutheran Society, who shelved this film after they found it “too disturbing”- you asked George A. Romero, the director of “Night of the Living Dead,” to create an educational film about the dangers of growing old and ageism, and basically gave him free reign; I’m curious what you expected to get?
“The Amusement Park” was probably not the best film for me to watch after having to put my mom in assisted living last month. Romero’s film is a terrifying vision of the anxieties of old age, the every day discriminations the elderly feel, and the neglect that sometimes persist among the younger generations. It’s as pure a vision of horror as Romero ever put out, and for 46 years, it was thought to be lost. Made in 1973, Romero was commissioned by the aforementioned Lutheran Society to make a film highlight some of the ageism the elderly felt at the time. It is not seeing the light of day until after his death in 2017, and it is a Hell of a swan song. Painstakingly restored, “The Amusement Park” is probably the most viscerally difficult horror movie to sit through of the past five years.
The film begins with an introduction by the actor, Lincoln Maazel. At 71 years old, he’s still capable of working, but because of his age, there are other concerns to be worried about. Romero’s movie begins properly in a white room, with Maazel sitting down, disheveled, in a dirtied-up white suit. Another man (also played by Maazel, also in a white suit, but looking much more upbeat) comes in, and tries to get him outside. Because of the difference of appearance and performance, we think at first that the men are different people, but when the more upbeat one goes outside, into an amusement park, we see how one leads to the other.
Being an educational film, or intended to be one, “The Amusement Park” is not intended to be a reflection of reality, with a straight line narrative from one scene to another; this is a series of vignettes illustrating various forms of discrimination and elderly abuse, and it’s unfortunate that many of these persist to this day. As a result, “The Amusement Park” is a hallucinatory trip into madness for the main character, and having an amusement park be the setting only makes this scarier for us to watch. If this doesn’t make people consider how they treat the elderly, that’s more on them, because Romero’s film cuts deep. Despite how the Lutheran Society saw it, he did what they wanted him to do.
