Night of the Living Dead (1968)

On March 15, 2020, the entire world as we previously knew it changed forever on account of an infectious, mysterious disease known as COVID-19. In the absolute worst manner imaginable to kick in the new decade, the world was placed under state-sanctioned lockdowns in a desperate attempt to hinder the spread of the virus. Schools were shut down and children were consequently thrust into a miserable world of isolation, required to continue their schooling at home in the safety of their bedrooms and unable to interact with their friends. Masks were mandated in stores that were left open, such as grocery and convenience. If you refused to wear one, you were promptly removed from the premises. Worst of all for myself, restaurants were shut down, reduced to takeout only, with limited admittance upon reopening. For the first few months of this unprecedented lockdown, the world went into a frenzy of fear, unsure of the safest courses of action. For many people, it was a nightmare to be kept away for so long from their loved ones, but at the same time, everyone's greatest fear was contracting COVID because it affects everyone differently based on age and health. For some, such as myself, it meant temporarily losing your senses of taste and smell. For others, like my father, it meant two weeks physically trapped in bed, unable to move and devoid of an appetite. And for the unluckiest among us, it was a death sentence. 

For his groundbreaking and eerily prescient directorial debut, George A. Romero taps into a similar type of mass hysteria that explores the conflicting ways everyday citizens respond to the most powerful and destructive emotions universal to humankind: fear, paranoia, mistrust, and perhaps most devastating of all, uncertainty. Directed by Romero and co-written by him and John Russo, Night of the Living Dead may not be the inaugural installment in the zombie subgenre of horror -- that honor apparently belongs to Victor Halperin and Garnett Weston's White Zombie from 1932 -- but it's unquestionably the most seminal, setting the standard for the American zombie picture and paving the way for a horde of like-minded films and TV series that continue to dominate the horror landscape 57 years later. Certain aspects may have been drained of their luster through the fickle customs of Father Time, such as the bombastic and corny orchestral score and melodramatic acting, but what remains is still a creative, blissfully straightforward story of survival steeped in tension that lays bare the inability of humankind to come together in times of crisis and cope with fear. In the process, Romero and Russo give birth to the representation of the modern zombie, one of horror's most iconic and nightmarish creations.

One late evening, siblings Johnny (Russell Streiner) and Barbra (Judith O'Dea) drive to a cemetery in rural Pennsylvania to lay a new wreath on the headstone of their father's grave. The cemetery appears to be completely deserted save an elderly man (Bill Hinzman) in a black, tattered suit, wandering the grounds in what resembles an intoxicated stupor. Before Barbra can follow Johnny back to his car, the man approaches and suddenly attacks her, ripping at her clothes. Johnny intervenes to defend his sister and engages in a scuffle with the man, who ultimately throws Johnny down and causes him to hit his head against a gravestone, killing him. Barbra runs away from the cemetery and through the woods screaming for help, finally stumbling across an unoccupied farmhouse, in which she seeks refuge. Arriving shortly after is Ben (Duane Jones), a black man who is also being pursued by a horde of the same type of people who attacked Barbra and Johnny. Whoever they are, they walk with a limp, appear disoriented, pursue others relentlessly for no given reason, and apparently are immune to being run over. 

As Barbra sits on a sofa and sinks into shock-fueled catatonia, Ben gets to work boarding up the doors and windows as the ghouls quickly uncover their location and lay siege to the farmhouse. Unbeknown to Ben or Barbra, five other survivors of this epidemic have already sought refuge in the cellar: Harry and Helen Cooper (Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman), a bitter married couple on the verge of divorce whose daughter, Karen (Kyra Eschon), lays mostly unconscious after being bitten on the arm; and teenage lovers, Tom and Judy (Keith Wayne and Judith Ridley). Once the survivors gather together upstairs and acquaint themselves, an inner tension commences about what actions should be taken. The stubborn and pretentious Harry insists that everyone should gather in the cellar and wait for rescue, while the pragmatic and clear-thinking Ben believes the cellar to be a deathtrap, arguing that, at least upstairs, they have windows to spot any oncoming assailants and several options for a necessary escape. Overwhelmed by the insanity of the situation and grief over the death of her brother, Barbra remains on the sofa, unable to move or participate in the group strategizing. With only the TV and radio as their sources of information, a newscaster informs them that this sudden onslaught of attacks, spreading across the East Coast of the United States, is being committed by the reanimated corpses of the recently deceased, who seek not only to murder anyone and everyone in their path, but to consume their flesh as well.

Fulfilling the quadruple responsibilities of writing, directing, shooting, and editing, George Romero wastes absolutely no time in plunging his audience headfirst into the surreal, inexplicable nightmare of the situation at hand. He doesn't visually depict the cause of this outbreak, nor does he begin his story the day before, the final day of normality before all hell breaks loose. No, this man gets straight to the point, brightening the screen with a trio of prolonged, static shots of a deserted stretch of forested road surrounded by trees, which immediately sets a chilling tone of isolation. Very tautly, he introduces his first pair of characters to deceive us into assuming they will serve as our protagonists, only to dispel that conventional notion rather quickly, alerting his audience that, in this world, anything can happen at any moment. A master of storytelling economy, Romero, along with his screenwriting partner, uses dialogue to establish the relationship between Johnny and Barbra as well as their motivation for unknowingly placing themselves in what will quickly reveal itself as a dire struggle for survival. The writers lull their audience into a false sense of security with the sort of petty, childish bickering common among siblings. Johnny complains about having to drive a far distance to and from the cemetery at night just to place yet another wreath on their father's headstone, Barbra chastises him for oversleeping, thus causing them to arrive late in the evening, Johnny teases Barbra over her seemingly irrational fear of cemeteries, thus paving the way for his infamous taunt, "They're coming to get you, Barbra." These two truly feel like a big brother and little sister. With little in the way of traditional buildup, Romero and Russo unleash their lumbering form of horror suddenly, with no rhyme or reason. 

Following their legendarily terrifying opening set piece, Romero and Russo settle comfortably into the groove of a plot that is so blissfully simple in conception -- a ragtag group of strangers seeks refuge from an increasingly growing swarm of reanimated, flesh-eating ghouls in the assumed safety of a farmhouse -- yet undeniably groundbreaking and subgenre-defining in its construction of zombies (a term never uttered in the script). Through the physical actions of the zombies themselves and the straightforward, unforced exposition spoken by Bill "Chilly Billy" Cardille, the writers cleanly establish their attributes and weaknesses: the zombies lumber forward in a trancelike daze, feel an innate phobia of fire and unquenchable craving for human flesh, are able to be brought back to death only through a bullet to the brain, bludgeoning over the head, or incineration, and reanimate minutes after suffering their natural death. Unlike in their 21st-century evolution, in which their skin is rotted, the zombies of Night of the Living Dead are presented as freshly deceased corpses: dressed presentably in the normal clothes in which they died or, in one undead woman's case, butt naked, their complexion is pale and sickly, they walk with a painful limp, and communicate solely in grunts. 

What makes Romero and Russo's introductory interpretation of zombies so unnerving is precisely their proximity to the appearance of normal human beings as well as their nightmare-slow gait. These so-called ghouls aren't aliens from another planet or demons from another dimension; they're members of our own species, flesh-and-blood human beings, fellow Americans, our neighbors, our colleagues, our friends, who have just recently passed away, but have been violently awakened from what should be their eternal slumber and are possessed with an uncontrollable urge to seek out the flesh of the living. They aren't aware of what they're doing or why they feel the need to do it. In a way, they're victims themselves, disoriented, confused, driven by an impulse they can't begin to fathom, let alone overcome. Their brains are telling them they must feast on human flesh, and they're powerless to fight against it, enslaved by their newfound afterlife addiction.

The setting in which the characters of Night of the Living Dead take refuge is flawless in both its simplicity and cost-effectiveness as well as its symbolic treatment. On the surface, it's an ordinary, isolated, white farmhouse in the middle of a forest behind a cemetery, ideal for Barbra's escape from the man pursuing her. Lying at the top of the stairs is the partially devoured corpse of the female owner. The home is full of windows, a double-edged sword: for the survivors, they provide a quick and easy ability to discern the growing number of zombies circling around; for the zombies, they provide abundant portals through which to enter effortlessly. A fireplace provides the warm, domestic comfort inherent to a rural lifestyle, while doubling as an invariable weapon against the pyrophobic zombies. The cellar presents itself as the safest place to hide, large enough for seven people to huddle together and wait for a rescue team, so long as the door is locked and boarded up. However, should the zombies gain entrance into the home and think to look downstairs, there will be nowhere for the survivors to run. If the police do arrive, the survivors might not hear them from downstairs. 

Romero is an expert at guerrilla filmmaking, selecting a single, unremarkable setting and locating the comfort and menace inherent to its various features and appliances. What initially emits the appearance of a safe haven quickly devolves into a physical and psychological warzone as tensions among the inhabitants mount. While the surviving humans bicker among themselves inside the house, a growing horde of undead ones gathers outside of it, a potent theme that would be reanimated 39 years later in Frank Darabont's sci-fi horror, The Mist. The comfort and spaciousness afforded by such a quaint building are subverted by an enrapturing sensation of claustrophobia, Romero transforming the farmhouse into a microcosm of a world coming apart at the seams, tearing itself asunder by human conflict and their various methods to cope with fear. Almost seeming to forget about the zombies eagerly waiting to feast on their flesh, Ben and Harry enter into a power struggle, fighting for control over their apocalyptic scenario and dominance over their fellow survivors. The most horrifying thought to most people when thrust into a catastrophe is the loss of control, and people like Harry will hold on for dear life to any possible solution to regain some measure thereof, even if it means letting others be reduced to zombie sustenance.

In constructing their small band of protagonists, Romero and Russo don't necessarily excel in the difficult art of character development, and their interpretation of women is far from feminist. However, they accomplish one crucial task that fosters emotional engagement: assigning every major character a distinguishable personality. No character is identical to another in personality, but all are driven by the mutual, universal objective to make it out of this farmhouse with their lives, limbs, and skin intact. Let's start with the worst first. In a year that ironically gifted us one of the most intelligent, resourceful, proactive, determined, and sympathetic heroines courtesy of Roman Polanski's psychological horror adaptation, Rosemary's Baby, Romero and Russo take a step back with their regressive characterization of Barbra, painting her as a helpless, ineffectual damsel in distress who spends the majority of her screen time, following Johnny's admittedly traumatic murder, sitting or lying on a couch in shock. While everyone else assists each other in boarding up the house, discussing potential escape options, or providing emotional comfort to an injured, unconscious little girl, Barbra reverts to an embarrassingly childlike state of mental stuntedness, providing virtually zero help to anyone -- that is, until she finally snaps out of her catatonia toward the end, gets her butt off the sofa, and aids Helen in keeping the zombies from getting inside. The psychological underpinning of Barbra's uselessness is understandable, as is her denial of her brother's demise, but this woman is so offensively and comically pathetic that she faints at a single slap across her face. 

O'Dea elicits pity for Barbra's loss, but goes so far over the top in her portrayal of hysteria and is embarrassingly childish in depicting her loss of touch with reality. As she recounts her and Johnny's traumatic experience to Ben, sinking more and more into the memory, O'Dea closes her eyes, puts her hands on her cheeks, and nods repeatedly while sobbing, "Johnny! Johnny, help me! Oh, help me!" What should elicit tears of empathetic heartbreak instead tempts chuckles of derision.

To pick up the slack of the white woman, Ben quickly announces himself as the true hero of the story. Even though he proves ultimately unable to save his fellow survivors from a bloody and, in one instance, fiery death, Ben is the closest they have to maintaining a semblance of hope and gaining a measure of order amid the chaos. It's become a trope in modern horror that the black characters either die first or early in the movie. Romero took a chance in casting Duane Jones, a black man, as the protagonist and ultimate final man standing (until he isn't). As Barbra cowers on the sofa, allowing everyone else to handle the situation, and Harry and Helen argue in the cellar, Ben assumes the role of "father knows best," focusing his energy strictly on keeping himself and everyone else in his orbit safe. Intelligent, resourceful, proactive, and protective over Barbra, Ben boards every last door and window in the farmhouse and wards off the zombies with fire via homemade torches constructed from table legs, a window curtain, and the fireplace fire, brandishing it in front of their faces or setting fire to a couch and kicking it off the porch to keep them at bay. Using his composed demeanor and quick wit, he forcefully asserts authority over the louder and more abrasive Harry and isn't afraid to call out his cowardice, hubris, and at times blatant stupidity. If ever in a crisis, of the natural or supernatural variety, Ben is the man you'd want leading your pack. 

Jones plays him as commanding and composed, offsetting the prevailing atmosphere of panic with a placid demeanor that inspires teamwork in the people around him. It's not that Ben isn't afraid -- he openly admits to the contrary -- but he's lived long enough, especially as a black man in 1960s America, to understand that sitting idly by, wallowing in fear, and waiting to be rescued will get him nowhere.

On the contrasting side is Harry Cooper, the worst man you could ask to have on your team. He may be a husband and father clad in a respectable, businesslike white button-down shirt, with a single-minded devotion to preserve the safety of himself and his two loved ones, but Harry is a coward, plain and simple. When he hears the unmistakably human and feminine screams of Barbra from downstairs, he refuses to leave the comfort of the cellar to help, insisting to himself and his group that their ears are deceiving them. Even after Ben points out the counter-productivity of holing up in the cellar, Harry stubbornly retains his conviction that it's the safest place to hide. Driven by an egotistical need to prove his superiority, Harry is less concerned with doing what's morally correct and most conducive to the welfare of his fellow survivors than he is at proving to them that his ideas are the right ones, while theirs are wrong. He represents the most selfish dimension of humankind, prioritizing the welfare of himself and his loved ones over that of anyone else, which is as repugnant as it is tragically relatable. Because his ego is bigger than his brain or heart, Harry is too grumpy and inflexible to recognize the potentially life-saving value of teamwork, even when it stares him directly in the face.

It's no wonder his relationship with Helen is on the rocks, veering straight into divorce. The only thing they still have in common is their love for their daughter, Karen. Like Harry, Helen prioritizes the safety of Karen above all else, only that doesn't blind her to the value of everyone else's life. She expresses disgust at her soon-to-be-ex-husband's stubbornness and is fully cognizant of his childish desire to be invariably correct. When Harry says that he wasn't going to take any unnecessary chances when he heard Barbra's screaming, Helen incisively retorts, "Of course not, Harry." This woman knows the man she married, maybe more than he knows himself, and certainly more than she knows why she's stayed married to him for so long. Her maternal warmth doesn't stop at her own daughter, either, as she extends compassion and patience to Barbra after she learns of her brother's passing, even shaking out a cigarette to prevent the scent from bothering her. 

Tom and Judy are a longtime teenage couple whose love for each other hasn't wavered in the slightest. Tom is open-minded enough to hear Ben out regarding his ideas, but is conflicted about whose side to take: Ben's, which would entail staying upstairs, or Harry's, which would entail confining himself and Judy in the cellar. After following his gut, Tom becomes a sort of second-in-command to Ben. Similar to Harry's devotion to Helen and Karen, Tom's primary objective is to escape to safety with Judy in his arms. Were it not for the tragic mishap that engulfs them in flames, Tom and Judy would have graduated to the same status as the Coopers (though hopefully without the later-stage acrimony). Judy is terrified of leaving Tom to risk his life, but loyally complies with his requests in the knowledge that they will provide their best chance at survival. Even though she'd rather not be left alone in the cellar with a sick child, Judy reluctantly agrees to temporarily watch over Karen out of the kindness of her heart so the Coopers can come upstairs and listen to the TV.

The dialogue moves the story forward through authentic and intellectual strategizing between the five primary (and mentally cognizant) protagonists, revealing individual personalities along the journey (Harry's stubborn insistence, Ben's no-nonsense pragmatism, self-preservation, and stinging sarcasm, Helen's sensible and empathetic contrast to Harry's delusions of self-assuredness). Romero and Russo reserve any shred of humor for their opening scene, indulging in lighthearted brother-sister banter between Johnny and Barbra before it's swiftly and permanently discarded. 

On account of the micro budget, Romero was forced to shoot Night of the Living Dead on 35 mm black-and-white film, a supposed deficiency that, much like the malfunctioning of the mechanical animatronic shark in Steven Spielberg's Jaws, emerged as one of its greatest assets. The black-and-white aesthetic saturates Night of the Living Dead in an otherworldly, nightmarish ambience fitting for a story of zombie invasion, tethering it to a long-ago time before the term "zombie" even entered the American lexicon. Unfortunately, as atmospheric and eerie as the cinematography is, the constant presence of shadows does betray the shoestring budget Romero was afforded and occasionally obscures the action. As far as black-and-white horror goes, this does not capture it at its most visually resplendent or coherent. The dim lighting makes it difficult to fully immerse oneself in instances of zombie-and-human combat, a choice that surely cannot be artistically intentional. 

The opposite can be said about Romero's presentation of his zombies, which is masterful in ratcheting up apprehension and highlighting their deceptively run-of-the-mill appearances. Romero films his ghoulish reincarnations in wide shots, depicting them as a subhuman swarm, gathered as a collective hive mind, lumbering forward, united in their shared lust for blood and hunger for flesh. By capturing them from a distance in a wide-angle lens, occasionally switching to a facial close-up, Romero accentuates their unassuming, potentially drunken shapes. If you were to look at them from behind a window, they'd appear as normal people who may have just stumbled out of a bar. In Romero's most artfully imaginative use of light and camera placement, he frames Kyra Schon in shadow against a wall as Karen stabs Helen to death with a trowel. The flesh-feast sequence, in which Romero shines his spotlight on the zombies as they munch gleefully on the charred remains of Tom and Judy, is both gruesome for a 1968 horror film and oddly mouth-watering for spareribs (speaking for myself, at least). 

As his own editor, Romero strategically obfuscates the graphic details of his zombie carnage, using physical gestures and thumping sound effects to paint a sufficiently vivid picture in our mind's eye. For an altercation between Ben and the first zombie to break into the farmhouse, Romero films Jones plunging a tire iron downward before cutting to the aftermath: a close-up of a bloody hole in the zombie's forehead. To depict Johnny smacking his head against the base of a gravestone, Romero films Streiner falling in front of it, trusting our imagination to fill in the collision between head and stone. In portraying the murder of Helen at the hands of her reanimated daughter, Romero uses clever shot selection to work around the lack of point-in-flesh penetration, cutting between close-ups of Schon's arms as they thrust a trowel up and down repeatedly, and of Eastman's face, frozen in agony and horror, as Bosco Chocolate Syrup (masquerading as blood) is drizzled off-camera on her chest, streams out of her mouth, and splashes on the wall beneath Schon's stabbing shadow, augmented by the reverberation of Eastman's haunting screams (in an effective but conspicuous result of post-production audio enhancement).

In terms of pacing, Romero moves his narrative at a similar lumbering speed to his antagonists. When Ben and Barbra first become acquainted, Romero zeroes in on Jones boarding up the doors and windows to emphasize Ben's determination to survive and establish a relieving, if short-lived, sense of safety, biding his time before introducing the other inhabitants and manifesting a mood of anticipation for the zombies' impending return. He favors reaction shots to spotlight his characters' emotions when zombies break into the home, Harry's fearful hesitation to let Ben back inside, the flicker of judgment in Ben's eyes as he listens to Barbra ramble on hysterically about her first encounter with a zombie, and the mix of fear and vague approval in Helen's eyes as she watches Harry snatch Ben's rifle off the floor. 

Confining Night of the Living Dead to 1968 even more than its cinematography is its music, an orchestral score composed of screechy strings, thumping percussion, and dramatic brass that's eerie and charmingly old-fashioned, feeding into the ethereal atmosphere conjured by Romero and complementing the action sequences between the humans and zombies. However, when heard by modern ears, it's too corny and of its time to elicit the dread and chills it might have among contemporary audiences, and somewhat overused. When Barbra first enters the farmhouse, Romero randomly cuts to an insert shot of mounted deer heads on the wall, accompanied by a musical stinger, for a thoroughly unnecessary attempt at a cheap false scare. 

As increasingly bizarre and utterly insane as the occurrences are, the TV and radio news broadcasts by Bill Cardille imbue them with an unlikely, documentarian verisimilitude while providing Romero with a natural method to convey crucial exposition to his characters and, by extension, audience. The explanation for this string of mutations is intimated through a brief and strained conversation between a communicative scientist and uncommunicative military officer. As relayed by Cardille's broadcast journalist, a space probe sent to Venus exploded before it could return to Earth. According to the scientist, the probe contained massive amounts of radiation that could be underlying the zombifications of the East Coast. The military officer defensively claims that hasn't yet been proven, so we can only infer who the more credible source is. To Romero's credit, he refrains from either depicting this explosion or confirming its relevance to the plot, granting viewers the freedom to reach their own conclusion. 

The closing montage of motionless images of a homegrown militia, armed with hooks, gathering corpses to burn in a bonfire is chilling in its calm recklessness, evoking Nazism in its portrayal of men blindly following orders without taking the time or exercising the conscience to consider the potential ramifications of their obedience. As a result, Night of the Living Dead concludes on a note of the most bitter and shocking irony. Just as Romero and Russo subverted expectation by positioning a black man as the protagonist, so too do they buck the trend of the conventional, Hollywood-friendly, happy ending. Not only do the writers kill off every last member of their ensemble, but they make it clear that, had Ben not been in the wrong place at the wrong time, he would've emerged as the sole survivor. After secluding himself in the cellar, ironically heeding Harry's advice to life-saving effect, Ben awakens the following morning, alive and physically unharmed. A posse of armed men are walking the streets, systematically shooting every zombie within their visibility in the cranium. Naturally, we assume that Ben is moments away from being rescued. The only problem is that, because these zombies still resemble their previous living selves, it's difficult to distinguish one of them from us -- a difficulty that results in one of horror's most disheartening casualties. 

As Ben sneaks a peek out of a window at the approaching militia, his rifle in hand, Sheriff McClelland (George Kosana) directs a civilian named Vince to fire a single shot between Ben's eyes. Without a moment's thought, Vince complies with the order, and just like that, Ben's life is snuffed out. In executing the boldest move in their script, Romero presents his hero's unjust murder bluntly without the aid of dramatic music to build a sense of impending doom. Some may find this moment -- a white man shooting an unarmed black man under the tutelage of a white sheriff -- to be a commentary on racially motivated police brutality against black people. Personally, I don't view it that way. Instead, I consider Ben's death the unexpected result of a fatal assumption. A classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If Ben hadn't walked up to the window, wielding his rifle, no less, or if he had screamed out that he was uninfected, he would've emerged from the home unharmed and welcomed into the posse. In no way is that meant to diminish or justify his execution, however, which is the result of gun-happy carelessness on the part of men so determined to rid the streets of evil that they fail to realize they're putting the lives of their own citizens at risk. 

Perhaps even more distressing is that, after Ben's shooting, his body is dragged away and tossed into a bonfire along with the re-dead corpses of the zombies. The world will never know that he was a hero who was wrongfully killed. Sheriff McClelland and Vince will never be held accountable or forced to reckon with the psychological consequence of having killed an innocent, living man. In their eyes, and those of the rest of the world, Ben was just another zombie burnt to a crisp. In a way, maybe his death does contain some social commentary after all.

7.7/10