52-week film challenge, film 37
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️½

It has been a long time since I last saw this film, but even the first time I saw it I was very impressed with it, and I’m happy to report that the passing decades haven’t diluted my view of it at all. At its core, it is a very cheap but effective horror movie, but with levels and subtlety that raise it far above the rank of “cheap horror movies” into both a social statement of a very divided America at the time (and, sadly, still), and a psychological study of how people react under stress because of circumstances they cannot control.

The new restoration of the movie has given me a chance to view it in the best possible light, and it reminds me again of the conviction and authenticity of the players as well as the extras who play the zombies; this is a very well-directed film from Mr. Romero that has (by necessity) a play-like quality to it. In the wrong hands it could have been stagey and talky, but Romero’s cinematography uses the language of film to give it a tight, nimble sense of movement.

The plot is revealed in a nearly-perfect manner; a couple are attacked by a shambolic man, the woman escapes in a panic and makes her way to a nearby house, where she is nearly a zombie herself as she processes a mind-breaking trauma. She is further traumatized when she discovers the corpse of the long-dead woman who owned the house upstairs. A black man named Ben (Duane Jones) also arrives at the house, who also isn’t sure what’s happening — but has retained his wits and sets about barricading the house, understanding that the outsiders aren’t acting like humans anymore.

They are surprised to discover a small family and a young couple have been hiding in the cellar, also shell-shocked from being attacked by what turns out to be the recently-dead, turned into “ghouls” by some kind of radiation from an exploded space probe. This information is parsed out slowly across the film; at first, nobody really understands what is happening, and the sense of helplessness and confusion is increasingly relatable today, as some formerly-coherent societies break down and decay in seemingly random, disturbing ways.

As a reflection on Romero’s view of American culture at the time, the film both parses out more backstory and information as we go along, but also the ad-hoc structure of the band of survivors begins to break down, collapsing just as help finally arrives. I don’t want to say too much about the ending because it is still so powerful and upsetting, but I will say the climax of the film has lost none of its punch over the last 55 years, and that America doesn’t seem to have learned much since then.

The influence Night of the Living Dead has had on low-budget filmmaking and the horror genre specifically is also hard to summarize, except to say that this film defined what would later be commonly called “zombie movies” and changed the direction of film horror entirely to lean more into capitalizing on troubling elements in the real world.

Romero went on to direct five sequels to the film, though the most memorable one to me remains the original sequel, Dawn of the Dead. I also found his vampire movie, Martin (1977), way more thought-provoking than I expected.

Years later, when I was in college, I met and interviewed Romeo for the college newspaper. He had been invited by the film and drama instructor there to shoot a short film on location, as luck would have it — the first film he shot outside of Pittsburgh. Ironically, I never saw the resulting film, Jacaranda Joe, and I should really track that down.

We had a lively and memorable discussion about his career, waaaay more than I could have ever published in the newspaper, including a frank discussion about the social implications of many of his films. He was very generous with his time, and seemed happy to discuss his films with someone who had actually seen most of them to that point, including Season of the Witch and The Crazies.

Watching the film again after so long, I remain so impressed with the quality of his main cast, especially Jones and the real-life family that played the cellar-dwelling Coopers. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor couldn’t portray a marriage on the rocks any better than Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman, and as for Karl’s daughter Kyra — she has a very minor role in the film until she doesn’t, and then … woah.

The “ghouls” also do a great job, really getting that shambolic, mindless walk and creepy milling about thing just right, only lightly augmented with makeup. Ironically, the “help” in the form of police and posses who figure out how to “kill” the zombies for good are the weakest acting link, though the TV presenter who delivers lots of backstory was very natural (as he should be — he was a real-life TV horror-movie show host!).

Many films from the late 1960s are very tied to the culture/style/fashion/issues of the time, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but somehow Night of the Living Dead is far more timeless, especially when it comes to the story. It holds up extraordinarily well and is well worth watching and thinking about, as one of the few horror movies with such a strong social message.