Essays and Unsolicited
Opinions: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
(1968)
by Jim Heffernan 
In the
Beginning….
I can't remember the exact year I first saw Night of the Living
Dead but I can recall rather vividly many of the details surrounding my first
experience viewing it. It would have been during the autumn season,
sometime between 1986 and 1988 (which would have made me somewhere between six
and eight years old). A local public access station was running a
marathon of public-domain horror titles as a last minute substitution for a
canceled haunted house that some unknown community program had
scheduled for that year in a nearby town. How I became aware of such
an event is a detail lost to time but what I do recall is the title that
was the selling point to this specific marathon. That film was
"Gorgo", a fairly forgotten UK-produced giant monster movie from the
early 60's that owed more than a little of its creative inspiration to the
success of the Godzilla films.
Once Gorgo had finished, the host of the public access program, a
gentleman speaking and behaving in a silly exaggerated manner that resembled a
low-rent version of the horror movie host prototype that was all the rage
during those days, announced the next movie... Night of the Living Dead. It was
a title that sounded familiar but one I was relatively unfamiliar with beyond
that. At that point, zombies as a horror movie species did nothing for me. I
knew them as the lifeless souls usually brought back by voodoo curses in movies
I didn't care to sit through or the chapter in the horror books I frequently
read that I would usually skip past. I was too young to watch R-rated movies
regularly at that age and in the rare instance that my parents would give in
and let me watch one, I would gravitate more toward the Freddy's, Jason's, and
Michael Myers.
The claustrophobic surroundings of the farmhouse setting felt like
a haunting isolated prison of its own, complete with taxidermied deer heads on
the wall that seemed like they too could come back to life at a moment's notice
and jump out at the already vulnerable protagonist. Peering through the
window, the woman would realize the futility of any escape efforts as her
stalker was still roaming the yard by the farmhouse. She was trapped. In going
upstairs to search for help, the movie's next big scare moment would come as
the woman would find what could only be described as a mangled corpse... so
bloody and devoured that it was nearly impossible to make out. Overwhelmed with
fear, the woman would make a fight or flight dash back down the stairs and out
the front door, only to run straight into the blinding high beams of an
approaching automobile. Almost instantly, another figure would leap into frame
with little time to distinguish whether its intentions were friendly or harmful.
Lucky for the woman, who at this point was near catatonic from trauma, the
figure was very much a good guy, there to help.
Very little of what followed in the film stayed with me after the
first viewing. I recall a little conversation between the two, the reveal of
additional survivors in the basement, and a whole bunch of footage of some four
eyed newscaster guy talking about an "ongoing epidemic". None of it
really resonated with me at that point in time and kind of tuned in and out,
pretty much only keeping it on so I could see what the next movie was in the
marathon. I didn't even remember watching the ending. The next movie was
"Little Shop of Horrors", which I watched even less of. By the
following week, I was on to other movies but the opening chase scene stayed
with me.
Bringing New Life
to Old Genres.
While most commonly defined as a “zombie film”, Romero’s seminal
horror classic also deserves recognition for reworking another popular if
widely ignored subgenre of films known unofficially as “siege” pictures. These films were generally built around the
idea of a group of people, often strangers, trapped in a confined location, and
forced to band together to get out.
Prior to Night of the Living Dead, the more known examples from this
genre were westerns like Howard Hawkes’ Rio Bravo and lower-rent creature
features like The Killer Shrews. Romero would
attribute a great deal of his inspiration for Night’s concept to the 1964
Vincent Price film, The Last Man on Earth (a sort-of one-man siege picture,
based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend).
It is in using the “siege film” template as a backbone for their script that
Romero and co-writer John Russo arguably got the most creative mileage out of
their zombie concept. The idea of
countless undead bodies slowly marching from out of the darkness toward this one
farmhouse in the middle of nowhere is as imaginative a use of the formula as
any that came before. It would not only
transform the way filmmakers used zombies but also in how they would come to
approach the mechanics of a “siege film”.
The trapped humans inside the farmhouse are seven strangers (a
truck driver, a catatonic woman, a young couple, and a married middle-aged
couple with a wounded child). Romero
makes good use of media sources like television and radio broadcasts to paint a
broader picture of the epidemic going on outside while also cutting away at the
appropriate times to see the growing hoard of “misshapen monsters” waiting in
the shadows. It’s easy to see the
influence this would have on future filmmakers like John Carpenter, whose 1976
sophomore effort, Assault on Precinct 13,
portrayed gang members attacking a decommissioned police station with the same
lifeless and mechanical instincts as Romero’s zombies. Likewise, Frank Darabont’s 2007 sleeper, The Mist, based on a Stephen King
best-seller of the same name, found Sunday morning shoppers hiding out in a
grocery store, from a similar far reaching disaster involving creatures of an
unknown origin. The marriage of the
siege concept to the horror/science fiction genre is still growing strong today
with fresh contributions from everyone from Robert Rodriguez to M. Night Shyamalan. It’s hard to imagine what so many of these
glimpses of cinematic post-apocalypse would look like without the existence of
the Romero “Dead” film.
Exploring
Conflict at 24 frames per second.
One of the more timeless qualities of Night is its portrayal of
human conflict in the midst of turmoil. Almost immediately, two of the male
characters, Ben and Harry Cooper, are at odds over the survival strategy for
the entire group. Cooper believes that hiding out in the basement until they
are rescued is the best way to stay alive while Ben wants to remain upstairs in
a more open space so they have room to escape if the zombies get in. Ben
theorizes that with only one way in or out, the basement would be inescapable
if the undead army got through the door. Cooper argues that one door in means
only one door to protect where numerous doors and windows means having to
constantly stay on top of each. The argument in itself is almost a moot point
to Romero. Both men are so married to their own point of view that it overtakes
everything else, even survival. Their stubbornness takes on a "with
me or against me" ultimatum where the remaining members of the group are
forced to choose sides or face certain wrath. It is in this moment where the storytelling takes on a more
allegorical approach. The zombies become merely a symbol for any disaster. The
human characters have exposed themselves as their own true enemies.
While the concept of fear and paranoia as a catalyst for tribal-like self-destruction was hardly uncharted territory in popular culture in '68 (a classic Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" had done a great job with similar material), Romero definitely earns credit for pushing away from a conventional approach to how these themes are explored. In particular, he guides the audience toward developing a sense of trust with Ben (the de facto hero, played by Duane Jones). He is painted far more sympathetically than the belligerent and boorish Harry Cooper. He is shown to have an admiral amount of strength, intelligence, and survival skills while Cooper comes off as kind of loud and overbearing to the point where even his own wife is getting tired of him. Because of this, Ben's idea ends up seeming more attractive. But in the end, he ends up being wrong. The zombies do get through the windows and doors upstairs and completely engulf the place. It is only through abandoning his own plan and escaping to the basement that Ben escapes. At this point, he has already killed Cooper and watched the rest of the survivors perish as well. It is Cooper's idea, the very one he has been vocally opposed to since the beginning, that ends up saving him. At least, from the zombies.
NOT All Massage
Parlors Offer Happy Endings....
Night of the Living Dead features one of the more memorable
downbeat endings in film. It's surely not the first time a horror movie ending
went that way (though the Hays Code, established in the 1930's, had more or
less restricted endings that showed evil triumphing at the end of studio
pictures) but it still remains one of the most defining. After all of the other
characters have met their demise, either through flawed planning or turning on
each other, only Duane Jones' Ben, the hero of the story, has lasted through
the night. With the sun rising on a new day and an organized posse of armed
locals closing in on the farmhouse, the film seems to be moving optimistically
toward an eventual rescue for the only survivor of the evening. As he glimpses
through the window though, the men outside seem to confuse him for one of the
undead and blow him away on sight without a second thought. It is here where
the coincidental casting of a black actor takes on an uncomfortable subtext as
the all-white clan of white men drag his corpse off to be burned without
ceremony amongst a large pile of the dead. The chilling newsreel-style black
and white photography combined with the appropriately ghoulish library music
make for one of the more unsettling finales ever committed to celluloid. Even
as this heavily-armed militia moves their way through the countryside, blasting
away the undead, Romero doesn't leave us with much optimism. We get the sense
that society has lost. All attempts to handle the issue have resulted in grave
loss. As a film produced at a time when the United States was still
heavily involved in the Vietnam War, the wears of that conflict certainly seem
evident in the story without it ever once being mentioned.
While it might be inaccurate to assign Romero sole credit for
pioneering the transition away from more textbook happy endings into bleaker,
more ambiguous conclusions, he certainly should be credited to sticking to his
guns when it came to how his film ended. Reportedly, his decision to deal with
smaller distributors for the picture was largely due to the fact that every
major studio with any interest wanted a more optimistic ending before they
would agree to handle it. Twelve years prior, Don Siegel had infamously run
into a similar problem with his "Invasion of the Body Snatchers",
ultimately leading to Allied Artists, the studio in charge of it, opting to
have its chillingly powerful ending altered with narrations and added scenes to
give it a "less pessimistic" feel. A lot of the impact of
Siegel's original ending, which saw a screaming Kevin McCarthy declaring that
the pod people had already begun infiltrating our society, would wind up being
compromised by a tacked-on epilogue that explained how the military had
intercepted the pods in time and seemingly vanquished the threat. Siegel and
producer Walter Wagner both had very mixed feelings about the changes but were
largely powerless to do much. Thankfully for Romero and Russo, the culture had
changed significantly since. The wholesome ideals being sold to Americans in the
1950's were no longer being digested by a generation caught up in the horrors
of the Vietnam War. Audiences were now coming around to the idea that not
everything was as glamorous as they'd been lead to believe. A revelation that
would even prove sobering for Romero and company when during a trip out of town
to sell their finished movie, news came out through the radio that prominent
Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., had been assassinated on a motel
balcony in Memphis.
What makes the conclusion of Night all the more powerful are the
small, fleeting moments of optimism that Romero sprinkles throughout the film,
slight reminders of what could be if the characters functioned in a more
tactful and unified manner. An ill-fated escape plan involving a pickup truck
and a nearby gas pump briefly shows heated adversaries, Ben and Cooper, working
together unselfishly toward a common goal.
When the plan falls apart in a literal explosion, costing the remaining
survivors their only chance at a getaway, the ugly side of their humanity
resurfaces. Cooper, who just moments
prior, was willing to work for the good of the group, is now seen cowering away
from the door, unwilling to remove the boards that are preventing Ben from
getting back in, even as he yells urgently for help.
The Trials and
Tribulations of Distributing the Dead.
Much of the enduring popularity of "Night of the Living
Dead" can be arguably attributed to a distribution error that likely wound
up costing the rights holders millions of dollars in royalties. When Walter
Reade, the company originally in charge of distributing the film pulled the
title card to have it replaced (the original title was "Night of Anubis"),
the new card came back without a copyright notice. Due to copyright laws at the
time, this allowed it to slip into public domain, which essentially meant that
anybody with a print of the film could run it publicly for profit without
having to pay for the rights to do so. The problem continued during the
advent of home video and cable television with many networks and budget video
labels also capitalizing on the mistake. Latent Image likely lost millions. The
silver lining here, as mentioned previously, is the copyright blunder made the
film significantly more accessible than most other films. Because so many
films, television commercials, and clip shows were allowed to incorporate
footage from the movie without paying licensing fees, it was able to maintain a
much higher visibility in the market which presumably strengthened its
following considerably once the midnight grindhouse theater and drive-in
screenings had run their course. Just how much of an impact its public domain
status had on its shelf life is anybody's guess but all my early exposure to it
came through avenues that likely wouldn't have existed if the film were tied
down to a specific rights owner at the time.
Beyond distribution errors and rights problems, the filmmakers would suffer additional headaches, not long after the film's initial theatrical run when a flood would completely destroy the basement where a good deal of the production materials including the master print of the film were being stored. Just a few years before George Romero's death though, a duplicate negative would resurface allowing for a new restoration of the film to be put together and eventually released in time for the 50th anniversary of the film. Included among the surviving materials were sections of a long lost workprint of the film with its original title card and unused dailies and alternate takes from the shoot. Both would be included in a 2018 Criterion Collection release.
George Romero and
the Legacy of the “Living Dead”.
In the wake of George Romero's death from lung cancer, last year,
much of social media was understandably ablaze with tributes from fans,
colleagues, and fellow filmmakers alike, all paying homage to an innovative
talent whose work had meant so much to them on a personal or professional
level. In attempting to transcribe my own such tribute, I realized that
looking back at "Night of the Living Dead", in particular, its
influence was as multi-layered as its message. The most obvious thing to
say would be that it changed and forever shifted the image of zombies in modern
cinema and popular culture. Anything zombie-related that came
after it was undeniably and unavoidably the result of what George, Jack
Russo, and all the Latent Image crew had put together back in 1968. Return of
the Living Dead. The Walking Dead. 28 Days Later. All
children of George's unique vision. And that's to say nothing of the
massive outpouring of Italian zombie films that came out in the 70's and 80's
(which George further influenced with "Dawn of the Dead" in
'78). But to pull the curtain back even further, "Night" also
showed how easily and effectively horror films, even those not specifically
connected to the zombie subgenre, could be made on a lower budget level.
Films like The Evil Dead, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Blair Witch Project, and
the like seemed undeniably built from the same guerilla filmmaking foundation
as Night. Horror, as arguably best exemplified by Night's shoestring
budget, remains one of the rare genres that not only doesn't require an
abundance of expensive resources to pull off but in many cases, actually
benefits from having less. So much of scaring an audience is less about
designing the visual and more about allowing the greatest scares to come from
the viewer's subconscious. And "Night" pulled that off as
imaginatively as any horror film I have ever seen. It conserves its big
zombie scares and uses them masterfully at the times where they cost the most
impact. Scenes of the undead appearing from the shadows and moving slowly
toward the farmhouse are the stuff that nightmares are made of. Even more
interestingly when the sequences are just simple dialogue scenes with
characters talking about the atrocities they have already experienced or that
could be waiting just around the corner, the sights we already have been shown
do the job of informing the ones that will only ever play out inside our
heads.
"Night of the Living Dead" is arguably one of the single greatest examples of filmmakers innovating through necessity. Some of its strongest, most unique creative contributions might only exist because of the limitations that Romero faced. Though color film had long become the industry norm by 1968, the choice of black and white film stock made "Night" stand out, both highlighting its nightmarishly surrealistic qualities and probably hiding a few of its low-budget production blemishes by not revealing them in full color. The black and white decision was more or less, always written off as being more driven by finances (the cost of shooting in color would have been substantially more expensive in those days) than artistic motivation but it is hard to deny that it is a choice that greatly benefited the aesthetic of the picture. Such is also the case with the film's soundtrack. Foregoing the traditional method of hiring a composer to produce an original music score, Romero and company instead carefully pieced together their film's musical backbone utilizing stock music selections from various library sources. While the music cues had been used fairly regularly in various genre pictures (most notably in 1959's "Teenagers from Outer Space"), its use in Night would prove so effective that it would ultimately be linked permanently to in nearly every facet of popular culture. Perhaps the most effective cost-cutting choice to come out of the production was the use of the zombies themselves (or ghouls, as the script most often calls them) as the creatures of choice for the allegorical American nightmare. Whether or not, there was ever any serious consideration to use any other type of cinematic monster like a werewolf, vampire, or alien is anybody's guess but given the budget restraints, the zombie feels every bit the perfect choice. The zombies used in the movie are from a stylistic standpoint, pretty standard. They look like regular people in clothes. The only real distinction is in their completely lifeless appearance, which is owed more to performance and creative direction than to any kind of elaborate effects work. It would seem arguable that Romero's reinvention of the zombie genre, the defining element of his film career, was likely more economical in its origin than it was a premeditated concept to turn the horror genre upside down.
Regardless of the reasons why it came to be, "Night of the
Living Dead" is film school to me. It is the great American independent
film. It built the foundation that became the exploitation film movement, where
big ideas became the answer when big stars were not affordable. It borrowed the
most spectacular elements from the established horror flicks from the eras that
proceeded it (the atmosphere of the Universal horror flicks, the
envelope-pushing shocks of Hitchcock's Psycho, the shameless marketing of the
William Castle pictures) and used it to influence and inspire all that would
come after it. The door was now open, not just for different kinds of
horror films, but for all types of low-budget genre fare with a brain and a
social conscious. Few films, if any, have provided such food for thought
for cash-strapped aspiring filmmakers outside of the Hollywood studio system.
While some of the lesser ones took a more straight forward approach to George's
work, creating cheap imitations of "Night" with their friends and
family. Some more attentive viewers took a closer examination on why it worked
and used that influence to create more inspired and imaginative works. There is
so much I am still learning from "Night of the Living Dead", both as
a filmmaker and as a fan.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Heffernan is a shameless self promoter. To learn more about this, check out the Facebook pages of his two films, The Angry World of Brian Webster and Destroy All Sisters, both debuting at The Regent theatre in Arlington, Mass on Thursday, February 7, 2019. Purchase tickets HERE.
