Bill 'Chilly Billy' Cardille .... Field reporter
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| Even ancient Rome was affected. |
Regarded as the grandfather of the modern zombie film, Night of the Living Dead transformed the zombie from the (more realistic) human afflicted by a voodoo trance into the flesh eating undead. It may not have been the first film to treat zombies this way, but because it’s a great film the transformation stuck. Gore-wise Night of the Living Dead may not be shocking any more, or frightening, But it is compelling and intense. Its combination of black and white photography and grisly horror is particularly unsettling, and gives the film a grimy, realistic quality.
The opening scene of Barbara and Johnny visiting their father’s grave is justifiably famous. Johnny jokes with Barbara about how the graveyard used to scare her as a child. When they see a man slowly walking towards them, Johnny starts taunting Barbara with "He’s coming to get you, Barbara". Barbara tries to apologise to the man for Johnny’s rudeness but he attacks her. Johnny tries to help, but is knocked out, and Barbara flees to a deserted farmhouse.
She finds that an African American man, Ben, is already in the house. And while she is almost catatonic from fear, he is resourceful and determined. After boarding up almost the whole house they find that there are five other people hiding in the basement who claim they didn’t know what was going on upstairs while Ben was doing all that work.
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Even a crying woman couldn't stop
the undead hordes. |
One of them, Harry, is a short-tempered, opinionated, loud-mouthed white man who thinks it’s crazy that they’d stay upstairs when they could just lock themselves in the basement. Ben thinks the basement is a death trap, and he has a shotgun to back him up. But Harry openly bristles under his command, and the two of them clash. Thankfully, their rivalry is written well enough that it doesn’t turn into a tiresome series of shouting matches, as has happened in a lot of Night of the Living clones.
The movie is paced perfectly, the zombie menace builds up in a way commensurate with the tensions inside the house. Information on the zombies is given out first via radio, and later when they find a TV. And while this is technically just exposition, it’s done in an entertaining way and is spaced out to ease up the tension and avoid endless scenes of people boarding up windows. The last act is a perfect example of a horror film pay off, the threat has been built up, the tensions allowed to grow, until things explode.
Romero has said that he laces all his zombie films with social commentary. In Night of the Living Dead he cast an African American as the hero (the race wasn’t specified in the script) who saves the white girl, in an era when civil rights was still very much an ongoing debate. Add to this the fact that all of the mindless zombies have pasty white faces, and Harry the intolerant bull-headed white man wants to hide in a safe place and not worry about anyone else. We have an African-American hero who may be up against the undead in the text of the film, but is faced with racism is the subtext. And then there’s the ending, which I won’t reveal, but has been purposefully left open to interpretation.
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In those days everyone dropped
what they were doing when Burl
Ives was on TV. |
I don’t know if the choice of filming in black and white was part of this metaphor (in 1968 it was a choice). But it looks so perfect that it makes me wonder why black and white isn’t used much for horror any more. Perhaps it’s because the majority of black and white horror films didn’t go for grisly gore, and most horror films are cheap knock-offs of each other. When people came to copy Night of the Living Dead they copied the zombies, and the arguments, rather than things worth copying like cinematography and theme.
Night of the Living Dead is a great film, which deserves its place in the highest echelon of horror films. Like many much imitated films, the imitators got the basics right, but often didn’t grasp what made the original work so well. Russo and Romero not only wrote a finely crafted script, they had fresh ideas, both horror-wise and in a social commentary sense. That’s why this film was, and still is, great.
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