company: Image Ten
and The Latent Image
year: 1968
runtime: 96′
director: George A. Romero
cast: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea,
Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman,
Keith Wayne, Judith Ridley,
Kyra Schon, S. William Hinzman
writers: John A. Russo
and George A. Romero
cinematography: George A. Romero
Order this film from Amazon.com
If you have yet to see Night of the Living Dead, I heartily recommend doing so – this review can wait. The film is readily available for viewing at the Internet Archive, Youtube and similar sites thanks to its unfortunate copyright status and I’ve linked to my favorite of the many, many home video releases, Dimension’s recent 40th anniversary DVD edition, in the information to the left. The screen grabs used in this review are sourced from that release.
Over four decades after its original release George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead still packs a nasty punch. Initially marketed as a weekend matinee (a slot geared towards youngsters and frequently populated by more generic horror fare) by distributor Walter Reade, its difficult to imagine the impact Night‘s gruesome spectacle must have had when new or to quantify the scope of its importance to cinema as a whole. This is the film the dragged its terrors out of the exotic far-flung locales and up from the secret basement laboratories of old and plopped them right into the lap of middle America. This is the one that brought horror home.
The story is simple: An assortment of strangers huddle in a rural farmhouse in an effort to escape a disaster of unprecedented proportions. From the Midwest to the East Coast come reports of mass murder and mutilation, and shocking accounts of the recently departed rising to attack and devour the living. Night falls and the dead rise, surrounding the farmhouse and testing the shaky alliance of the desperate survivors within.
Night of the Living Dead owes much of its effectiveness and staying power to the turbulent decade in which it was made, and while no overt references to contemporary history are made its impact on the style and content of the film is obvious. The 60s were a time of social upheaval both in America and abroad. The decade had seen the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Malcom X, the beginning of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution and a continuation of the interminable conflict in Vietnam. The Cold War was very much on the minds of everyday Americans, the nuclear “sword of Damacles” still a palpable threat to civilization as a whole. It’s no surprise that Night‘s view of contemporary America is so relentlessly nihilistic.
One can see echoes of Cold War concerns in Night‘s sci-fi / horror concept, with mysterious radiation carried Earthward by an experimental space probe postulated in-film to be the most probable culprit in the waking of the recently dead. The de facto leaders of the survivors in the farm house bicker endlessly over where to sit out the event, the boarded upstairs or the barricaded cellar, the gravity of the situation reflecting the nuclear threat. “They’ll probably get us wherever we are,” says one of the group after another brings up the possibility of hundreds of attackers, gravely intoning the perceived pointlessness of trying to survive such an event at all.
Notable in retrospect are the film’s prescient racial politics, unintended by the filmmakers at the time Night was made. The closest the picture comes to having an identifiable hero is Ben (Duane Jones), a young black man constantly at odds with Harry (Karl Hardman), a white man struggling to usurp Ben’s assumed authority. The major conflict of the pictures is over the issue of the cellar, one argument about which culminates in the two announcing themselves the “boss” of their respective safe havens. Harry is portrayed as cowardly and conniving, seeing himself as entitled to the leadership of the group for no observable reason other than his ethnicity. Ben exists in stark contrast. Assertive and action-minded, he formulates a loose plan to escape the farm house, a plan that goes awry with mortal consequences.
The conflict between the two takes on the air of a battle between the white bosses of the past and a new generation revolutionary African American youth. Ben and Harry’s willful struggle eventually turns physical, with Ben killing Harry outright after a few skirmishes. The sight of Ben, disgustedly pumping Harry full of buckshot, must have seemed quite the subversive political statement at the time of the film’s release, coming on the heels of the assassination of Malcom X and the rise of the Black Panther Party. No less compelling is the aftermath of the eponymous night, in which Ben awakens to find the house surrounded not by the undead, but by a trigger-happy mob of ‘shoot first, ask later’ locals . . .
The spare farm house setting works as the perfect claustrophobic stage for the charged events, the dread and unease compounded a thousand fold by the gruesome horrors that take place therein. Complemented by Carnival of Souls-inspired Conrad Hall-like photographic direction and an endearing documentary crudity that can only come from driven individuals hanging on a shoestring and a prayer, the slow march of Night‘s ghouls is both ethereal and terrifying. The creatures, at once human and not, step one by one from the shadows, steadily mounting in number and developing a palpable menace that’s lacking in their contemporaries. When their climactic attack begins it’s truly terrifying. One woman is dragged into the undead horde by her own brother while a pair of young lovers are accidentally incinerated, becoming an all-you-can-eat zombie buffet. The most disturbing of all of Night‘s gory shocks involves Harry’s dead school-aged daughter, who nibbles on the fresh remains of dear-old dad before taking to her mother with a trowel. It’s a scene that still sets me squirming, and that positively sickened me when I first happened upon the film at the tender young age of 9.
While far from the first splatter film, Night of the Living Dead brought a stark realism to its scenes of graphic violence, an element lacking in Blood Feast, et al, and even in most of Romero’s subsequent work. It’s a testament to the creative team behind it that, after an endless parade of Saws and Hostels and slasher after slasher, Night still retains the power to shock its audience. The ghouls themselves are a fantastic amalgamation of disparate inspirations, from the night-wandering vampires of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend to the shambling servants of Victor Halperin’s White Zombie to the dancing ghosts of Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls, with a disturbing cannibalistic compulsion adding another grotesque dimension to their character. They’re a perfect existential threat, playing on inherited fears of death, being devoured and, perhaps most unnerving of all, losing that spark that makes us human.
To this day I find Night of the Living Dead the most effective horror film of Romero’s career. For bottom dollar black-and-white chills it’s hard to beat, and the strong social context will leave you with plenty to talk about afterwards. With zombies reaching a level of pop culture saturation that’s frankly obnoxious to this passing fan, it’s good to get some perspective and remind myself of where it all again. These are the living dead as I try best to remember them – before the pub crawls, before the survival guide, before the foreboding unknown was drowned in its own mythos. This is the beginning of it all, and it’s scary as hell.
