The Horror of Aging in the Most Powerful Country on Earth

The most frightening specter this week may not be the
walking dead, but the living. We gather tonight with the
Ashland Symposia in Ashland, Oregon, for a different kind
of Halloween scare.
While many are re-watching Romero’s Night of the Living
Dead, this evening turns to his once-shelved The
Amusement Park (1975): a compact commission from the
Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania,
originally intended as an educational film on aging, but
Romero’s disturbing treatment led the sponsors to abort
the project; the film was never released and remained
shelved.
After the under-one-hour screening of this vintage,
unsettling reel, we will discuss what lingers—dignity and
neglect, public space and power, and the psychological split that allows a society to sustain narratives
of might while dissociating from its own fragility.