by Jake Hjort, Contributing Writer
Welcome back, fellow time travelers, to another edition of 20th Century Flicks! This month, in a continued effort to check classic cinema off of my list of shame, I’m diving back to the year 1968 to watch Night of the Living Dead. As we are in the midst of spooky season, and I carry on with my journey to cover some of Hollywood’s greatest directors, I wanted to take a look at one of the foundational architects of the horror genre, and the progenitor of the modern zombie: George Romero. An independent filmmaker whose most notable work until then was a segment for Mr. Rogers, Romero took a shoestring budget and transformed it into a genre-defining classic that still influences directors today.
On a relatively quiet day in rural Pennsylvania, Barbra (Judith O’Dea) and Johnny (Russell Streiner) are visiting their father’s grave when they are approached by a lumbering stranger. This stranger, who they soon discover to be a reanimated corpse, kills Johnny and begins to pursue Barbra, who flees to a nearby farmhouse. There, she meets Ben (Duane Jones), a fellow survivor who helps her fend off an ever-increasing horde of undead. Boarded up in the basement, the two also discover young couple Tom and Judy (Keith Wayne, Judith Ridley) and the Cooper family, consisting of Harry, Helen, and their daughter Karen (Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Kyra Schon), who had been bitten by one of the ghouls as they made their way to safety. Together, the group of seven manage conflict, both interpersonal and with the great existential zombie threat, as they are slowly picked off one by one as the evening progresses. As the sun rises, only Ben remains, and his brief moment of hope quickly turns dark, as the sheriff (George Kosana) he thought was coming to rescue him shoots him dead, presumably believing him to be one of the undead.
Given the film’s age and production budget, I have to say that I was a bit surprised by how effective the storytelling and the characters are. Sure, most of these characters are fairly one-dimensional caricatures — Ben is the stoic hero, Harry is paranoid and angry, Tom is naïve and overeager, et cetera — but given a short runtime, and a large cast of actors with very minimal experience, keeping things simple is the best choice they could have made. By minimizing big character turns and arcs, you’re really able to focus on the world and the horror surrounding all of these individuals, and the way in which their unique (even if one-note) perspectives inform the choices that they make. This isn’t to say that any of the performances are bad either; in fact, I’d say that aside from Hardman, who is a bit over the top, everyone else serves the story well. Jones plays a very charismatic leading man, and O’Dea gives a very harrowing portrayal of a women experiencing severe trauma, as Barbra is largely catatonic following the death of her brother.
Of course, you can’t really talk about Jones’ performance and Ben’s character without mentioning that this was a rare film to have Black protagonist in an era where Hollywood was still very white. The film was released in 1968 at the height of the Cold War and civil rights movements, and only a few months following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., so it’s hard to not look at the zombie outbreak as a manifestation of the paranoia and fear of “the other.” Throughout the film, Ben feels pretty cool and competent when facing the ghouls, more threatened by the paranoid Harry and the overzealous sheriff that kills him in the stories final minutes, a moment that particularly stands out today given our current culture of police relations.
So aside from that harrowing moment with the Sheriff in the film’s finale, is this horror movie still scary to a modern audience? Honestly, I’m a bit surprised to say it, but a lot of the scares hold up pretty well. I was expecting a lot of the zombie moments and the kills to be very cheesy, but everything is played fairly straight and grounded, lending a sense of believability to this outbreak as though it is something that actually could happen one day. I wouldn’t say that this is a film that gave me any nightmares, but I was definitely unsettled and on the edge of my seat at several different points, which I definitely didn’t anticipate for a nearly 60-year-old film.
Night of the Living Dead didn’t just popularize zombie media, it essentially invented it. Prior to this film, reanimated dead were fairly niche monsters linked more to Caribbean voodoo than mass outbreaks, but Romero near singlehandedly turned them into the iconic antagonists they are today. Without Night of the Living Dead, we wouldn’t have other classic films such as Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, or Zombieland, not to mention the horror genre at large that Romero has certainly influenced. Of course, it has to be noted that this influence isn’t just due to Romero’s innovation, but also to a clerical error that voided the film’s copyright and put it into the public domain shortly after release. Much like It’s a Wonderful Life’s lapse in copyright protection allowed it to be broadcast freely and become a Christmas classic, the accessibility and ability to replicate Night of the Living Dead surely contributes to its fame and success. Heck, you can literally watch it for free as an embedded video on Wikipedia right now — you don’t even need to pay for a streaming service or video rental.
Night of the Living Dead is, when evaluated through a modern lens, a perfectly solid horror film with some decent scares and good performances. However, when you consider the era that it came out in and the legacy that it has left, its position as an icon makes sense. If I were an audience member watching this horde of undead surrounding these poor people, I feel as though I would have been terrified seeing horrors on the big screen that I had never imagined before.
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