Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Where to Watch: Prime, Youtube, Apple, Foxtel Go (Various versions, rent or stream free)

****1/2

So there will be spoilers for this review, because it's hard to discuss this film without revealing the double whammy that is its ending. But if you haven't seen Night of the Living Dead yet, just go watch it. It's a bit gory and disturbing even by today's standards, but I don't think you can call yourself much of a horror fan if you haven't seen it. I mean, a few false starts aside, this is the zombie movie that started them all. And it's incredible that such a cheap film, from 1968 no less, has held up so well and still commands such power to shock and disturb on a purely visceral level. Even better, this is a monster movie that offers a wealth of interesting themes and great ideas to go along with its scenes of gut munching. So consider this opening paragraph a capsule review telling you to fire up your preferred streaming apparatus and watch the darn thing.

That out of the way, on to the meat of this article. The raw, gore-dripping meat.

The plot of the film is fairly straightforward, and may seem like a bit of a cliché until you remember that Romero did it first. A young woman and her brother have travelled out into rural Pennsylvania for the annual laying of a wreath on their father's grave. At the cemetery, they are attacked by a shambling old man in a torn suit. The young man is killed but the woman, Barbara, escapes. She flees to an abandoned farm house, visibly disturbed but still functioning despite her ordeal. Once inside, however, she finds the phones are dead. She also finds a hideously mutilated body on the first floor landing. At this point she understandable just sort of shuts down. 

Luckily for her, at this moment Ben appears. A strong, handsome, intelligent and resourceful young man, he narrowly escaped a run in with his own pack of murderous whatsits (we know they're zombies, but the characters at this point do not - and it's worth noting that the living dead are never actually called zombies in this film, instead eventually being eventually referred to by the (I think) more appropriate sobriquet of ghouls). He managed to commandeer an abandoned truck, and stopped at the farm house when he saw that it had its own petrol bowser. Unfortunately, said bowser is locked. Also unfortunately, at this point Barbara is of no use to anybody.

As more ghouls start to show up, somehow drawn to their refuge, Ben sets about strengthening their defences. He finds a rifle, and starts boarding up all the windows and doors with any bit of timber he can pry loose from within the house. All this noise draws some unexpected company, though. It turns out there are five people hiding out in the cellar. And what a bunch! Tom and Judy, the young couple, are alright - if naïve and easily swayed. But there's also a middle aged married couple with a sick child, and the husband Harry Cooper, de facto leader until Ben showed up, is an arsehole of the first water. Naturally, personalities clash. Ben wants to stay upstairs where they can be more mobile and have multiple avenues of escape, all the time with an eye on getting to the petrol bowser through the ever thickening mass of ghouls and maybe making it to one of the government run crisis centres that they keep talking about on the old TV he found. Cooper, however, thinks he and Tom have got the cellar pretty well fortified, and his plan is for everyone to head underground and hunker down until help arrives. 

On the surface, both plans have merit. But Ben's plan at least has the benefits of flexibility and potential escape. As he says, if the ghouls did make it through the cellar door then all seven of them would be fish in a barrel. There's also the fact that the TV, radio, food and petrol bowser are all upstairs. And then there's just Cooper. Nothing is stopping him, at any point, from just going back into the cellar and locking the door. Unfortunately he's just one of those guys who has to be in charge, and while he might on some level be acting from everyone's best interests when he tries to get everyone to accompany him to the cellar, it doesn't come across that way. Instead, it comes across as an inflexible prick trying to mask his apparent cowardice by manufacturing a power struggle. It doesn't help that Tom has started to see things from Ben's point of view, and that Cooper's wife holds her husband in open contempt, and doesn't care what they do as long as it means getting her daughter to a hospital as soon as possible. So here we have it, the ur-example of that classic zombie movie theme - that a situation which should at least be manageable if dealt with coolly and calmly in a spirit of cooperation, is instead made worse and worse and worse because people can't help being dicks to each other. As in any other zombie film you might have seen, things do not go well. What's interesting is exactly how this clusterfuck unfolds - even after nearly sixty years of imitation and parody, the climax of Night of the Living Dead still has power to shock. 

I might as well drop the synopsis from this point and just talk about the film in general. There's a lot to talk about. Like did I mention Ben is black? Not really a big deal in a more recent film, but in the late 60s that was a very big deal indeed. What's interesting is that Ben's blackness is never really mentioned. It's not even a sticking point for Cooper, who for all his dickishness is at least not apparently a racist. But it does matter to the viewer, because in a film of this vintage it sets up expectations. Ben is the hero, and he is the hero in the way that stoic white guys are conventionally portrayed in these sorts of films. And don't tell me you haven't seen far too many shitty genre films of a liberal bent where blackness was used as a visual shorthand for moral and ethical superiority - Hell, Stephen King, God bless him, made a career out of that trope. Someone walking into this film in the late 60s would have expected a cheap, lurid little shocker. They would have seen Ben as a case of liberal stunt casting. And there is absolutely no way in hell that they would have seen the last half hour of this film coming. Because for all that Ben is the hero and Cooper is a dick, Cooper is right and Ben is wrong. After everything goes to shit, and Ben is left the only living inhabitant of the farm house, he hides himself in the cellar. He barricades the cellar door. And he lives through the night.

Of course, when he hears gunshots the next morning and emerges from the cellar, he's shot in the head by a party of redneck zombie hunters who don't even bother to check first if he's alive. 

So the race thing does contribute, but not too much should be made of it. Supposedly Romero and Russo wrote the script colour blind, and cast Duane Jones as Ben because he was the best actor who auditioned. And I believe it. His monologue about his first brush-in with the ghouls is haunting stuff, and he sells it beautifully. Honestly, if not for Jones as Ben and Karl Hardman as Harry Cooper, I doubt this film would have worked. No, to my mind the main conflict in this film is generational. Ben is smart, capable and charismatic, but he's also ultimately shown to have little real idea what he's doing. Cooper is a conniving, cowardly, domineering prick, but he also possesses a common-sense approach that turns-out to have been the best course of action from the get go. It does seem to sum up (at least to my understanding ) the generational divide in the 1960s - the older generation have the benefit of tradition and practical experience, but they're so belligerent and set in their ways that only a madman would follow them. The youth are looking for a new, better way to do things, but in so doing they're all too willing to throw the baby out with the bath water. If the two groups could just work together then maybe we could move forward into a better world, but (and here Romero's trademark pessimism about the human condition comes into focus) that's probably not going to happen. And even if it did, the systems we have in place (as represented by the zombie hunters) seem to preclude any meaningful change being effected on a purely human level anyway. 

In many ways, I feel like Night of the Living Dead set every zombie film that followed up to fail. It's only real weakness is budgetary. On every other level, it's a triumph. And it goes into such detail, and adds so many little touches, that it's obvious that Romero and Russo knew they were on to a good thing here, and decided to wring every last good idea out of their extremely fertile premise. The radio and television coverage of the outbreak which the survivors follow so avidly lends an impressive scope to what could have been a very claustrophobic film - this isn't just an isolated incident, it's happening everywhere. The origin of the zombie plague - most probably some strange radiation brought back from a probe of Venus - manages to avoid establishing the "zombie virus" cliché while also masking the fact that the film's fundamental premise is ripped off from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, in which the cause of the vampire outbreak was a virus. It also adds the cool fact that the radiation is not creating a race of infectious zombies - any corpse fresh enough to still have a reasonably intact brain is coming to life, no matter how it died. Hence, also, the origin of "Destroy the brain, kill the ghoul". And the television coverage also manages to show the complicity and stupidity of the authorities who created this crisis, as well as the chillingly banal way the zombie hunter posses go about their business. But it's that ending, more than anything, that might be the film's most lasting contribution.

The fact is, before Night of the Living Dead, most horror movies were safe. They could be disturbing, frightening, even outright terrifying, but with the general exception of more arty fare, they ended with at least a nod towards good triumphing over evil. Usually, if nothing else, some of the protagonists survived. Night of the Living Dead doesn't have that. It sets up expectations - the resourceful heroine, the handsome and capable hero, the cranky old man who sees reason in the end - and it subverts every one of them. The heroine goes mad. The hero has no idea what he's doing. The cranky old man gets himself killed rather than relinquishing control for more than a few moments. Not a single one of the protagonists survives. And the perfunctory way in which Ben meets his end is all the more chilling for its brevity. If you ever wondered what the hell happened in the late 60s to produce the sudden shift to utterly nightmarish, gruesome films with bleak, downer endings, then at least part of the answer can be found in Night of the Living Dead.

P.S.

The HD restoration is beautiful, even if I found myself getting nostalgic for the washed out old public domain print.