And the dead man came out, his hands and feet bound in graveclothes…
Yeah, they’re dead. They’re… all messed up.
George Kosana as Sheriff McClelland, Night of the Living Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Writer: John A. Russo & George A. Romero
Producer: Russell W. Streiner, Karl Hardman
Starring: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Keith Wayne and Judith Ridley.
Released: 1st October 1968
Trailer
The film is in the public domain, and can be found online easily. YouTube link.
Where do you even start talking about Night of the Living Dead?
One of the problems with this legacy, and it’s not a bad problem for a low budget horror B movie to have, is that the legacy of the film is so very hard to strip away from the film itself. It consumes so much discussion about it, where the stories of behind the scenes trivia overtake the film that sits at its core. How many Q&As, or commentaries, or documentaries are there where George Romero describes how casting Duane Jones as Ben wasn’t intended as political, but merely because he was the best actor they had? It satisfies those fan urges to know everything there is to possibly know about something, but is that the best we can do for this film?
In part, this desire to relive Night of the Living Dead vicariously has cursed those associated with the film. Duane Jones never escaped the shadow of the zombies present here, and no other actor had much of a career of note. At best, Bill Hinzman would go on to ‘capitalise’ on his reputation as the first Romero zombie by writing, directing, producing and starring in Flesheater. Every zombie film after this one lives in the shadow of it. Only really Romero built a career from this, and even that requires him to revisit his zombies every so often.
But then, we’re not here to discuss those production or making of aspects of the film. As I say, there are more than enough interviews, documentaries, Q&As, reviews, and other writings about that kind of stuff to fill entire libraries.
Instead, let us return initially to the core of the film itself and the impact it had on its audience. One of my favourite pieces of writing around this film is by Roger Ebert (I hesitate to say review – it’s almost an example of reportage) (warning: contains racist language). In it, he describes kids coming in to see the latest dumb horror flick with a promisingly lurid title, and Night of the Living Dead is as lurid as Creature from the Black Lagoon or House of Evil. But as the film progresses, something interesting happens:
The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.
Night of the Living Dead film review by Roger Ebert
It’s hard to quantify the impact a film can have on an audience. Stories of how audiences reacted to King Kong, or The Exorcist, are surely exaggerated if still enjoyable to imagine. But the quiet loss of hope over the film’s runtime, at least in this case, strikes more of a truthful chord.
Part of this is due to the zombies themselves. Romero’s zombies set the standard for all that came after, but interestingly, very little is defined here. They are not even called zombies in the film (and indeed rarely are in any Romero zombie film). Romero thought of them more as ghouls. But from this film alone, we get that they are the resurrected dead that feed on the flesh of the living, possibly transmitted through bites but otherwise of unknown origin. That, and a bullet to the head can put them down, permanently. It’s a nebulous concept that, without the benefit of a scientist explaining it for our understanding, is never explained to audience satisfaction. All we get are tips to survive.
Compare this to other zombies we have seen in film before this, going all the way back to White Zombie. Zombies are slaves, slow and shambling and yes, mostly dead, but they are slaves. Romero and Russo’s first major innovation here in the writing is to remove the slavemasters, in effect also removing understandable and human motives from the equation. Without masters, there is no one single thing to defeat anymore, but an insatiable, uncontrollable horde.
Personally, one of the images I found most frightening on this rewatch was around twenty minutes in. Ben has successfully repelled one of the zombies, and it staggers back out of frame, only to reveal that the house is being rapidly surrounded by more zombies shambling towards their prey. Without a master to tame them, they only gather more to their cause, and we still don’t understand why.
The second innovation from the pens of Russo and Romero is flesh-eating taboo introduced here. Zombies have been plenty violent before, and the dead-eyed robotic mannerisms meant that their strength could be used as a tool by their masters to attack our heroes. Yet without a master, those tools lack intelligent motivation. Basing a motivation for the ghouls on a basic requirement for living, a sick parody when enacted by the dead, was a stroke of genius, The way it is introduced in the film, by flabbergasted and unbelieving radio announcers, seeds this disgusting idea into the audience but never quite preparing us until we see the corpses chowing down on blackened bones and charred liver. It makes them even more unrecognisably monsters, despite their familiar faces.
Thirdly, without a master, the zombie virus has an ill-defined origins. It is hazily explained, though never confirmed, that radiation from a crashing satellite is the cause of all the misery, but though it is proposed it is never outright confirmed. Even if it were, it’s not like the knowledge would help our heroes anyway. Russo and Romero remove from the zombie tradition from its voodoo background, making them no longer monsters of magic but monsters of science, some strange unknowable science purely there to harm us. The added benefit is that by removing any sense of origin in all films subsequent, zombies are able to become metaphors for any number of modern fears, something that Romero would wield to great effect.
One side effect of removing this voodoo aspect is that what black representation that existed prior to Night can be written out. Black representation within zombie films concerning voodoo usually can be summed up as servant, evil servant, zombie servant, zombie or victim. Russo and Romero didn’t mean for this to happen, but removing the voodoo aspect ensures that future films never have to worry about having to cast at least one black character to represent the Haitian origins of the curse (though this is unfair in its way too – there were lots of zombie films prior that also ignored the voodoo aspect as well). But what prevents this from being an act of colonial adoption and erasure of culture is the casting of a black character in this not as a servant, evil servant, zombie servant, zombie or victim – he is cast as our hero.
George Romero famously cast Duane Jones because Jones was the best actor for the role. But in 1968, casting a black actor was an inherently political act. This is the same year that Martin Luther King is assassinated (filming took place over the winter of 1967/68 before), around the time King was protesting the Vietnam war. The Black Panther Party had formed in 1966, and Huey Newton, one of its founding members, had been involved in a shootout that led to the death of a cop not long before filming would commence. Civil Rights were a hot button topic at the time, and even if Romero may have been blind to the political ramifications to casting his lead, I would be surprised if Duane Jones wasn’t fully aware.
To indulge in a little bit of production trivia (though it does serve the main point), Ben as originally written was a truck driver on the simple, uneducated side. But stories told about the filming, including Ben’s famous monologue, suggest that much of the dialogue was improvised. Jones gives a powerful enough performance that I have no doubt that he could have easily performed the role as originally envisioned by Russo and Romero, but Jones instead gives a far more educated performance than the the film calls for. He elevates what could have been a dull performance from anyone else (see Keith Wayne’s performance as Tom for some very functional performing) into something that demands you watch. I don’t know how aware Jones was of the history of zombie representation in film before this, but that doesn’t matter. He was a black man in 60s America. He’s lived the experience of a man ostracised and hated for his skin colour, something I could never possibly imagine. The script doesn’t call for voodoo, and so Duane Jones is allowed to create and embody a new role for zombie films: the practical, level-headed survivor. He’s a black man – he’s had to survive in a white world all his life, of course he is a survivor here. That it now means that he has to put up with the white dead coming back to life and trying to get him isn’t much worse than what he’s had to endure before.
Yet at the same time, there is an element of truth to Romero and Russo’s choice to have Ben be an everyman, rather than the shining example of One of the Good Ones. Had this been played by a white man, it wouldn’t be much different in terms of story. But Ben, as a black man, is no messiah, no perfect person. He makes mistakes such as with the fuel pump that signals the survivor’s end. He is fallible. Making him perfect would have felt wrong, betraying the gritty, realistic tone that film is trying to accomplish with something that would have rung untrue.
We have to talk a little about the racial implications of the ending. Part of this film’s power, especially as described in the Ebert piece linked above, is how hopeless it is. The imagery of a black man who has done nothing really wrong yet killed by a white man and then burned, is the most horrific thing in the whole film and culmination of everything that came before. It’s hard not to draw historical links with America’s history of lynching, perhaps most appropriately here the lynching of Jesse Washington. That his body is tossed onto the same pile that contains the Hinzman zombie from the opening scenes is a fair misunderstanding within the fiction of the story, but metaphorically Ben is treated in life, and then quickly his death, the same as the white monsters he survived. His innocence, death and burning body recalls the horrific photographs of Washington’s charred corpse. That Ben is the sole black character, alive or dead, only deepens our understanding that the black character is treated the same as the inhuman monsters throughout the film. It’s almost designed perfectly to make any white person watching feel as uncomfortable as possible with the racial implications.
Though race is undoubtedly an important area of debate when discussing Night of the Living Dead, there are other characters to discuss.
As well as the massive changes that were happening with regards to race in the Civil Rights movement, there is also the woman’s liberation to consider too. This film presents four female characters. Barbara, who appears at first as the film’s lead, is an interesting one to consider through this lens.
Barbara, though she is pretty much catatonic once Ben assumes the lead of the film, has a quiet character arc of her own in the background. The events of the day destroy her entirely, and as night settles she attempts to rebuild herself within roles she is comfortable and familiar with in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar new world. The little music box brings back a childish wonder, and as she picks up and strokes at the linen she reminds me of a bride, only to then cradle it like a child. She vacillates between childish impotence and maddening terror as she retells her jumbled version of events of her day. The feminine roles that she perhaps would have relied on in the past are taken away from her, and in the absence of a strong model for herself she is helpless. Barbara is a demonstration of the need for women’s liberation outside of traditional roles, which cannot survive in this new world.
It’s brave to make the woman who was your main character so powerless, and really gives the film its more cynical tone more so than the film’s downbeat ending, which cements everything that has come before. Barbara is weak, even when compared to the other women characters in the film, but when faced with the circumstances she faces, we empathise, recognising her own weakness as ours too. We cannot expect everyone to be heroes, and even worse, we recognise her reaction to the horrors around her is the only sane response.
Judy was cast because she looked good on camera, and her acting reflects that. She was an addition to the script late on, and as such she contributes very little beyond distressed fiancee to Tom who contributes to her and Tom’s death when she tried playing hero. Helen Cooper is implied to be a bored housewife desperate to leave Harry and only still there because of her daughter (who is an expression of fear of a child’s potential, considering she stabs her mother seventeen times with a trowel). The women in this story are trapped within traditional roles laid out for them, desperate to be something more. Being as this is a movie from the 60s made by white men, but also partially because of it being a horror movie, they cannot break free and are doomed to them.
Finally there is Harry Cooper, that bastard. As he stands in opposition to Ben and Helen, as well as constantly trying to take Barbara away from everything, he represents neutered white male power. In a similar way to how Barbara is left bereft without traditional structures, Cooper stands in opposition to everything he can in order to claw back some quantum of power from his assumed position. He’s had it easy for way too long in this world, and the zombies have taken away every traditional power structure put in place to support people like him. With regards to Barbara, the reason he is drawn to pulling her downstairs is that he senses instinctively that she can be easily dominated, especially as even his wife seems to criticise him more and more. And as a white man, it’s more than likely that Harry earned more money than whatever Ben could get as a black man, but we as viewers can see immediately who the more deserving one is. Constantly and consistently, he is shown to be an impotent shouter when faced with Ben’s cool, level-headed approach, and his reluctance to contribute almost at any time with something positive to their survival is what leads to their downfall. Yes, the cellar did turn out to be the safest place (barring his dying daughter), but only after he had refused to make the house itself more secure. He was right because he ensured the alternative was wrong.
Returning to the ending as part of a separate discussion, the above desperation and failure of our realistic characters is what makes the film so downbeat. Their squabbles sound real, their failures relatable and so when the final gunshot rings out that strikes Ben down, we are left with nothing to root for. There are no scientists or soldiers or teenagers in leather jackets; just desperate people trying to survive without any idea of how to achieve that. The mistakes they make are not the classic horror tropes of going into darkened rooms or splitting up for clues. They are mistakes of who to trust, when to run, when to fight, where to go, what to do. Who among us would have made the perfect decisions to survive under those same extraordinary circumstances of the dead rising? We all like to think how we would survive a zombie apocalypse, but Night of the Living Dead shows us there is no guarantee. We are only human. No wonder those children wept in that afternoon showing.
There is plenty more to talk about with regards to this film. I’ve touched lightly on the production history when it has fed into the reading of the film, but as one of the most iconic horror films of all time there is a wealth of material out there, and this essay was not meant to recap what can be found out about the production. The excellent Criterion release also does a fabulous job of highlighting the craft elements of the film. Though Romero’s first feature film, the editing and seamless use of library music shows this is a film made by an already confident talent.
It is a landmark film. Though it is a zombie film, it is the zombie film that changed everything that was to come after it. Though it is a B movie horror film, it is operating in a way that B movies had not done so before, and was a film at the cutting edge of its time that still resonates today. Even though this essay is one of the longest I’ve written so far on any subject, I still feel as though I have barely scratched its surface of its depth. Though later of the Dead films may satisfy that horror itch in a more pleasing way, there are none that are as awesome as the first Night.
Notes
The film is famously in the public domain, meaning any DVD company can put out a copy of the film. I personally have around five or six versions on DVD/blu-ray. By quite some margin, the Criterion release has the best image and sound quality I’ve found. However, if you are interested in bonus features, it’s rare to find much crossover between versions and for that reason it is fun to track down variations to gather different features: this one has a commentary, that one has a feature-length documentary, this other one has an interview with George Romero, and so on… Having said that, the Criterion release has one of my favourite features I’ve seen for a film ever, when it discusses in depth Romero’s use of library music. What a nerd I am.
NEXT: George A Romero’s There’s Always Vanilla.
Deeper Thoughts for the Horror Inclined 