The lasting power of filmmaker George A. Romero’s work lies in his ability to strike at the heart of deep-rooted social and psychological fears. Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) didn’t single-handedly start the modern zombie sub-genre merely due to their shock factor, but rather because each film used the zombie to discuss a wide variety of thorny topics, from racism to class to the inevitable fate of all human beings: death. The Lutheran Society was probably not thinking of Romero’s pioneering zombie film when they commissioned him to make a movie about the perils of aging and the elderly in 1973; more than likely, they had seen Romero’s short films and TV commercials instead, including an educational segment the native Pittsburghian had shot for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Nevertheless, Romero brought his horror prowess to bear on the resulting short entitled The Amusement Park, so much so that the Lutheran Society refused to release it for being too disturbing. Recently restored by the George A. Romero Foundation, in collaboration with IndieCollect, and premiering nationwide on Shudder, the movie acts as the pinnacle of Romero’s short subjects, an educational film that knows the best way to make a social issue captivating and immediate is to make it experiential. 

The educational film is a form that more often than not is ridiculed, and for good reason. These movies, essentially glorified industrial films, tend to be commissioned by corporations or government entities and are thus left so dry and soulless as to not only be ineffective but laughable. Thanks to their need to propagandize, these films often lack nuance and are tonally dull, and some of them even lack creativity. Romero refuses to let The Amusement Park fall into this trap at every turn. It opens and closes with bookending segments featuring lead actor Lincoln Maazel (as himself) speaking to camera about the plight of the elderly, his speech notably forthright. Romero and screenwriter Wally Cook aren’t coy about their aims with the short — at one point, Maazel blatantly states that the filmmakers “intend for you to feel the problem, to experience it,” forewarning that this is not to be a traditional educational film that will hand-hold the audience all the way through. 

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In between the bookends, The Amusement Park is perhaps the most surrealistic movie Romero ever made. It begins with an unnamed old man (Maazel) sitting in an all white room looking especially wounded and beaten up when he meets a clean and comparatively spry version of himself. The healthy-looking old man wishes to go outside, while the wounded man vehemently warns against it. The unblemished man goes anyway, opening a door and stepping out immediately into an amusement park that is filled with a variety of disturbingly skewed attractions. Romero and Cook make no attempt at subtlety where these “rides” are concerned with regards to their central social issues — one ride demands that people have an individual income of $3,500 or more to be able to ride it, another features bumper cars where an elderly couple is accused of causing a collision accident by a younger man, another sees the old man thrown into a nursing home where he’s “supposed to have fun,” and so on. Given The Amusement Park’s aim to demonstrate how the nation’s elderly encounter numerous traumatic hardships, none of these “rides” are particularly surprising, but what makes them intriguing and disturbing is Romero’s application of surrealism and grounded documentary techniques to make the events feel real. 

Romero and cinematographer S. William Hinzman shoot The Amusement Park with a constant juggling of techniques that serve to unsettle. Sometimes the camera is handheld, sometimes it’s on a tripod — other times they use fisheye lenses to distort the frame. This is combined with Romero and sound artist Michael Gornick employing a constantly shifting, cacophonous soundtrack — there isn’t much dialogue in The Amusement Park, but there is a never ending stream of noise, everything from crowd chatter to random exclamations to muffled public address announcements (the latter presaging the constant tannoy voice of Dawn of the Dead’s mall). Romero himself adds the final touch as an editor, rapidly cutting between static shots and moving shots, several different angles and even separate scenes at will, bringing a disorienting New Wave sensibility to a deliberately fantastical and surreal setting. It all results in The Amusement Park being an incredibly anxiety-inducing experience, an approach that was clearly on the filmmaker’s mind as his similarly anxious viral outbreak film The Crazies (1973) was shot the same year.