During a time filled with countless remakes and progressively uninspiring lack of originality within the horror genre, it’s always refreshing when something new and exciting enters the arena. Old school horror fans are very hard to impress nowadays with new “horror fans” salivating over the aforementioned remakes, CGI laden PG-13 horror, and teen based romantic vampire drivel. Yes folks, films like the Twilight series have invaded the horror world with Fangoria Magazine helplessly falling into the hype with a cover story of the dreaded “tween “epic.

Nevertheless, artist and enthusiast Mike Schneider has revisited a classic that has been ripped to shreds over the last 2 decades with unofficial sequels, prequels, rehashes, and overall absurdity. Considered by many to be the ‘Holy Grail’ of horror cinema, Night of the Living Dead (NotLD) now ‘lives’ and ‘breathes’ as an art film. Although already incased in the Museum of Modern Art, NotLD has taken on a very different artistic ‘reanimation’.

Conceived of the many different art forms available (puppeteering, oil paintings, CGI, hand drawn animation, etc) and consisting of over 150 international artists from all points of the globe, Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated serves as “an art show hung on the cult classic’s timeline.”

The Skyline View had the opportunity to catch up with NotLD:R’s Organizer/Curator Mike Schneider to discuss the project’s roots, its pathway to theaters, and Mike’s favorite scenes in both the classic film as well as Reanimated.

THE SKYLINE VIEW (TSV): From the select trailers posted all over the web, the film looks like a breath of fresh air from the generic-stock material that seems to come out of Hollywood these days. What was your initial approach to kick-starting the project?  MIKE SCHNEIDER (MS): Well I’m slow to call it a film.  The old Monty Python bit “…And Now For Something Completely Different” comes to mind; but it’s not really that far off reach. There are fan artists and people experimenting with existing media all the time. Who hasn’t doodled in their notebooks? What we’ve done here was gathered it all together and curated that timeline like a great big art show.

There are no right or wrong answers, there are no restrictions of style or media, there is no selection of who can be part of it, and from that ‘we’re all the same now get up and move’ spirit we inherited from the living dead, we hit it hard. There wasn’t a kick start, more of a ‘stagger’. Every piece and every post was not only showing what was done but an invitation for others to join us in doing. So yeah…things spread fast when everyone is invited to jump in grab a piece and make it their own.

TSV: We understand that you wished for no monetary gains from this project. What was the idea behind this credo?  MS: There are enough people cashing in on George Romero and the 68′ [cast of the 1968 film – Ed.] I can’t change that and I’m not going to try. But at the same time we won’t be joining them in that exploitation. These are good people and they deserve to be treated with respect.  Now there are fans that take things way too seriously and think that Romero shot this thing on stone tablets and magically every word is law but what we’ve created is a labor of love.

It’s not always clean, it’s not always serious, but it’s done with nothing but love and respect for the original work. So hopefully by holding ourselves to those standards the fans will feel comfortable enough to relax and enjoy what we’ve done here.

TSV: Sadly, George Romero has been the whipping boy of the genre with many people exploiting and taking advantage of him. What are your thoughts on this?

MS: The system is kind of broken. Everyone’s looking for their in and he’s too cool for the [shenanigans]. He talks to them and then in turn is exploited because they (the ‘fans’) don’t know better.

I mean you go to a [Horror Convention], you hear people chatting him up about their projects and it’s awesome that he doesn’t sick his manager on them or push them along for the next autograph. But are those people really fans if they are going to take his words and use them out of context?

TSV: What are some of your favorite scenes in Romero’s original vision of NotLD and what are you favorite scenes from NotLD:R

MS: I like different things about different scenes. If I had to pick one which put the whole package together for me it would be Karen Cooper  perforating her mother because in that instant you have strong shadows, surreal audio warping and corruption of innocence making a hauntingly beautiful moment.

As far as Reanimated [NotLD:R] , that gets even harder. I tend to like the moments when I notice some little detail in one person’s work relating to something in someone else’s work, especially if that wasn’t something which is visible in the original film.

A great example is Harry Cooper’s posture. Because of the character’s personality, a bunch of the artists made him hunched over. His posture in the original isn’t really bad and yet I can’t tell you how many people drew him as literally spineless. It’s the kind of thing which wasn’t there visually, but enough of us felt it that we independently made it part of our art. 

TSV: Describe your College experience and success.

MS:  you do patting each other on the back.

I threw conceptualism into crafts courses, anti-art into art education, and leaned into media art in classrooms where the professor spouted on about how they were too cultured to own a TV. By the end, I had so many wavers and independent studies that I graduated with one of my degrees being ‘Fine Arts: Digital Media’ before the course of studies was finalized, any other students were enrolled, or a single professor had been hired into the department.

I was self taught in an academic system. Still, the experiences and chances to argue my points with learned people helped me to refine and strengthen my stance. That alone was worth the cost of admission.

TSV: What advice can you give to students who want to achieve their ultimate creative spark as an artist?

MS: Don’t try to be completely original because it’s all been done before. Accept that and move on to figuring out new ways to put those existing ideas together. We write sentences with existing words because those words have meaning to one another and they lend that meaning to the sentence. Concepts are no different. Find your vocabulary (the things and ideas which speak to you) and start stringing them together.