The 25th
anniversary reunion documentary for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD begins with this neat
introduction: “In 1967 a group of
dedicated industrial film-makers, broadcast professionals, stage actors and
actresses, ambitious amateurs and assorted family and friends became a virtual
creative army in an attempt to pull off the seemingly impossible – a regionally
produced feature film.”
Director
George A. Romero at that time was part
The plot is
pretty straight-forward, opening with two siblings, Johnny and Barbra (Russell
Streiner and Judith O’Dea) making their annual pilgrimage to their father’s
grave to plant a wreath. In the cemetery Johnny teases his sister about the
spooky atmosphere as a stumbling sinister man approaches. He is a zombie, part
of a horrific unexplained reviving of the dead, who proceeds to attack them
both, fatally killing Johnny as he falls and strikes his head on a gravestone.
Barbara flees to an isolated house, where she encounters Ben (Duane Jones), a level-headed
black fellow escapee from the developing terror. Ben is a capable, level-headed
survivor whereas Barbra retreats into a catatonia-like PTSD. They are joined by
a likeable young couple, Tom and Judy (Keith Wayne, Judith Ridley) and an older married couple, hot-headed bully
Harry Cooper and his bitter wife Helen (Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman) who
bring their daughter Karen (Kyra Schon) and an inter-‘familial’ tension that
soon affects the siege-mates as they struggle to barricade themselves against
the gradual waves of ‘ghouls’ from the outside.
Meanwhile
the emergency broadcasting networks try to explain the phenomenon as triggered
by a Venus orbiting satellite, Explorer, destroyed owing to the presence of
some form of radiation - but that has
seemingly infected the eastern third of the U.S, causing the recently-dead to
reanimate and cannibalistically devour living humans. They advise the crudest
method of dispatching the walking dead, using bludgeoning, fire and bullets and
foregoing civilised burial procedures to prevent the just-dead from rising as
well: “The bodies must be burned
immediately. They’re just dead flesh – and dangerous”.
In the final
act, the plans that the impromptu housemates make fall apart: Tom and Judy are
blown up in their truck as they attempt to refuel it for a planned group
getaway. Harry’s streak of cowardice gets him fatally wounded during the
climactic waves of zombie attack on the house when he wrestles a gun from Ben,
who shoots him in the heat of the conflict. Harry stumbles down to the cellar
he was so keen to hide in all along and dies of his wounds. Helen retreats
there also where she witnesses the awful sight of their daughter Karen
consuming her dead husband on the floor. Karen stabs her mother to death with a
garden trowel. Barbra is shocked to see her brother Johnny as part of the
undead horde forcing their way into the property. They envelop and kill her.
Ben, the last survivor, hides in the cellar, shooting the revived Harry and
Helen.
As dawn
breaks, the posse of townsfolk led by Sheriff “Beat ‘em or burn ‘em. They go up pretty easy” McClelland cuts a
neutralising swathe toward the house. A groggy Ben comes to the window, where
he is mistaken for a zombie and clinically shot, leaving no survivors from the
night’s desperate stand…
Despite its
limitations, or maybe because of them, NOTLD is ground-breakingly effective in
many ways: Firstly, the budgetary restrictions created a tight comradeship
among the cast and crew, many of whom blurred the lines between the two by
having to perform double or even triple duty in functions – Russell Streiner
was not just acting in the film as Johnny, he was a co-producer, like Karl
‘Harry’ Hardman, who added a third role as one of the make-up artists on set.
The close
collaboration off-screen was superbly warped on-screen to create a pressure
cooker of bubbling tensions within the makeshift family unit in the house. After
eroding our character identification by rendering Barbra catatonic (much like
killing off Janet Leigh so early in PSYCHO), the threat level of being ripped
open by the zombies outside is matched by the potential of being structurally
torn apart indoors, Hot-headed Harry bull-dozes his way in, masking his
cowardice with intimidation, pushing for the group to hide down in the cellar
from the get-go whether they agree or not. He and Ben constantly duel for
top-dog status, the latter losing his cool at the older man’s dangerous
selfishness: “I oughtta drag you out
there and feed you to those things!” Harry’s wife confirms that his
behaviour is not situational - his combative, insecure nature is a catalyst in
accelerating their demise. There is sociological commentary here about how a
supposedly civilised society may descend into chaos if our instinct for
self-preservation is allowed to dominate our humanity.
The elements
that make up the grammar of the zombie movie originate here. As well as the fraught vying for dominance
between alpha males thrown together by necessity under the claustrophobia of
siege conditions , the rules - the standard methods of dispatch so familiar as
horror lore now of either burning or putting a bullet in the brain - began with
NOTLD.
Linked to
this, the casting of Duane Jones as the leader within the group was an
important step in affirmative ethnic role models on-screen, all the more
impressive as he was slotted into a script where the character was written as caucasian.
No changes were made following his casting, no traces of tokenism - his
ethnicity is not referenced in any way, and he emerges as a well-spoken, calm,
resourceful, middle-class character, like a young Bill Cosby, but one with
much-needed practical skills. (Today, I fancy this type of role would be cast
more narrowly with a young, streetwise ‘gang-banger’ personality). During the
filming, it took Jones some time before he felt comfortable with the
opportunity as it was so rare in a society still supportive in many places of
residual segregation and a period where civilian rioters and the Black Panthers
battled militantly for equality.
The gory
feastings by the zombies on human entrails (supplied by a local butcher shop)
were fiercely graphic for their time, and although not as visceral as, say the
later eye gouging of Olga Karlatos in ZOMBI 2 or some of the ‘head traumas’ and
disembowelments in Romero’s awesome sequel DAWN OF THE DEAD and DAY OF THE DEAD,
they still deliver strikingly queasy moments. Watching the undead hungrily
devouring the remnants of Tom and Judy in the moonlight outside the house is
memorably unsettling as is the quasi-Freudian snacking of young Karen upon her
mother in the cellar.
The
monochrome cinematography and raw feel adds to the almost documentary veracity
of NOTLD. During the film, we are fed pieces of rolling news from the media as
a state of emergency results in shelters being set up and newscasters
attempting to gather expert advice from scientists and the government. Watching
it now, it foreshadows the 24-hour news cycle coverage of today’s war and
disasters covered by the likes of CNN. These scenes are credible in how they
move from vague guesswork to concrete specifics of trying to handle the
situation and public panic as more facts are known.
NIGHT’s cinéma vérité grimness of aspect is also
powerfully amplified at the end. The shooting of Ben is a shockingly downbeat conclusion;
just as we are led to believe a new day brings new possibilities for life, his
death robs us of hope – an admirably brave choice for a movie aiming at
commercial success. (The early ‘70s would usher in a similar air of cynicism in
many film endings). This is reinforced by the added one-two punch of the casuality
with which Sheriff McClelland deadpans “Okay,
he’s dead. Let’s go get ‘im. That’s another one for the fire” and the cut
to a final sequence of grainy newsprint-style photos of the clean-up operation.
The all-night fight for survival of the people we have become invested in is
now nothing more than routine sweeping-up.
It’s worth
mentioning the effectiveness of sound-track cues as well. Whilst making
understandably
Romero and
his colleagues ultimately lost a lot of revenue on the film owing to naivety.
Before releasing it, they had copyrighted not the film of NOTLD, but simply the
former script-stage title of NIGHT OF
THE FLESH-EATERS, which meant that when the name changed to the one we all know
it as, the copyright no longer applied. Subsequently, companies were able to
print their own VHS releases and avoid paying any royalties to its producers.
This did not prevent NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD from making George Romero’s name
in the horror movie world. He would always labour outside the established
studio system, forging a hard road but one with arguably more artistic control,
later refining and expanding his apocalyptic vision with the more ambitious
DAWN OF THE DEAD and the damagingly budget-constrained DAY OF THE DEAD, then to
my mind over-extending his pioneering property a few films too far (DIARY? SURVIVAL?).
He earned his place as a firm genre favourite and is hugely influential to this
day as each generation re-draws his zombie territory.
