“If you want to see what turns a B movie into a classic … don’t miss Night of the Living Dead. It is unthinkable for anyone seriously interested in horror movies not to see it“
REX REED
Who made it?
Directed by George Romero | Written by George Romero & John Russo | Director Of Photography George Romero | Special Effects Marilyn Eastman and Karl Hardman
Who’s in it?
Duane Jones | Judith O’Dea | Marilyn Eastman | Karl Hardman | Judith Ridley | Keith Wayne
If you weren’t watching this, you might have been watching…
Bullit / The Odd Couple / Hang ‘Em High
Production notes and Wikipage and whatnot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Living_Dead
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063350/
What’s it all about?
We open on a low budget. Its black and white and sixties looking, grainy film stock. Library music pulled from a file probably called “The Best Of Scary Dan-Dan-Daaaa Orchestra Tunes Volume 3” tell us something’s either up or about to be up. It’s any town USA, a remote agricultural highway, all spidery dead trees and old farm buildings. Could be anywhere. Its’ Pennsylvania actually. But I’m pretty certain that, in 1968, even Pennsylvania, the 2nd state to join the union, considered itself the definition of “could be anywhere.”
The credits state this is going to be an IMAGE TEN Production (a company still going today, although pretty much like many the one-hit-wonder, living off its sole glory and still peddling Living Dead trivia, merch and factoids on its site here: https://www.image-ten.com/). The music supervisor has decided to fade in some eerie sci-fi theremin to unsettle us more. And what’s this? A dull saloon car, a boxy ‘67 Pontiac LeMans idles past us on the road, two folk inside. And the oddly perfunctory titles appear giving us a matter of fact “Night Of The Living Dead” over more woodland and blank winter pasture.
No dripping blood, no gory splashes. What follows as the we watch the car continue, enter a cemetery – with what looks like a bullet pocked sign – are your basic Image Ten production credits: make up, props, special effects, hair styles. And, standing there like a lone student film project entitled “cultural symbolism” a fluttering US flag.
Let’s meet the drivers. At the wheel, Barbra. Youngish. Twenties, I’d say. Standard 60s garb when everyone dressed like their parents the moment they left college. Flat centre parting, rain coat, sensible low heel. In the passenger seat, it’s Johnny. Or what you’d get if you ordered “wise-ass pen-pushing ad exec desk jockey putz” from Etsy. Dark suit, neat geek parting, spotty tie, pocket-protector, big heavy black specs, cigarette.
We learn through some clever snappy back and forth that these are brother and sister, driven up for 3hrs to visit the old man’s grave and put some flowers down, as demanded by a frail old mother who won’t make the 6hr trip herself. He’s whining, she’s sighing, he’s bored and wants candy, she wants to get the whole thing over with. He can’t understand why they don’t use the same flowers every year and can’t even remember what dad looked like. If you have a younger brother, you’ll know the type. If you have an older sister, you’ll know the type. I have both, since you ask.
Some smart dialogue tells us summer is coming to an end, so we know its light to save on camera costs, but it’s still 8pm and will be dark soon. The car radio is playing up, a hint of something bigger than them out there somewhere. A flat, 60’s, manly broadcast voice giving crackly “testing testing” and “back on the air after technical interruptions…” Still, let’s get it done. They pile out and start the search for the headstone to dump the bouquet.
Thunder claps. As they wander and Johnny goofs around, they spot a looming darkly suited figure walking slow and stiff a few plots away. Seemingly lost? Drunk? Homeless? The two reminisce and recall silly teasing and hi-jinks as kids when J would tease B. Like the tiresome office wag, Johnny puts on his spooky “Peter Lorre” voice and starts giving it lots of “they’re coming to get you Barbra!” like a knob. Brothers, eh? “Here he comes now!” he continues as the solo stranger lumbers dully toward them. We see him up close. Older. Forties? Shabby and torn clothes. Pale skin, heavy creased face.
And then, from nowhere, he’s on them. Lurching, attacking and grabbing. He wrestles Johnny, suit tearing, glasses flying, struggling among the stones.
They tumble and flop like men in a real fight (no Hollywood punch-up this. Remember Hugh Grant and Colin Firth slapping and toppling in Bridget Jones? It’s more like that). But whoopsie, as Barbara screams and gasps, Johnny goes down with a CRACK, temple catching the edge of a stone. He’s out cold. The composer reminds us this is terrifying with more orchestral dan dan dahhhhh!
We’re just six minutes in and 50% of our cast down.
Barbra, hysterical, makes a desperate run for the car, half terrified for her life and half scared of abandoning her brother to his fate. The figure stumbles after her, determined, gurning and clawing. She trips! Shoe lost! Stumbles up. To the car! Locks the door studs, his grey tormented face is at the window. He’s pulling and slamming, a crazy wide eyed but blank face, desperate like a sick dog. He grabs up a fist sized rock and shatters the passenger glass.
He’s climbing in, Barb’ fighting him off. Struggling with the controls, Barb manages to get the car to pull away. Thundering brass and timpani accompany her as she swerves and lurches through the cemetery, sliding the car up against a tree with a screech. Breathless, she’s out of the car and running. In the distance the figure lurches madly after her with dead steps. Onto a road! Texas Chainsaw style, with all the dan dan daaaaa music giving it plenty of elbows and strings, she hurls her way down the tree lined tarmac. What’s that between the trees? Over the hill? A house! Plain, white and simple. And outside it, a fuel pump! Heaving herself forwards, Barb gets through the brush, to the steps, to the porch, to the door! Slamming. Breathlessly she searches around the house. But he’s still coming! A back door! She’s into the home!
Inside it’s darkly underlit, sparce and spare shot with gothic expressionistic shadows at Burtony angles. Slams door behind her. Thunder and woodwind surround her. She is alone? We only hope help is at hand.
(If you fancy taking a trip, the nice people at Image Ten have a computer generated 3D walkthrough you can enjoy here: https://www.image-ten.com/virtual-house)
Barbra explores and we follow. It’s a simple house, a farmy house. Gingham and lace and dark wood and lino and cork. She takes a kitchen knife from a drawer and creeps room to room. It’s untidy, papers scattered. The owners left in a hurry? Furniture knocked over. On the walls, deer heads stare, on the floor animal rugs lie. To the window, Barb peers out. The dumb grey figure is still there, a few dozen yards from the porch. He seems to be confused by the washing line like a shell-suited executive middle manager on The Crystal Maze. Shocked but practical, Barb is at the phone, rattling the connectors in that way that I’ve never understood. The line is dead. She checks the window again. Oh lord. It seems that the ruckus has gathered a gawping crowd like a Covent Garden mime. Outside are more pale, drunken figures, looming and lurching. Oddly, they’re all in suits so it looks a little like a convention for fans of The Jam or a stoned reenactment of Reservoir Dogs.
Desperate for help, Barb decides to check upstairs…only to be stopped in her tracks by…URGH! What appears to be half-eaten, decomposing rotten remains of a human skull. Body still attached. One wide, gnawed-eye staring.
Well that’s enough of that shit, and Barb is back down the stairs, only to be suddenly blinded by the piecing headlights of a new car arriving. Thank Christ! Through the door he comes and we feel we can somewhat relax. Young, black, male and healthy in a smart shirt and tidy crew-cut, he looks like the type you’d want on a camping trip. Armed with a tire iron, he fights off the grabbing monsters, pulling them away from a terrified Barbra. Locking doors, cautious and methodical, it appears this ain’t his first corral. “Don’t worry about him,” Ben says (for tis manly Ben, our hero). “I can handle him. Probably be a lot more of them when they find out about us.”
Ben is now very much in charge. A man with a plan. He moves about the rooms, purposefully and deliberately for the next few minutes, talking fast, talking solutions. His truck is out of gas. Is there a key to the pump? He’s checking windows and doors, moving furniture, setting up. He’s calm but firm with dumbstruck Barb. But he can get nothing from her silent, shell-shocked face.
Ben’s up the stairs, searching for people, searching for weapons, searching for the key to the fuel pump. But…”Jesus…” he stumbles over the corpse on the landing. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he says (not, predictably, for the last time). Blood from the corpse drips from the upper bannisters, splashing onto a trembling Barbra. “What’s happening?!” she repeats over and over. Understandably so.
We’ll talk later in this piece about the making-of and the direction, script and pacing. But just to say this at the 15-minute mark. It’s terrific. I mean really something. Sparce, edgy, fast, twisty and relentless, we are in very safe hands here and it’s a simple but terrifically handled set-up which Romero is having all sorts of carnival fun with, pulling out all the jumps and tricks of a huckster taking you on a penny thrill ride.
Okay, enuff. More of that Film Studies nonsense later. Outside the farm house we can see the Reservoir Dorks lurching and gurgling, stumbling and moaning, smashing car lights like thugs. Inside Ben is desperate for information from Barb but she’s giving up nothing. She’s limp and empty – it’s all too much. But there’s no time for that as the enemy is now, as the poet said, at the gate. The undead “ghouls” (as we’ll call them) have got in. Ben figuratively tears off his shirt and bellows “by the power of Greyskull!” as he proceeds to go Medieval on their asses. Punching, pounding, banging, thudding. He bruises and bashes and beats the figures one after another as they crawl over him and over the house. Boom! Thwack! K-Pow! Adam West’s Batman would be proud. It’s bony, its crunchy, its squelchy and – if this is what cinema goers have come for – then it’s just what the doctor ordered. Imagine punching fistfuls of Lego into a rotten melon? It sounds like that. THUD! A tire iron to the head of one. Pow! A thwack with wood on another. Barb can only gather her pale legs under her coat and cower on the couch like a maiden. The ghouls are of every stripe; Men, women, old young. One has a dressing gown in the manner of a zombified Arthur Dent on the search for his towel. As the last of the intruders are beaten back, battered and bashed, we see over Ben’s shoulder, another half dozen slowly lope and limp dead eyed across the lawn to the warm light of the flimsy house.
So now we’re in it. For the next few minutes it gets very practical. Doors are locked. Bodies are dragged out of the front room. A corpse is hauled out by Ben to the front porch where he douses it and sets it alight in a scorching white blaze, causing the timid ghouls to back away like animals. We see them gaze and cower up close for the first time. This is no “Walking Dead” zombie grossness. No skeletons or exposed jawbones. It’s ragged, torn and sparce. Pale, scars, wounds, scratches and torn fabric. If these are the corpses we have been promised by ghoulish titles and leering posters, they haven’t been dead long. Most are dressed in shabby but “ordinary” day clothes, like they’re taking a break from a day at the mall.
Inside, Ben remains busy, yelling fast orders like a general. Lights on, searching for tools, hammers, wrenches. Some nails and bolts in box in draw. Barb is too limp, too frail. For which General Ben has no time. He almost loses his temper, barking at her to gather wood, gather furniture. The plan is to board themselves in. “We have to work together, you have to help me,” he demands. Eventually, she agrees in a pathetic, limp wristed fey manner which makes Sissy Spacek look like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. While Ben tears up skirting, piles planks, stacks wooden drawers and begins to hammer up the windows, Barb shifts idly from handing out flimsy planks to staring transfixed at the innocent charm of a simple music box in a way that would make you want to slap her. Honestly, it would be like getting a sleepy heroin addict to play Jenga. “Won’t be long before those things are back pounding their way in here.” Ben says. “They’re afraid now…”
They fall into a plodding process, sharing stories of their circumstance as hammers pound and wood stacks up. Thinking barb is the owner of the house, Ben’s enquiring about resources. Beekman’s Diner down the road? That’s where he found the truck. Listened to radio. The things attacked a gasoline truck. Saw the truck moving in a funny way. They were catching up to it. “Slammed on my brakes.” He wrenches and saws table legs as he talks, tossing them to the fire. “Went right through the bill board, ripped through the gas pump and never stopped moving. By now it’s like a moving bonfire.”
He continues, vivid and shell shocked. “Still hear the man screaming…” Talks of the huge numbers of “them.” 50 or 60 of those “things” just standing there. He’s half narrating, half…what? Looking for forgiveness? Redemption? “I just wanted to crush them. They scattered in the air like bugs…”
Now it’s Barb’s turn to explain her story. She warms up a little as the fire in the grate crackles. “We were riding in the cemetery…” But she cannot recap the horrors without reliving them. As manly Ben continues to board up and barrier the doors, Barb gets hysterical. Ashamed and traumatised and so confused. “We’ve got to wait for Johnny! PLEASE!” she begs as Ben closes the house to the world. Oh he’s had enough of this feeble whimsy and loses it. “This is no Sunday school picnic! Your brother is DEAD!” and SLAP! Pow, right in the kisser, he cracks her with an open hand. Overcome, Barb goes down, thud to the floor and Ben carries her feinted body to the couch.
A short respite as the Romero uses every trick in the budget story-telling book to bring us up to speed. As Ben hammers, slides heavy furniture, stokes and fire and sets up a safe haven to hopefully sit out the horrors, he finds a radio and with whistles and crackles, he tunes in.
We begin, as messages and reports come and go, get a growing, terrifying realisation of what awaits them in the outside world. A masterstroke of world building that conjures up images of carnage, horror, devastation and widespread chaos. Again, we’ll deconstruct this later, but much like a radio play, it allows us viewers to create their own personal images.
Classic crackly 1950’s stern, hasty sounds. The facts. “An epidemic of mass murder being committed by a virtual army of unidentified assassins.” Ben keeps hammering wooden panels. Outside, more figures lurk by the car, swaying and gurning. The radio announcers at a loss to explain or warn details. “Best be described as Mayhem.” Phrases drop, like Eastern and other States, like National Guard being “mobilized at any moment.” Stern reports of police, “military action…” We listen and watch Ben in silence tearing curtains and creating torches with wooden table legs.
Why these won’t immediately burn-up, by the way, I don’t know and have never known. Just as an aside. Torn rags, gasoline, wooden stakes… From Frankenstein to Indiana Jones, it seems to be a cinematic ‘torch’ technique. Does this shit work? Hmm. For another time perhaps.
As the radio burbles and tension grows – “the safest course of action is to simply stay where you are…” we freeze. As at this very moment, Ben opens the door and paces out to the front yard, torch aloft. He lights an armchair, kicking it over, the ghouls retreating, fearful. More radio: Presidential Cabinet for a behind closed door meeting. Something about White House spokesmen and chattering typewriters over latest Despatch. Those listening will notice the plot twists here as…what’s that…? The closed-door meeting will include…NASA? DAN DAN, and definitely, DAAAAAA!
Ben continues purposefully. But thankfully not with silly, cinematic Home Alone bear traps or Heath Robinson/Rube Goldberg gizmos. Just plodding, Protect & Survive, Government Duck and Cover pamphlet advice. Nails, boards and hope.
Time passes. Tension builds. What’s outside? Now we can’t see. Doors are blocked; windows boarded. Barb awakes groggily. Ben sits; he draws tensely on a cigarette he is not enjoying. The radio talks of victims “torn apart.” It began “2 days ago with the report of the slaying of a family of 7…” Ben is up and at ‘em, he can’t sit still. Cupboard to cupboard, searching and bustling for food and rations…wait! What is this? A lever-action rifle. Ooooh here we go!
You remember when a blood-soaked Bruce Willis goes weapon to weapon in the Pulp Fiction pawn shop? Hammer? No. Baseball bat? No. Fuckin chainsaw?! No. the SAMURAI SWORD! Boom! Yep, that’s how it feels. Ben cocks the rifle, chack-chack! He fumbles for a box full of shells. Here we go.
He brings Barb some shoes. Thoughtful. Puts them on her. “We ought to be alright here for a while.” Great guy. Explains he’s going upstairs. Reassuring. We’re 37mins in. An hour to go. Let’s up the ante even more with an end of act one twist. Ready?
They’re not alone in the house. DAN DAN DAAAAAAAH!
From the basement door a ruckus, a bang, a clatter and now the room is full. Two more men, yelling, cursing, shouting the odds. Ben is furious! Who are they? They didn’t come up and help?! They didn’t hear the screams? But they said they heard the ghouls attack! “Get your story straight man!”
Let’s meet these two new comers. First we’ve got the elder man, Harry. Think of an angry Jack Lemmon. Or Burt Young’s Paulie from Rocky, but with a nagging wife and a mortgage. Balding, insecure. A bossy, petty, bureaucratic little-man, picket-fence republican busybody. All cigarettes and sweat patches. Next to him, Tom. Younger, plainer. Mid-twenties college type. Now the yelling and alpha posturing and racial tensions and masculine panic explode. Harry wants to board everyone up in the basement. Safe and secure. His wife Helen and hurt child Karen, plus Tom’s girlfriend are down there. It’s the safest place.
Ben is louder, angrier. Oh, and has a gun. He wants to stay up here. Escape routes. It’s locked down. Not boxed in. Chest bumping and finger pointing and “hells!” and “goddamits” and one of two “now look here, mister’s!” Barb can only gape as the “tough guys” try and take the lead, take charge. Harry calls Ben’s boards “lousy pieces of wood? Those things turned over our car!” Back and forth, back and forth, the posturing and barking. “There could be 20,30, 100 of these things!” Arguing the logic of cellars vs windows. Tom talks logic of Ben’s escape routes. Harry threatens to board him and his family up in cellar…
But suddenly its every man for himself as the ghouls are back! A dozen figures, lumbering and lurching outside by the car. SMASH! They reach thought window! Hands and arms grasping! Tom is stabbing and cutting their hands with pocket knife, tearing flesh. Ben’s shotgun BANGS! BANG! BANG! Re-load, chack-chack. BANG! But, as Jeff Wayne and Richard Burton warned us, still they come! Confused, lurching. BANG! A shot to the head takes one down and out. BANG!
And now they come in hoards.
Slowly walking. More mucky, scarred, stained and scabbed than rotting skeletons. Music builds, timpani and twitching strings. Ten more, twenty more. Some naked, others in flappy hospital gowns. Thudding, relentless, marching towards the light. Face flesh torn and sore, picking and gnawing on tree bark.
In the house the arguments escalate. Cellar! Board the windows! No, cellar! No! Board the windows! It rises to panic. Harry wants to take Barb down with them. And bring the food too. “We got a right!” Ben is standing firm. “It’s tough for the kid that her old man is so stupid.” Bold and fierce they roar at each other as the ghouls bang and thunder at the buckling, splintering doors. But Ben, if you’ll pardon the vernacular, ain’t going to die for an idiot whitey. “You can be boss down there! I’ll be boss up here!” Finally Harry retreats down the stairs, boarding himself, his wife and his child behind the wooden door. Tom’s girlfriend Judy comes upstairs to join Barb and Ben. The house is split. It’s time to take sides.
Downstairs? Not a happy homelife. The fruit cellar is quiet and well lit, roomy and stocked. On a workbench, young Karen lies, sick from her earlier attack. Harry and his wife Helen bicker snidely, snatching at cigarettes, arguing and sniping.
These two have not been in a love for a very long time and have dropped even the pretence of companionship. Harry is insufferable, Helen is bored and spoilt. “It’s important isn’t it,” she snarks, lip curling. “For you to be right? Everyone else to be wrong?” Clearly it’s not their first row about this one. Helen wants a radio down there. Harry is stubborn, faithful to the idea of submission. He knows his place. “If the authorities know what’s happening, they’ll send people for us. Tell us what to do.” Harry is desperate cling to the status quo. Its where he eats, it’s what he knows. The alternative? Take his family upstairs? His wife? To some black guy? We feel the tension. “We may not enjoy living together,” Helen snipes from within her starchy, tweedy coat. “But dying together isn’t going to solve anything.”
But suddenly! An olive branch. A reconciliation! Some shared ground. Or, well, a television at least. Something they can all get behind. They call out from upstairs. Caring duties are swapped and the ladies move positions. Helen smokes. Harry snatches one. A boxy TV is hauled in, big dark wood thing with wiry rabbit ears. The men fiddle, knobs and wiggles. They tune it in to the news and gather, hushed, to hear more.
Now it’s pure television. Hyper-real TV news and reporting. Eyewitness accounts. Men in heavy glasses, Cronkite style, tappy tap of ticker tape and typewriters. Formal and sombre, the news breaks. National Civil Defence in Washington. “Persons who have recently died have been returning to life and committing acts of murder.” Arising from funeral homes, morgues and hospitals, the unburied dead are rising and seeking human victims. The Government have a new plan. Rescue stations. Food and shelter and national guards. “Stay tuned for details on your nearest station…”
Despite this supernatural horrific turn of events, the house is too frantic and scared to debate the physics. Immediately hearing of these rescue stations, Ben is keen to get in the truck and get to safety. But fuel pump is locked. But idle thoughts nag… “Why are space experts being consulted for an earth emergency?” The TV talks of a recent satellite shot to Venus. Destroyed by NASA when it was found to be radioactive on its way home…
Back around the all-knowing TV, the group watch, mouths agape, as an Army spokesman is caught by a walking reporter outside the majestic Capitol Building. He thrusts his heavy microphone at the brassy five-star General type. “Everything is being done that can be done.” It’s all cameras and hats and snappy suits. They dodge details, ducking into a staff car. As they do, the ticker-tape on screen reveals “Willard Medical centre”. They recognise the name… Just 17 miles from there.
So here we are. Just 30 mins to go. A group, a challenge, a goal. Heroes and villains. Who will make it out alive? At this stage we’re rooting for the good guys and, lets face it, if Harry and Helen get chomped? Well, too bad. Poor Karen is better off without them. But no time for that, let’s go.
The arguments explode once again, chests bumping, fingers pointing. How they can escape? A sick child? And…and two women? (Yep, it’s 1968 folks). Another woman “out of her head?” The place is surrounded! But Ben takes charge again, moving folk about. Meanwhile news burbles on, suits and big framed specs. Sturdy and frowny and firm: Talk of “cadavers moving”, dead, limbless, eyes open.
In the busy basement, women swap caring roles. Still lying on the workbench, the young girl is in pain. Its got worse. The TV experts are now saying bodies must be cremated dead bodies. “The bereaved will have to forge the dubious comforts a funeral service will give.” Quietly the horrors mount, plodding and mundane. There’s no more Hammer horror, it’s just plain, relentless, dull grained tube explanations. Boffins, ties, suits, clocks on the newsroom walls.
But a plan must be made. Fuel. Trucks. Rescue Centres. But hell, how to get the ghouls clear from the house? Ben goes full Hannibal Smith with his orders and strategy: Kerosene, bottles, keys for gas pump, fabric to cut up, molotov cocktails. Clear a path, get the truck fuelled, get everyone to Willard. Good old Tom is happy to handle the truck. The two younger man begin to unboard the door. “Let’s move it.”
Poor Harry is frustrated. Things are moving on without him. And who is this guy making him look bad?
Tom and Judy discuss the escape as they cut up fabric for fuses to use in the bombs. She is not convinced. “Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?” But like Harry, Tom has grown up listening to experts. To advice. To those ‘in charge.’ “The television said it was the right thing to do.” They discussing the town of Willard. Remember, they’ve been before? When there was that flood? Judy is scared; they hug. Meanwhile Harry wants Barbra downstairs in the cellar for her safety.
Oooooh, lots of tension as Tom and Ben start to loosen the boarded door. What awaits? Freedom? Death? We have not seen outside for a good while. Judy and Tom exchange pained longing looks. Oh for this all to be over. Outside? The numbers grow and ghouls surround the home…
But BOOM! The first Molotov! BOOM! The second! Harry is heaving the bombs from the upstairs window, each one with a musical Dan dan daaaah!
The ghouls, timid, they cower, moan and flee. BOOM! More light! BOOM! More flame. Quick, Ben and Tom battle their way out. Ben waves the rifle, Tom clambers into the rusty truck. But no! Terrified and desperate, Judy can’t bear it and squeezes past to burst outside to be with Tom. Goddamit! Determined, Harry locks her out. She’s trapped. No-man’s land. Ben lays torches on the lawn, jabbing and pushing a burning table leg at the coming crowd. Into the back of the truck. Ghouls claw forward but with a woosh of flame, Ben lights them up! Wow! Dazzling glare of crackling flame as they scatter and flail, still grabbing at the old truck.
With a rev, the truck heads off, music thundering, chassis bumping. In the house, panicky Harry moves from window to window. At the gas pump, its fingers and thumbs and panic as Tom struggles with the key. But BLAM! Hero Ben fires off the lock. Yes! You can feel the fist pump from the audience. Go on Ben! But whoopsie, wait, easy there… Tom careless, panicked, splashes and sploshes gallons of spilt fuel all over the side of the truck. “Watch the torch!” But WHOOSH! The side of the truck ignites.
Now, mission impossible fuse style, the fire begins to creep across the dirt floor, following the spilt fuel, towards the pump. Tom and Judy floor it, tearing away from the pump, but the back of the truck is ablaze. Ben yells warnings, Harry transfixed, aghast. Ben beats away the flames from the pump in desperation.
But no good. BOOM! The truck stalls, Judys jacket caught, the couple struggle to escape the cab but BOOM! The whole truck ignites in a blaze, frying a screaming Tom and Judy.
And still the groaning, moaning ghouls approach.
At the pump, BLAM! Ben shoots one down, rifle in one hand, flaming table leg in the other. Swiping his torch back and forth, keeping them at bay, he sprints, stumbling back to the house. But inside, Harry has other ideas, door firmly locked. BANG! THUMP! YELL! Ben is desperate to get in but Harry wont budge, fearful for his family’s safety. Ben steps back and BANG! Creatures stumbles and lurch onto the porch just feet behind Ben as the door splinters and he clambers in.
The men have a stand off. In the face of their own Armageddon, they glare at each other, seething with both terror and rage. But the fight must take a back seat as they take a brief moment to unite against the foe and desperately board up the door again, still scowling wide eyed at each other. Hoo boy, I wouldn’t want to be Harry once the doors fixed.
And I was right. Staring at each other. Trembling tension… And POW! SMACK! PUNCH! THWACK! BAM!
Ben punches the Batman shit out of Harry all over the house. “I oughta drag you out there and feed you to those things!” An absolute bar-room bare-knuckle pasting that is a trembling joy to watch.
Dun dun duuuuuuh… And relax. The house takes a breath. But there is a long night ahead still.
Outside, the creatures approach the truck, pulling and pawing in the shadows at the crispy remains of the charred bodies, lustily drooling and gnawing on bones, fighting over intestines, sloppy livers and hearts, wide eyed chowing down like it were fried chicken on a Friday night. Gnawing at hands and limbs.
In the house, they all sit around, waiting, silence, brooding. Ben loads the rifle noisily. Practical as ever he asks, is Willard the nearest town? Can they get the car turned back over? It’s a mile away. Harry still fights his corner for leadership. “You gonna carry that child a mile? With those THINGS out there?” Harry asks. “I can carry the kid,” sighs Ben. Of course he does. He asks about the injury. She got bitten. Now it’s talk of disease? Carrying? Too weak to walk? More noise outside. The novelty of the BBQ fried dinner has worn off.
The TV is back on. More news of the mysterious radiation steadily increasing. “Dead bodies will continue to be transformed into the flesh-eating ghouls.” But hell, USA! USA! USA! News reports now show Butler County, Pennsylvania have a posse rounded up. Hicks and trucks and rifles and baccy chewin’ redneck lynchin’ types. Straw hats, marches, turnups and work-boots. Reporters talk to the chief baccy-chewin’ confederate hard-ass in charge, McLellan. “Yep. Ghouls can be killed by a shot to the dead or a heavy blow to the skull…”
As he chews and talks, little pork pie hat bobbing, braces stretched over his beef-filled tum, crew-cut Vietnam youths, dads in fleecy denim, trucker caps and furry collared corduroy, dangling fags and Stetsons. He breaks off to yelling instructions like a BBQ with bullet belts.
Or as they say in the US, a BBQ. “Beat em all, blasted em down. Beat em or burn em, they go up pretty easy.” He’s convinced they can wipe ‘em all out in 24hrs.
Back at the farm, its going from bad to worse. BOOM! The lights go out. A fuse? A power line? Harry wants to take over. Blaming Ben for the deaths. Needs to be in charge, needs the rifle. But the creatures are at the porch. Wooden banging, slamming, dull thuds. Boom, bang, Crash of glass. Strings and music start to frenzy up as the ghouls break in. Fights, punches, beatings. The rifle drops! Ben struggles with boards as Harry goes for the gun! He orders Helen to the cellar. The men struggle over the weapon until pump! CHACK CHACK! BANG! Ben shoots Harry. Down he goes, limp. The wooden boards are smashed, splintered, hands and arms grabbing. Harry struggles, bleeding, to the cellar steps, through the doorway, tumbling. Karen is still on the slab. He crawls over to her sick body. Upstairs the chaos and horror is relentless. Arms, boards, grabbing, screams.
Downstairs? Well Karen has died…but awoken. And wounded dad has no defence. Mum comes downstairs… Karen? No! Oh baby! The child kneels over her dead dad. His arm ripped off, she calmly chews on the dismembered limb, bloody stump aloft, like a picnic chicken leg.
Spotting mum, Karen discards her supper and grabs up a sharp trowel. No! No! Mum screams! But no. Down the towel comes, hard, heavy. Chopped cabbage sounds, Psycho-style slashes over and over and over. Echoey screams, Blood splashing and dripping.
Upstairs the barricades collapse. In they come. Dead eyed and blank, relentless. They drag Barbra away to eat. Ben helplessly fighting as Karen emerges, dripping with gore, from cellar. Ben pushes her to the couch, hauls ass to the cellar, bolting the flimsy door behind him.
Now the house overrun. Amok with ghouls, furniture tumbling, they claw and bang on the cellar door. Inside, Ben is desperately boarding and blocking. Behind him however, dead but presumably still a lunkhead, old Harry begins to rise…
BANG! BANG BANG! No more Harry. Ben gazes at the mess of the wife. She stirs, eyes flickering… BANG. Stirs no more. Ben loses is cool at last, kicking over chairs, helpless and trapped. But focus. Still planning, still thinking. Hunkers down with the gun aimed at the top of the stairs. Upstairs they wander dull and lifeless like bumper cars…
It’s next morning.
Dawn breaks over the farmland. Dead silhouettes of trees. Birds sing, a lone chopper thumps overhead. Across the fields a cordon of men in a search party line, armed and ready, stride the field on their hunt. It’s McLellan’s killing party. Now we see hunting dogs, sheriffs, marshals. Coffee cups, TV crews, cigarettes. Checking out a house over there. “Everything appears to be under control.” Dogs, men, suits and mud.
In the house, Ben stirs. He was sleeping. Exhausted. Can it be? Hope? The sound of dogs above. Gunshots. Cops are trudging slowly, dropping occasionally to a knee – BANG – picking off straggling ghouls in their 1s and 2s. They pass the burned-out truck and remains. “Someone had a cookout here…” BANG. BANG. They pick of more ghouls emerging from the woods into the daylight. “Nick, Tony, Steve, get out in that field and build me a bonfire.” Boss pointing and yelling and ordering. Ben slowly climbs the cellar stairs and unblocks the door.
He comes to the window, holding a rifle peering out into the squinty sunshine.
“Hit him in the head,” McLellan snarls. “Right between the eyes” and BANG. Down Ben goes. “Good shot, okay his dead lets go get him, that’s another one for the fire…”
Now it’s stills. Wart footage style. Meat hooks, boots. Faces. Dead bodies piled high. Ben’s corpse carried. And finally WHOOOF! The pyre goes up in a blaze like a dry Wicker Man. Music. And we fade to black.
Is it any good?
Now we’re talking. Seriously. This, THIS is what it’s all about.
I believe it was movie legend Roger Corman (House Of Usher, Pit & The Pendulum, Little Shop Of Horrors) who would always give the same advice to new filmmakers. In order to learn the trade, the techniques, the tips and the practical tricks of getting a movie made, make a low budget horror. Take a group of people, trap them somewhere remote, and then kill them off one by one. I’m paraphrasing, but this was the general advice. A low-budget horror is simple to write, easy to direct, you can get friends to be in it, you only need 1 camera, 1 weekend and 1 location and you can learn how it all gets done.
Now this is good advice. Just ask Amy Holden Jones, Tom Holland or Clive Barker who’s first features – The Slumber Party Massacre; Fright Night and Hellraiser – taught them precisely that.
Or hell, why not ask the always chatty Quentin Tarantino, who did exactly the same single-location pick-em-off cheapie with a crime bent with his debut Reservoir Dogs.
This trope has always been terrific horror-fodder. Be it a haunted cabin (The Evil Dead), an Artic Research Centre (The Thing), a distant space-cargo ship (Alien) or a boat (Jaws); there’s nothing quite as simple – or as satisfying – as a mixed group of characters (the hero, the coward, the bombshell, the nerd, the joker etc) and locking them somewhere for a killer/robot/alien/zombie /vampire/ whatever to terrorise them all night.
When George A Romero decided to set aside his advertising job and shake things up (his career, and ultimately the world) embarking on his 1968 zombie horror movie (a script inspired by the 1954 books I Am Legend by Richard Matheson but initially planned as a comedy), he could not have possible known the impact it would have.
Shot with investors’ money who were contacted and hyped up and offered a slice of the profits, Romero and his new production company – IMAGE TEN – gathered $114,000. There was an appetite for “bizarre” cinema and thankfully enough doctors and dentist with savings who fancied a credit, maybe an acting part but more importantly, a slice of the burgeoning cheapie-horror genre.
And armed with cast, crew, cameras, cars and an old Pennsylvanian farm-house, he and his team set up shop and created what Paul McCullough of Take One calculated to be “most profitable horror film ever produced outside the walls of a major studio”
Within ten years the $114k outlay had created between $12 and $15 million at the U.S. box office. Dubbed or subtitled into more than 25 languages and released across Europe, Canada and Australia, Night of the Living Dead grossed $30 million internationally.
Why? Because George Romero, with no more experience, equipment or budget than most amateurs at the time, simply had created a script as tight as a drum and gathered a cast who could play tension, suspense, horror, fear and violence with earnest, straight-faced honesty. In fact, to return to Tarantino who was asked about Living Dead’s success, “They’re amateurs of the best kind, because they love acting. What made Romero such a terrific filmmaker was he was a legit regional filmmaker. And what made it special was the slightly homemade quality to the movie.”
Romero knew (as Spielberg proved with his giant shark a decade later and Ridley Scott demonstrated with his illusive Alien) that keeping the monsters off screen and filming reactions, noises, bangs, screams with merely the glimpse of a creature meant the audience would fill in the blanks.
Low cost meant Romero had no choice but to use every short-cut and slight of hand in the book. The most impressive of these is his reliance on radio and television to create a horrific, blood stained, panicky chaotic Armegeddon outside the four walls that the audience conjoured up in their imaginations. The old saying that “radio has the best pictures” has never been truer. Official sounding reports, stern newsreels, ticker-taping typewriters and on-the-spot interviews suggest hints at a world, just behind the door, just over the rise, that has gone to bloody hell. We don’t see the President, the NASA experts, the survival camps, hospitals or the exploding oil tankers…but we know they’re there and it grips us with a cold hand. Not since Orson Wells recreated a Martian attack on radio with panicked reports and hysterical eye-witnesses on Mercury Theatre Radio in 1938 had media and monsters married with such menace.
It wasn’t my first viewing of this, when I set it up with headphones and a laptop on a pub table one Tuesday night. I had 2 hrs to kill before delivering a pub-quiz in my home town of Kingston, so with a pint of Naked Ladies bitter, some caramel cashews and a slowly emptying packet of Camel Blue cigarettes, I snuggled in to enjoy the tension and thrills. But it had been a while since I’d seen it in full.
And it has everything, to be honest. Easy to criticise as relying on “corny tropes,” (graveyards, lumbering zombies, jump scares, torch wielding heroes, feinting dames, sick children) one has to keep in mind that many of the shock and thrill techniques we are now all too familiar from countless rip-offs, were being tried and tested for the first time on Romero’s set.
The screaming hysterical single woman on the empty road, running and crying as she is chased? Rescuers being attacked as they are mistaken for the monsters? Creepy tinkly child-like music box playing eerily against the tense silence?
Romero also knew to steal and borrow from the best. There are touches of Hitchcock’s Psycho in the DNA of Night Of The Living Dead, with its dumb-staring stuffed taxidermy looming like woodland witnesses from the walls. The incredible photography that creates death-dark shadows and blinding moonlight as characters shift from dark to light, from yin to yang, from heroics to hysteria and moral righteousness to moral cowardice. The early death of the hero. Hell, even the fruit cellar and skeletal family members nod at Hitchcock’s classic.
Supposed heroes being bumped off? Hands thrusting through broken windows? We’ve seen it all since but little could have prepared 60s audiences for the energy, audacity and originality of this gory, home-invasion romp.
Tone wise it’s about as far as one could get from the thundering, blood red drenched tropical zombie movies audiences grew to know. Shot in black and white (to keep costs down) it has the Pathe Newsreel on-the-spot broadcast quality that adds a touch of “foundy footagey” documentary feel. This is ably assisted as I said by a cast who are playing it dead straight.
The belief that this is found-footage documentary, rather than Hammer House Theatrics, is enriched by the bare bones script as we have – which is all too rarely seen – smart people making smart decisions as the creatures begin to pound and punch the flimsy barricades. This is not a movie of silly risk taking, wandering around in fraternity underwear, exploring the spooky basements, running into the woods or dumb-ass slasher decisions. The cast do what we would do. Abandon a broken car, lock doors, try phone, stay low, hide in basements, try and get news from radios and televisions. Smart people in a terrifying situation, just as it should be.
The tension s what grabs and shocks. It’s far from a “gore fest.” (see below).
In fact tonally, and attitude, the nearest movie I can think of that has the tense, sweaty, shouty, panicky claustrophobia of Night Of The Living Dead is not a horror movie at all, but as one could easily enjoy comparing and contrasting this movie with Sidney Lumet’s single-room legal thriller “12 Angry Men.” Shirt sleeves, coffee cups, sweating, vicious, snarky? In fact if the 12 Angry Men, all shirtsleeves and desk fans and humid macho bickering, was about a dozen guys arguing how to keep zombies out, then you’d have Night Of The Living Dead.
Essays have been written on its subtext of course. A subversive film that critiques 1960s American society; An insight into international Cold War politics; A comment on domestic racism? Film historian Robin Wood and later critics discussed ‘Night at length as a commentary on repressed sexuality, on the marginalized groups of 1960s America and the disruption to societal norms resulting from the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, an idea echoed by Elliot Stein of The Village Voice and film historian Sumiko Higashi. Some see Ben’s death as a direct reflection of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Mark Lager of CineAction noted a clear parallel between the killing and destruction of Ben’s body by white police and the violence directed at African Americans during the civil rights movement, going on to described it as a more honest exploration of 1960s America than anything produced by Hollywood.
Film historian Gregory Waller identifies broad-ranging critiques of American institutions including the nuclear family, private homes, media, government, and “the entire mechanism of civil defense,” while film historian Linda Badley saw that the film as so horrifying because the monsters were not creatures from outer space or some exotic environment, but rather that “They’re us.”
The casting of Duane Jones as Ben in the lead role of course has had another dozen critics earning their crust with insights and commentary on the late 60′ impact of a black hero on the big screen. Romero himself was never trying to make a social point however: “Duane Jones was the best actor we met to play Ben. If there was a film with a black actor in it, it usually had a racial theme, like ‘The Defiant Ones.’ Consciously I resisted writing new dialogue ‘cause he happens to be black. We just shot the script. Perhaps ‘Night of the Living Dead’ is the first film to have a black man playing the lead role regardless of, rather than because of, his race.”
You’ll make your mind up yourself and either hide behind the couch, wince at the gore, yell at the masculine infighting, giggle at the amateur zombies or deconstruct the whole thing for a Social Science dissertation. For me, it’s just a fucking masterpiece. Astonishingly early, astonishingly accomplished. Knife edge and shocking with jumps, shocks and shudders throughout. Horror and nasties kept going, but it very rarely got better than this early classic.
Hooray! Due to a snafu with copyright licensing with reissues and whatnot, the legal wrangling has slipped and allowed the whole movie fall in to Public Domain. So YouTube will give you a fine version here! However for purists, as a picture selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry – deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” a shiny Criterion Collection 4k Blu Ray edition has now been restored through the efforts of the Museum of Modern Art, The Film Foundation, The George Lucas Family Foundation and The Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center. So treat yourself.
Oh and the ending? Well story goes in the original script Barbra was the only survivor, having been dragged down into the cellar by Ben. After shooting Ben, the Posse hear her scream, Sheriff Mclelland is about to shoot her when he spots a tear trickle down her cheek, realising she is alive,
he lowers his weapon. But, y’know, screw that. We get Romero’s more gut-wrenching choice. If you thought the ending of Darabont’s “The Mist” or “Wolf Creek” left you feeling hopeless? Brace yourself for this one.
Nasty?
Scary, yes. The pounding and the drooling and the slavering and moaning and groaning of the stumbling zombies, all pale moonlight skin, moth eaten clothes and scarred faces all are enough to give sick panic of approaching dread. But if we’re talking “nastiness,” which of course will be bloody, vicious, gratuitous, spurty, gloopy, rapey, screamy helpless stalk and slashing? Nope. Nothing like that.
Well…not nothing. The zombies have a touch of the rot and scars that are gruesome. There is a bloody skull at the top of the stairs, but nothing you couldn’t get in a joke shop or Halloween costumer. But it’s the entrails and grue that the living dead devour and much and drip like a KFC bargain bucket that might be the “ewwww!” for some. The flesh being devoured is meat dripping with Bosco Chocolate Syrup and Pratt & Lambert Vapex wall paint was also used for a lot of the blood splatter. But to be fair, given the beautiful silvery black and white photography, the mess doesn’t resemble anything more gory than a Walls Vienetta.
Ban worthy?
I mean come off it. Is it suitable for young people? I mean toddlers and teens? Probably not. But then that’s also true of a Swiss Army knife, a carrier bag, a cheese grater or a smart phone. No, I wouldn’t put it on at a kid’s party for 8-year-olds. But then I wouldn’t put on Citizen Kane either. Nothing corrupting or disturbing in a single frame.
What does it remind me of?
As I said it’s got a touch of Psycho, a touch of The Birds. But the “trapped and hunted” strangers is such now a well-worn trope that it rings bells with Assault On Precinct Thirteen, Halloween, Die Hard and every zombie movie from Sean Of the Dead to Scooby Doo.
Where to find it?
Hooray! Due to a snafu with copyright licensing with reissues and whatnot, the legal wrangling has slipped and allowed the whole movie fall in to Public Domain. So YouTube will give you a fine version here! However for purists, as a picture selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry – deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” a shiny Criterion Collection 4k Blu Ray edition has now been restored through the efforts of the Museum of Modern Art, The Film Foundation, The George Lucas Family Foundation and The Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center. So treat yourself.
letsgetthebannedbacktogether.uk 