Night of the Living Dead

Story

A car drives along a rural road amid rolling hills. The car veers onto a cemetery road. Johnny (Russell Streiner) holds up a wreath he plans to place on his father’s grave, complaining of the inconvenience as his sister yells at him. A storm quickly builds up. (but strangely no rain). As Barbra kneels to pray, Johnny tries to rush things along.

In the distance, a man is walking. Barbra (Judith O’Dea) hurriedly walks toward the man as Johnny declares in a camp Boris Karloff voice, “They’re coming to get you, Barbra!” The slow-moving figure approaches Barbra, then he suddenly lurches toward her, and Johnny intervenes. Johnny struggles with the rage-driven man, falls, and hits his head on a tombstone. Johnny lies dead as the man chases Barbra, who flees and then collapses. She makes it to the car but doesn’t have the keys. The man furiously tries to get inside, then picks up a rock and smashes the car window. Barbra releases the emergency brake and slides down a hill, but her car soon crashes into a tree, and she flees on foot, still being chased. In the distance, she sees a white farmhouse and runs toward it.

She runs inside the farmhouse and locks the door behind her as thunder crashes. Grabbing a large knife, she carefully checks the rooms. In a sudden jump scare, she confronts mounted animal heads on the wall. The man remains outside, still trying to get in. She tries to use the telephone, but only strange sounds come through. Two new, slow-moving men appear, moving very similarly to the first. Then, she walks upstairs, eyeballing a decomposing corpse. Barbra runs outside, directly into the blinding headlights of a newly arriving car, from which a black man steps out. The man, armed with a tire iron, rushes both of them inside. The black man, Ben (Duane Jones), asks Barbra if she knows where the keys to the outside gas pump are.

Ben immediately takes charge, while Barbra is in shock. Barbra begins to yell at Ben; she is totally overwhelmed. Two zombies outside are smashing Ben’s car, and he attacks them with his tire iron. One zombie emerges from a closet inside the house, and Ben uses his tire iron to pierce the creature’s forehead. Zombies approach the open front door. Ben tries to convince Barbra to find something with which to board up the house, but her addled mind doesn’t understand. Ben burns a zombie outside, which frightens the others, and he secures the house by finding wooden planks and boarding up windows and doors. Barbra pleads with him to go out and find Johnny, but Ben says he’s already dead. She finally passes out.

Ben turns on the radio, looking for a signal. “There is an epidemic of mass murder being committed by a virtual army of unidentified assassins ... It seems to be a sudden, general explosion of mass homicide.” The radio announcer goes on to say they are ordinary people who appear to be in a trance. Ben moves a sofa just outside the front door and sets it afire, scaring off the ghouls as he seeks shelter inside. Ben finds a rifle and ammo in a closet and brings them to the front room. The radio announcer reports that these roaming killers are eating the flesh of their victims.

Two men, one with a piece of metal, emerge from the cellar as Barbra screams. The father, Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman), and Tom (Keith Wayne) say they stayed down below to protect themselves, but now they’re upstairs to help. Harry wants the crew to move to safety in the cellar, while Ben says the zombies cannot get in on the boarded-up first or second floor. The men argue over where to stay: upstairs or downstairs. Hands reach out for the humans through the gaps in the wooden planks. Ben starts shooting at the zombies outside, but he doesn’t put them down unless he gets a headshot. Ben tells Harry to go downstairs because he’s the boss upstairs, and Harry is the boss downstairs. But Tom calls Judy (Judith Ripley) upstairs to stay as Harry rushes downstairs.

Downstairs, besides Harry, are his wife, Helen (Marilyn Eastman), and his daughter, Karen (Kyra Schon). Karen lies on a wooden table, bitten by a zombie and near death. Helen is very upset when Harry chooses to remain down here, even though there is a radio upstairs. Helen forces Harry and her to go upstairs, and Judy returns downstairs to watch over Karen. The TV announcer announces that people who recently died have been returning to life and seeking human victims. The reporter announces that rescue stations have been established to protect citizens. The announcer goes on to say that a satellite orbiting Venus was destroyed by NASA because it was exposed to high levels of radiation. That radiation is believed to be causing this phenomenon on Earth. Ben, knowing Helen is worried, asks her to switch places with Judy again. An announcer says the reanimated bodies must be immediately burned. Ben and Tom volunteer to make a run for gas.

Breaking open the door, Ben and Tom are armed and ready to drive the truck to get gas. Ben carries a furniture post as a torch, and Harry is upstairs, ready to throw Molotov cocktails at the wandering zombies. The zombies immediately back away from the trunk. Ben fights off zombies as Tom starts the truck, soon joined by Judy, who runs outside to be with Tom. Zombies are set on fire as Tom drives off with Ben swinging the torch. Arriving at the gas pump, Tom swings the nozzle, spilling gasoline and setting the truck on fire. Tom and Judy race the truck toward the house, still on fire. Tom stops to exit the vehicle, but Judy’s dress is caught on something, and the couple perishes as the truck explodes. Ben, still at the pump, starts to swing the torch to keep the zombies at a safe distance. Ben runs to the house, but Cooper has locked the front door, so he bursts through. Ben punches Harry four times for betraying him after they finish barricading the door. Zombies gather around the truck to eat smoldering flesh and organs. Meanwhile, on the latest television broadcast, it is revealed that these creatures can be killed by a shot to the head. “Kill the brain, and you kill the ghoul!” Another man says, “They’re dead; they’re all messed up.”

The ghouls are finally about to break through the front door as Harry mans a rifle and tells Helen to go to the cellar, but Ben swings a plank at him, and Ben shoots Harry in the stomach. Ben still manages to hobble downstairs. He crawls to Karen’s body and collapses. Upstairs, zombies are attacking Helen. Karen, now reanimated from being bitten by zombies, is eating parts of her father as Helen enters. She approaches her mother with a garden trowel and stabs Helen to death about 12 times. The zombies finally get past the front door and enter the house, with Johnny as the first.

Ben goes downstairs, barricading the door, as Barbra is trapped upstairs. And the ghouls filter into the house. Harry, dead, starts to reanimate, and Ben shoots him in the head. And then Helen, pierced with a garden trowel, also returns to zombie life, and Ben once again shoots her. The horde of zombies amble around aimlessly upstairs.

The next morning, the house is quiet as birds sing, a helicopter flying over. The copter lands amid marauding bands of zombie hunters. One volunteer tells the others to take about five men and a few dogs and check out the house behind some trees. Ben is tired and alone, hearing dogs bark in the background. Ben ventures upstairs as the men shoot stray zombies in the open fields. The so-called leader calls for a bonfire to be started to burn bodies. As Ben points his rifle at the approaching men, he is hit in the head by a rifle shot, and he’s ordered to the bonfire. Credits appear.

Critique

As the 1960s ended and the 1970s began, the popularity of the independent, lower-budgeted horror film began. The major studios failed to produce enough product for the home video VHS market. George Romero and crew were producing industrial films and commercials, but the close-knit friends pooled their money to produce a feature film. Once made, they failed to secure a major studio distribution deal, so they had to get creative. Night of the Living Dead had the extremely popular gimmick of showing ultra blood and gore, something mainstream studios kept to social limits. But the film was considered a cult film suitable for attracting midnight horror audiences. Word of mouth for these midnight shows was the best ballyhoo for success. Eventually, small distributor Continental Films acquired the indie for national distribution, and the film’s positive word of mouth created a new release formula, and the lower-budget film was a major success.

The film was innovative for its entirely unknown cast, except for popular horror host Bill Cardille, who was well known in the Pittsburgh area. The film was cutting-edge for the amount of visceral horror on display. Its effective use of canned music was also innovative and well-layered. And its widespread use of friends and neighbors also led to the film’s popularity. To illustrate extreme gore, we can just cite two sequences, but many more exist. First, the sequence at the gas pump where the car catches on fire, then explodes. The ghouls eat the well-cooked flesh. They tear at the flesh, they pull out intestines, and eat them. They bite on organs, livers, hearts, and kidneys. Never were such vivisections shown so graphically and so slowly. Second, where the dead but slowly animated corpse of Karen rises from the table, grabs the trowel, and penetrates her mother’s body with repeated stabbings. True, most of this mayhem is shown in shadow and silhouette, but the scene of a child murdering her mother is truly breaking a taboo.

Unlike most low-budget films, Night of the Living Dead is well-paced and action-packed. The zombies just don’t appear until the end; they're constantly present throughout. The horrific, graphic sequences pile on one after another. The film is gloriously paced throughout.

And it is amazing to think this movie reignited the forgotten zombie genre, when its ever-growing population of zombies is mostly referred to as ghouls. The creatures actually conform more to the ghoul destination than to the zombie one. They are the living dead who return to life to eat the flesh of the living. There is no supernatural definition of zombie here ... it’s all explained scientifically. So the revamped zombie genre might be better served by calling it the ghoul genre.

The performances by locals and some theater-trained actors are very naturalistic and convincing. Even the ghouls perform as slow-moving curiosities who demonstrate an inner being as though they are slow-moving babies learning their new mode of existence. They move as if they were learning to exist in new ways all over again.

And the humans inside the house are distinct characters: The leader/survivor, the mother, the teenager/girlfriend, the shellshocked woman, the cowardly father. Their acting range may not be very extensive, but their depth of character is fine for what their character requires.

Also, it must be remembered that, unless you were Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte, you did not find yourself in the lead role in a motion picture if you were black. The fact that an unknown black actor, Duane Jones, starred in the picture was innovative at the end of the 1960s. Black actors did not play the lead actor in 1968. And brutally killing him off in the final scenes is one filled with irony. The zombie hunters don’t even check to see if the character of Ben is still human, not yet a living dead, which is preposterous. How many innocent victims have been and will be killed and burned in this zombie crisis? One thing the ending clearly demonstrates is the cruelty humans exhibit compared to zombies. Zombies feed on the dead after killing them due to instinct and the need for food. Humans face zombies as hunters, simply shooting prey and giving little concern as to whether they are still living or dead. The humans know better, but not so the zombies.

The documentary feel of the movie is one of its principal strengths, adding you-are-there perspective that actually covers up the amateur acting, which makes people perform as if they are living in this Western Pennsylvania area. These aren’t actors as much as they are actual locals who play themselves.

The back yard movie came into its own with Night of the Living Dead in 1968. Instead of the proliferation of mainstream studio releases, all the established rules could be broken with independent productions that weren’t expected to be distributed through traditional avenues. It was the birth of a new kind of film which would dominate the “B” market. Night of the Living Dead was much more than a classic horror gem; it showed that films could be successfully produced outside Hollywood, following new and unproven rules. The wild, wild west of filmmaking was off and running.

ZOMBIES ROAM AIMLESSLY AROUND THE BURNING CAR.

KAREN (KYRA SCHON), REVIVED FROM THE DEAD, BEGINS TO EAT HER FATHER.

garysvehla509@gmail.com

DO YOU LIKE DARK CINEMA LIKE WE DO?

Submit an article or a critique of an article; Tell us how to improve the website!