Review: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

"They're coming to get you, Barbra!"


Summary:
 

Barbra (Judith O'Dea) and her brother Johnny are on their annual visit to their father's grave in the Pennsylvania countryside. But when Johnny is killed in the rural cemetery by a mysterious stranger, Barbra flees to the relative safety of a nearby farmhouse. There she meets Ben (Duane Jones), who quickly takes charge of a small group of refugees as they barricade themselves against a growing mass of ghouls and watch helplessly as the horrifying news unfolds on television: the dead are returning to life and attacking and devouring the living!

Starring:

Duane Jones as Ben, the de facto leader of the refugees.  Strong, intelligent, and hard-working, Ben is exactly who you should want in charge of your group should the ravenous undead ever arise─and, importantly, exactly who Harry does not want in charge.

Judith O'Dea as Barbra, the shell-shocked young woman whose brother's death at the beginning of the film sets the entire movie (ghouls and all) in motion.

Karl Hardman as Harry, the angry, frustrated, petty husband of Helen, father of Karen, and would-be-rival of Ben.  Harry is self-important, self-hating, and ultimately self-defeating, and spends most of the film fighting (mostly verbally...mostly) with Ben and/or Helen.

Marilyn Eastman as Helen, Harry's obviously long-suffering wife.  Though intelligent and caring, she is passive to a fault, and remains the only character in the film to whom I still, all these years and viewings later, routinely shout infuriated advice to mid-film.

Keith Wayne as Tom, the earnest, helpful blue-collar boy who, despite the fact that he could snap all of his fellow refugees in half like twigs, treats everyone in the group with such empathy and respect that you might think you were watching a 50's sitcom if not for all the undead cannibals running (OK, shambling) around.

Judith Ridley as Judy, Tom's earnest, helpful better half who gets a wee bit too helpful for her own good.  Or that of the rest of the group, for that matter. 

Review:

It's not every day that somebody makes a low-budget horror flick and ends up creating an entire genre of films (not to mention five good-ol'-fashioned sequels), but that's exactly what George A. Romero did in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead. Although the "ghouls" of Night are never called "zombies," modern audiences (who, unlike the moviegoers of 1968, have grown up with a pop culture in which the Romero zombie runs rampant) will have no difficulty recognizing the film's shambling corpses for what they are.

But what makes Night of the Living Dead so enduring is not just the then-novel concept of a flesh-eating ghoul (though that novelty certainly helps), but the fact that, at its core, Night of the Living Dead─and all of Romero's Dead series─is a character and culture study. From the strong, level-headed Ben, to the cowardly, self-important Harry Cooper (Hardman), the characters feel real and well-rounded. We feel sorry for long-suffering Helen Cooper (Eastman), though I for one wish she'd raise a finger to defend herself. We can't help but love Tom (Wayne) and Judy (Ridley), just about the most gosh-darned wholesome couple this side of Mayfield. And as the characters descend further into fear, suspicion, and mistrust, the ghouls surrounding them (and the movie itself) build up more and more momentum until the film explodes (literally, at times) unexpectedly into a truly terrifying, though graphically tame by today's standards, series of climactic scenes.

And all of this still works forty years later because we care about the characters. Romero doesn't simply go for the gross-out or the jump-out (though he does use both at times), but instead builds the audience's connection with the characters quickly and effectively while simultaneously building a sense of suspense and urgency as the government and the media distantly muddle through what is, to Ben and the others as well as those of us in the audience, a very immediate crisis: the slow but inevitable doom promised by the growing mass of ghouls outside the farmhouse.

The film has flaws, of course. It was independently "financed" (to the tune of about $114,000), though it is crafted extremely well considering the shoestring budget and black-and-white shooting. In fact, the black-and-white format actually enhances the film in some respects, particularly in allowing Romero to play with light and shadow to control the level of suspense (something he does effectively on both ends of the spectrum), and the shots are generally well-framed and well-paced. But the sound and score are both pretty derivative; Night of the Living Dead essentially has the same score as every other horror flick of the previous generation, and whenever Ben gets punchy, we hear the exact same fist-to-fillet slap. But because the film is so well crafted, these flaws simply make it seem older than it is: the first time I saw Night, I thought it was a contemporary of Bram Stoker and Bela Legosi's Dracula (shot nearly 40 years earlier, in 1931), though in hindsight that was a silly assumption given the amount of gore in Romero's film.

All in all, Night of the Living Dead is a must see, and not just for you zombie film historians out there. The movie may be best known for starting the zombie ball (now there's a terrifying image) rolling, but it still stands strongly on its own merits.

4.5/5.0