![]() ![]() Barbra, who plays the helpless, hysterical sister and is catatonically silent throughout the movie, unexpectedly tries to save Mrs. Johnny and Barbra find themselves at the cemetery, where the ghoul attacks them, only because their mother insists that the two of them must drive six-hours each year to place a wreath on the grave of their father. These families – Barbra and Johnny, Harry (Karl Hardman) and Helen Cooper (Marilyn Eastman), and Tom (Keith Wayne) and Judy (Keith Wayne) – often literally devour one another. Traditional family and gender roles defeat the other characters. Notwithstanding (or perhaps because of) Ben’s independence and competence, the sheriff’s deputy not only shoots Ben in the head but also tosses his body on a burning pile of ghouls. The images of the closing scenes – the dogs on leashes, the redneck sheriff (George Kosana) and his deputies, and the shooting from afar of Ben who is supposedly mistaken for a ghoul – plainly evoke the images of the South widely published in newspapers and broadcast on TV during the 1960s. 2 Ben alone survives the “night of the living dead,” but white racists kill him the next morning. While Romero claimed that the race of the role had nothing to do with casting, the scene in which Ben is introduced – the unexpected glare of headlights in the night and the sudden appearance of a Black man in the context of a lone, hysterical white woman – belies the claim that race was not relevant to his character. Yet these farmhouse survivors are defeated as much by American social traditions as by the ghouls themselves. Yet Ben, too, is often ignorant, occasionally shooting a ghoul in the torso and speculating about “who knows what kind of disease these things carry.” It’s only through news reports broadcast over the radio and on television that the rules for these “flesh eating ghouls” are slowly revealed. He soon assumes leadership over the few farmhouse survivors. Only the main protagonist, Ben (Duane Jones), who is Black and without family connection, seems at times to know the new rules, smashing the heads of the undead. Johnny, defending his sister, falls and hits his head on a gravestone. “They’re coming to get you, Barbra,” he intones. ![]() Johnny (Russell Streiner) foolishly teases his sister at the cemetery when he sees a man (Bill Hinzman) shambling towards them. The film’s characters are, of course, ignorant of the rules of this new genre. The farmhouse in which the terrified Barbra (Judith O’Dea) soon seeks refuge is filled with references to Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal Psycho (1960) – stuffed animals hanging from walls, rooms cluttered with ordinary, household objects and a skeleton in the cellar. The movie begins as a horror movie – a rural cemetery at dusk, distant thunder, odd camera angles and eerie music. As the car turns into that cemetery, an American flag prominently flies under the “Directed by George A. It opens with random shots of a car’s leisurely advance up a series of switchbacks to a nondescript, country road and a tattered “cemetery entrance” sign. Night of the Living Dead introduces these rules. It takes several days for those bitten by zombies to die and then become reanimated. The undead moved slowly in herd-like formation, with an insatiable need to devour human flesh and a singular vulnerability around the cranium. Moreover, while other directors would later change the rules that Romero had created in Night of the Living Dead, such as introducing “fast zombies” in place of the tireless “shambling” of Romero’s creatures, Romero’s zombie protocol was largely consistent. These ghouls propel the films forward and offer a social critique reflective of their historical moments. Romero, however, drew his inspiration for Night of the Living Dead from a different type of post-mortem mob – the plague-induced vampires of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend – and initially named his living cadavres “ghouls.” 1 The unexpected commercial and critical success of the low-budget Night of the Living Dead enabled Romero to write and direct five sequels and narrative variations: Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2009). Earlier examples include Hollywood classics White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943) as well as American B-movies such as Revolt of the Zombies (Victor Halperin, 1936) and Revenge of the Zombies (Steve Sekely, 1943). This was certainly not the first movie about zombies. George Romero reimagined the zombie movie when he co-wrote and directed Night of the Living Dead (1968).
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