How ‘The Night of the Living Dead’ changed cinema forever
“Helpless terror”—that’s how Stephen King described his feelings when watching George A Romero‘s The Night of the Living Dead for the first time.
To the 21st-century eye, the 1968 film might not seem particularly earth-shattering or scary. In a post-video nasties era when hardcore horror can be found at any cinema year-round, the idea of a black-and-white zombie movie with homemade special effects doesn’t strike fear into the hearts of most people.
Ironically, though, the reason the movie might not have the same impact that it did in 1968 is precisely because of how powerful it was. Over the five-plus decades that have elapsed since its release, so many filmmakers have copied and upped the ante on Night of the Living Dead that it has almost been rendered obsolete.
The plot centres on a group of strangers taking shelter in a farmhouse from a growing horde of the undead. The film refers to the flesh-eating, animated corpses as ghouls, but they created the template for the cinematic zombie. Duane Jones’s Ben emerges as the closest thing to a protagonist, leading the group in an escape attempt and fending off the members who become zombified. Even before the ghouls descend, there is discord between the group as they argue over who should be in charge and whether they should try to flee the house. Once the zombies do break down the door, the bloody, fleshy cannibalism is as gruesome and unflinching as anything you’d see today, though the effects are less lifelike.
Before Night of the Living Dead, zombie movies rarely portrayed them as flesh-eating corpses. They were often just sleepwalkers, victims of hypnosis, or under the influence of drugs. Many films also portrayed them as beautiful young women. The idea that a zombie would start eating someone’s face was laughable until Romero did it, and it induced screaming terror rather than mirth. Any time you see a zombie movie in which the titular creatures are lurching, dead-eyed corpses, you have Romero to thank.
Aside from inventing an entire subgenre, the pioneer took sociopolitical horror mainstream. He was not the first filmmaker to use the genre as a metaphor for the real horrors taking place in the world; B movie pioneers like Val Lewton had been doing that for decades. But Romero went to much darker and more explicit realms. For one thing, he didn’t really care where the monsters in Night of the Living Dead came from; he wanted to focus on what they brought out in the people who were fighting them.
“What should matter,” he said in a 2013 interview with Vice, “Is that this extraordinary thing is happening and people are still arguing about upstairs/downstairs, who’s the boss—they’re still arguing about their own agendas instead of facing the problem.”
In the case of this film, which was released at the peak of the civil rights movement just after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, much of the discourse surrounded Jones’s casting. It was unusual at the time for a Black actor to play a hero, especially when most of the white characters around him were cowardly and dishonourable. The fact that the film ends on a heartbreaking and cynical note, in which Jones’s character, as the last survivor in the household, is shot by a supposed rescue crew, only reinforces the parallels between the film and the real world. He survived the monsters, but it was the humans who were more dangerous all along.
Unlike many other horror movies of the day that featured either fantastical characters or inaccurate, supernatural depictions of non-Christian religions, Night of the Living Dead is easily mapped onto the chaos, rage, and violence that was gripping the country when it was released. The Vietnam War, the Cold War, political assassinations, and centuries of racism were coming to a head, and the brutality of the film resonated with audiences on a personal level. It was a time of fear, turmoil, and distrust, and Romero exploited those real-world horrors for all they were worth.
Not all horror movies these days hold up a mirror to society, but Romero proved that it was possible. More importantly, he proved that you could do so without sacrificing the essential escapism of splattering, squelching, abjectly terrifying exploitation cinema.
