Films 1960s
(1968) Night of the Living Dead
Saturday, October 14th, 2006
Night of the Living Dead
Director: George Romero
Released: 1968
"Night of the Living Dead" succeeds as a perfect horror film in that it succeeds on an aesthetic level, and in that its contents are important, timeless and effective.
Director George Romero and co-writer John Russo conquer the absurdity of their plot mechanism, that dead people come to life to eat the living. They transform it into visceral metaphor, with a prescience of 20th Century eventualities that mark their film as one of the great barometers of (pre and post) 1960s America.
A great deal of the meaning and substance of "Night of the Living Dead" begins in its script. The narrative is simple: A variety of characters converge upon and discover each other in a farmhouse near Pittsburgh when the dead begin to reanimate and attack the living.
Duane Jones plays Ben, a refugee from the reanimation who ends up nominally leading the ersatz household in boarding up windows and doors to blockade the zombies.
Ben spends the film toe-to-toe with Karl Hardman's Harry Cooper, a conventional and paunchy American father figure, replete with disaffected wife and injured, semi-catatonic daughter. By the end of "Night of the Living Dead" the allegorical intrusion of the virile black male into the typically Caucasian power structure comes to a head, and then comes to a head again as the true power-figure, George Kosana's Sheriff McClelland zeroes in on the refugees and dramatically reinforces some familiar the rules, racial and class laws that become radically emphasized in the post-apocalyptic countryside.
This is heady horror. Romero delivers it via high-performance engine directing, leaving molten rubber on the narrative as he accelerates into the action of the story.
A beautifully monochromatic graveyard scene, in which our introductory characters Barbra and Johnny meet their first ghoul, vaults into the claustrophobic and dramatically shadowed evening during which the bulk of the story occurs.
Romero constructs severe angles, many from ground-level and precariously tilted to position his characters in dramatic frames. It is not that "Night of the Living Dead" looks like a comic book (although it pays a certain debt to the graphic elements of 1950s EC Comics), it is that it tells its story in adventurous and information-packed comic-panel-like shots.
"Night of the Living Dead" is also tremendously daring. Romero and Russo communicate a clear passion for the human attraction and repulsion to death. Their characters talk of it, the zombies capture it realistically (they look, in fact, like nearly normal people - but slower and clumsy). The biological reality of the horror is there, artful but unflinching. When the zombies eat, the camera shows them doing so. Flaps of skin wiggle between teeth. It looks horrifyingly like a July picnic.
"Night of the Living Dead," while significantly stylized, is stylized to appear genuine and impartial. The grotesque, Romero seems to suggest, is a close cousin with that which is understandable, even identifiable.
Murder is dirty business in the film. Whether its Ben dispatching the undead with a tire iron or an undead daughter troweling her mother to death in the basement, the sounds and images that Romero chooses are disturbing, earthy and feel authentic.
The script also dirties its living characters. The heroes of the film are imperfect, prone to mistakes and fumbles that cost lives. Madness afflicts some, megalomania others. The public response to the crisis is ineffective, scarce, fueled by an inherent ugliness in the system. Romero seems to posit this condition as the very fabric of the country.
How political one views "Night of the Living Dead" probably depends on one's politics.
Its ending is certainly pointed, but the script also leaves room for simpler and less critical conclusions. What is alarming and artful, however, is the sudden switch to documentary style still photographs at the end of the film, and the documentary-style shift in the final shots following those photographs.
The brutality at the heart, and conclusion, of "Night of the Living Dead" is the brutality of real life in real communities without the trope of the walking dead to soften the narrative blow. It's a brave message in a brave film; rational, relevant and delivered with smart, strong and willful aesthetics.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Night of the Living Dead, 1968
Ben spends the film toe-to-toe with Karl Hardman's Harry Cooper, a conventional and paunchy American father figure, replete with disaffected wife and injured, semi-catatonic daughter. By the end of 'Night of the Living Dead' the allegorical intrusion of the virile black male into the typically Caucasian power structure comes to a head ...
