To be honest, I’m not normally into zombies. There’s obviously been some exceptions, but I don’t know....; I have horror fan friends who genuinely find them frightening, or appealing, or both…. They don’t usually do it for me. I think the most compelling and interesting aspect of them is that they’re always metaphorically interesting, but oftentimes, even when done well, I think that the metaphor just becomes way too malleable. What do zombies represent; you don’t really have to stretch too far to make them represent literally anything you want. That’s probably why the most interesting zombie movies in recent years were the ones that were trying something new; I don’t particularly think all of them succeeded at quality, but they were all interesting.
In that respect, George A. Romero’s original terrifying masterpiece, “Night of the Living Dead”, can probably come off as too cliché in the wrong light. No doubt, the technical brilliance is always there, but it’s become literally the playbook that every other zombie movie is either borrowing from, stealing from, or trying desperately to differ themselves from. And yet, under the right circumstances, the movie genuinely can haunt and stir me in ways most thrillers couldn’t dream of. And I don’t think it has anything to do with the “metaphor” of the actual zombies. Romero was definitely symbolic, zombies were never just zombies in any of his films, and I’m sure you can look up theories on this one, and I have one or two of my own, but the things that makes “Night of the Living Dead” so special starts with the executing of the tone of dread. At certain moments at mine, and I’m certain in many others’ lives, we feel like we’re at a point where nothing can go right; the walls keep closing in and no matter how hard you work and stress out just to struggle to keep your head above water, you know deep down that there’s this inherent dread that disaster’s coming towards you. I never really got how, zombies can be so easily defeated and yet seem so frightening to others; I get the idea that they’re so many of them and that they just keep coming is apart of and ware you out and exhaust your resources, but I don’t think most movies really express that veil of dread that that entails. Not that you’re short on everything, but that true sense that something horrible, no matter what, is going to come and take you all out, at the right, or more likely, at the worst-feeling times of your life, watching “Night of the Living Dead” can really grip you in ways other films can’t.
Zombies aren’t actually that prevalent in the film; most of the movie, is that claustrophobia. Zombies are out there, and we’ve seen what they can do, but there’s not much you can do. You’re stuck in a house. Who’s house? I don’t think it’s ever fully determined, and nor does it necessarily matter anymore. What does matter, is hopefully being able to keep them out for as long as you can, until either the threat miraculously ends, or until the inevitable is unable to be delayed anymore.
Duane Jones’s performance as Ben, the film’s protagonist stirs me. A lot was made of casting an African-American as the lead, which was rare for the time in general and especially so for a horror movie, but Jones wasn’t even a professional actor. (In fact, most of the cast, had very little acting experience and didn’t have much after the film.) He was an English professor who directed theater in his spare time, and when he auditioned, Romero re-wrote the part to fit him. I totally get why; he’s got an intensity and a presence that yields a degree of knowledge and authority that I think too many horror films tend to forget to have. In fact, most of the characters are intelligent. When it’s revealed that a family has already taken the cellar to evade the zombies, or ghouls as the radio and TV tell them; I think they both have a point on what the best approach to evade them, and they’re approaches and reactions are reasonable given their particular situations.
What I think really is the secret of the film are the radio and television reports that we hear and watch sporadically throughout the film. Another thing that too many horror films get wrong, but they work brilliantly here, they’re almost as frightening as the actual flesh-eating zombies. They sound and feel like genuine old news reports from that time. They remind me of Orson Welles’s famous “War of the Worlds” radio program, which also used the form and structures of legitimate news broadcast to help tell their story, although this film, they’re used more for exposition, but they manage to more convey the intensity in tone that's needed and sometimes it’s the quiet professionalism of the news broadcast makes the subjects they’re talking about, seem more real. People forget just how believable and how quaint-seeming much of Welles’s broadcast originally seemed as well. (I also suspect some of the Kronkite footage of JFK’s assassination and some of the other broadcasts of tragedies of the era played a part in influence. In hindsight, 1968, in America seems like a particularly intriguing year for this film to have come out.)
Its terror is also intriguing to put into context, horror films were always around, but they were more cheesy and special effects-based, and they were goofy and they were movies, in the most pure entertainment sense. “Night of the Living Dead” really stands out next to them. In many ways, it was the first horror film that really wasn’t for kids to enjoy. It was gruesome and dark, had family members having to kill other family members, and while the ghouls might’ve eaten a ton of human flesh, we didn’t see them graphically eating people before. And the deaths were far more visceral as well.
You can honestly separate modern horror, at least modern-American horror, to before and after “Night of the Living Dead” and yet that fact doesn’t make the movie any less powerful; if anything, it just get more stirring and frightening over time, and Romero’s films in general, have grown in distinction over the years. I have to watch more of them, but part of me knows that they’ll never match up to this one. “Night of the Living Dead” turned horror into terror, and instead of showing a visceral fear of the characters onscreen, it created that visceral dread and fear in us.
