Night of the Living Dead
HORROR-THON 2021 • THEY’RE HERE
10/10
DIRECTOR: George A. Romero
STARRING: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman
RELEASED: 1968
RUNTIME: 1 hour, 36 minutes
WATCH ON: HBO Max, Peacock, Criterion Channel, MGM+, The Roku Channel, or basically anywhere.
SCARE LEVEL: Moderate in the moment, devastating at the end
REWATCH VALUE: High, but don’t plan anything cheerful afterward
Every zombie you’ve ever seen, from the ones on The Walking Dead to the ones in Shaun of the Dead, traces back to a handful of people from Pittsburgh who made this movie for about $114,000. Nobody in the entire film says the word “zombie.” They call them ghouls.
Barbra and her brother Johnny drive out to a rural cemetery to put flowers on their father’s grave. Johnny teases her with a spooky voice. Then a pale man stumbles across the grass and attacks them for real. Johnny goes down. Barbara runs.
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She ends up in an empty farmhouse, and soon Ben shows up. He’s calm, capable, and the only person in this movie who makes a plan. He boards up the windows while the dead gather outside.
Then they find out other people are hiding in the cellar. That includes Harry Cooper, a man who would rather be right than alive. He and Ben fight the whole night about whether to hold the upstairs or hide in the basement. Meanwhile the radio explains that the recently dead are coming back and eating people.
An escape plan with a truck and a gas pump goes very badly. The Coopers’ sick daughter turns out not to be sick, exactly. By morning, one person is left. Then the posse sweeping the countryside arrives, and the ending is so bleak it still knocks the air out of you.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
I’ve watched a lot of horror, and this ending is still one of the most brutal I’ve seen. Someone survives the night, and then they don’t. There’s no monster in that final scene. That’s what makes it so upsetting.
Duane Jones as Ben is incredible. He plays the only competent adult in a house full of people falling apart, and in 1968, a Black leading man in a horror film was rare. Romero said he cast the best actor who auditioned. The movie never comments on it, and it doesn’t really need to.
Barbra, on the other hand, spends most of the movie in shock on a couch. I have notes, but I also get it.
It’s rough in places. The dialogue is stiff, and sometimes you can almost see the lighting rig. The blood is chocolate syrup. It still works because of the black and white, the grainy news broadcasts, and the tight farmhouse make it feel like someone found real footage in a barn.
Because of a copyright mistake, the film ended up in the public domain, and now it’s free basically everywhere. You have no excuse.
FUN FACT FOR YOUR NEXT DINNER PARTY
When the zombies are eating bodies in the burnt-out truck, they were actually eating roasted ham covered in chocolate sauce. The filmmakers joked it was so gross that it was almost a waste of time putting makeup on the zombies because they ended up looking pale and sickening anyway.