In 1973, George Romero was commissioned by the Lutheran Society to make an educational film about ageism and elder abuse. The resulting film, The Amusement Park, is probably the most fucked up PSA ever made, and was considered so disturbing by the investors that they refused to release it. Once believed to be lost, a print of The Amusement Park was found in 2018, restored, and is now getting a wide release on the Shudder streaming platform.
Honestly, I don’t know why someone would commission the guy that made Night of the Living Dead to make a movie and then be surprised that the film turned out to be disturbing, but here we are. Romero probably didn’t have to go that hard on making a PSA about ageism, but Romero was never one to pull his punches. Any other filmmaker would have been happy to collect a client’s money and then shoot a couple of poorly scripted and acted vignettes about how young people treat the elderly, but in this case, Romero made an experimental, surrealist film set in a nightmarish amusement park that serves as an analogy for society’s indifference towards those it no longer deems useful or productive. I don’t really know how effective The Amusement Park is as a PSA since its not very informative and doesn’t really offer any solutions to the problem of elder abuse besides a vague “Hey, maybe look into volunteer programs” message at the end, but as an existential art film about the cruel passage of time, it succeeds in spades.
There really isn’t any plot to The Amusement Park, most of the action follows an elderly gentleman whose day at the park devolves into a surreal nightmare. Not only does Romero make a statement on how society views and treats the elderly, but he also works in the social commentary that we’ve come to expect from him, and very soon we realize that the only people that really seem to be having a good time at this amusement park are young, able-bodied, and white. Things go from bad to worse for our geriatric protagonist, who is treated as either invisible or as a burden by his fellow park-goers and the employees. As the film goes on, our main character goes from just trying to have a nice day to struggling to survive in a place that refuses to acknowledge him as a human being.
While I wouldn’t call The Amusement Park a horror film, it’s filled with plenty of disturbing imagery and gets to be downright heartbreaking during moments where the elderly main character longs to just make a simple human connection with someone. While a normal PSA would probably show the audience signs and examples of elder abuse, this film shows us that ageism is a systematic problem that we’re all guilty of participating in. Romero even makes a point to show that most of our hostility towards the elderly stems from the deep-seeded fear that we will all be in their shoes one day. At one point, sooner or later, the amusement park will stop being fun for all of us, and the fear of growing old in a world tailored to the young and healthy is a universal one, and it’s the driving force behind this film.
I gotta admire the balls on this film and I would give anything to be in the room with the investors from the Lutheran Society when they first screened this film. What I would love even more is to see a class full of high school kids being told that they’re going to be watching a film on ageism, hear their sighs of annoyance, and then watch as their teacher puts on this film. As I said, I don’t know how “educational” this film is, but the images will stick with you long after the credits roll as well as a lingering feeling of dread over what awaits us all. Then again I don’t think it was Romero’s goal to educate as much as it was to make us think and put us in the shoes of the elderly and what they experience day in and day out. Are the content and images in this film too disturbing for a simple educational film? Probably, but that’s very much Romero’s intent. He wants the viewer to be unsettled by what they see in this film because the subject matter of The Amusement Park is not something that should be sugar-coated.
The Amusement Park is an example of how a true creative can make almost any project their own, for better or for worse. Any other filmmaker would have phoned in making an educational film, but Romero used this opportunity to hold a mirror up to society and show the apparent flaws that we’re all overlooking. While I wouldn’t call this film terrifying, its images will unsettle you and its message of society’s rejection of the most vulnerable is scarier than any horror film ever could be. Like any storyteller, Romero sometimes missed the mark, but when he hit, his accuracy was dead on and this film is a scathing indictment of how cruel the world can be sometimes, and sadly still feels relevant today.
James Reinhardt