Hi all! Today we’ll be talking about quite possibly the most impactful zombie movie of all time - and no, it’s not Bela Lugosi’s White Zombie. That movie was SUPER racist. Today we’re talking about the movie that invented the modern zombie. You know, slow, shambolic, cannibalistic, dead, and all messed up. Today, we’re talking about a movie made with about five dollars and a dream that changed horror - and cinema - forever. That’s right, it’s Night of the Living Dead time. Happy reading, stay spooky, and go to the library! 🧟‍♂️🪦🏚️🔪🩸

George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is to zombie movies what Psycho is to slashers. All of the attributes you have in your head about zombies came from this movie. A movie in which, a specific kind of insufferable movie nerd will always point out to you, they are never actually called ‘zombies’, despite that being a word that definitely existed at the time. Mostly, they’re called ‘ghouls’, but they are instantly recognizable as typical, modern zombies. Night of the Living Dead decided what zombies were going to be for about the next thirty five or so years, at least until Danny Boyle’s Infected raged onto the scene. But that’s a story for another time. And anyway, the Infected didn’t replace Romero zombies. Not even close. Every single zombie apocalypse story since Night of the Living Dead has been based on Night of the Living Dead. Sometimes purposefully, with specific homages, sometimes just by nature of having zombies in it, because at this point, all zombies are Romero zombies. Romero’s zombies even changed the previous definition of what a zombie is, leading to semantic arguments on whether or not Danny Boyle’s Infected count (I say they do). The main thing Night of the Living Dead introduced about zombies was the cannibalism aspect. The idea of the walking dead as potential horrors was not new, neither was the idea that they were violent. But cannibalism in zombies, something we have come to take for granted - they bite you, you turn - was incredibly shocking in 1968. I mean, I really need you all to understand how depraved that idea was then. Not only are your deceased loved ones staggering towards you mindlessly, they’re going to commit maybe the worst taboo there is and eat you. Alive.

To make sure you guys completely understand how insane this was to audiences in 1968, I’m going to give a bit of historical context. First, 1968 was the year the Hays Code was repealed - but not until a month after Night of the Living Dead was released. In many ways, Night of the Living Dead was a massive nail in the Hays Code’s coffin. The Code was meant to shelter audiences, to make sure that no one saw anything they didn’t want to see at the movies. By this point, the American people were basically used to the idea that all movies they saw in a theater had gone through the rigorous approval process, and were, therefore, safe to watch with anyone. Well, maybe not all of them, since famous Hays Code era movies include Psycho, The Haunting, and, in a true testament to how useful the Hays Code was, The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism (1967). Still though, there were some things audiences in 1968 simply weren’t prepared to see. Night of the Living Dead  was one of them. Second, and in a more thematic vein, America had entered the Vietnam War three years previously, and people were pissed. And they needed to know that other people were too, that they weren’t the only people who didn’t want to fight in a war that was, frankly, none of their business. And George Romero gave them that. The authorities in Night of the Living Dead are almost comically inept, clearly totally fine with letting people die just so long as they don’t have to do any kind of work about it. Night of the Living Dead could not have been a clearer indictment of the federal authority figures horribly mishandling the Vietnam War, and ended up being the first of many, many, horror movies to come that would pull from the same rage and fear (Jaws being a notable addition to this subgenre). In the same way that all horror movies made from around 1980-1990ish were about AIDS, pretty much all horror movies made from around 1968-1976 were about either the Vietnam War or the Hays Code. Which are pretty much the same thing when you think about it. But I digress.

The point is, Night of the Living Dead absolutely exploded the general public’s idea of what cinema could be, in many ways. It showed that not only could movies break some of the biggest taboos there were, they could also directly criticize the current moment. While movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) had very obviously played on societal fears of the time, they had not, up until that point, directly critiqued the people responsible. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Blob (1958) were not about the fact of the second Red Scare being a government propaganda scam to scare people into compliance and prevent anger over World War 2. Instead, they made the commie threat seem more real by putting it on the screen as pod people and a blob creature from another planet that absorbs your unassuming, perfectly American, neighbors. Night of the Living Dead was about how bad the government was actively fucking up and failing its citizens. Nothing had been so blatantly about that before. Romero wasn’t going ‘gosh, this war sure is scary’ he was going ‘we have no business being in this war and the government is purposefully endangering its citizens by refusing to give them all the information they deserve and would fail in exactly the same way in the event of a national crisis that only impacted civilians’, in almost exactly those words throughout the movie. And not only that, not only did he basically raise a mini-budget middle finger to the government, he did it with a black man as the film’s hero.

Duane Jones’ Ben is one of the most famous movie characters of all time. He is undeniably the hero of Night of the Living Dead. He is competent, and level-headed, and save the lives of everyone in the farmhouse several times over. And he’s a Black man onscreen in 1968. The impact of his character cannot be overstated. A black man in a movie who wasn’t a villain or a caricature was straight-up unheard of. And a large part of the reason Ben works so well as a hero and as a character is that the script was written under the assumption that it would be played by a white man and wasn’t changed when they cast Duane Jones. There are definitely moments in the film that play like racism - Harry doubting his abilities as a leader, the police shooting him, etc; - but those would have still happened were it a white man playing Ben. The same lines and actions just play differently when directed at a black man, or performed by a black man during a time when black people weren’t ever allowed to be heroes. A black man being the one to rescue a helpless, terrified, white woman was, shall we say, a bit of a shock to audiences in 1968. 

George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was made in his hometown (shoutout to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), on a budget of 114K and a dream, with extras that are clearly just his friends having the absolute time of their lives, and changed the way movies worked forever. It created the modern zombie. It directly criticized the actions of the American government. It had a black, heroic, leading man. And, more than anything, it was about people helping people in the face of unimaginable horror, under a useless government. Night of the Living Dead is about having faith in humanity while staring down the worst of it. It’s a huge middle finger to misanthropy. Because no matter how awful Harry is, or how shocked Barbra is, they help each other through the night, and are helped by the people around them, in turn. It’s a bleak, decidedly nihilistic story, Night of the Living Dead shows a humanity worth fighting for. And I think all of us could stand to remember that humanity right about now. It hasn’t gone anywhere since 1968. It’s still here, and still worth staying and fighting in that farmhouse for.

Thanks for reading, all! I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it. Also, if anyone knows where to stream/buy the original Dawn of the Dead (1978), let me know. Happy reading, and stay spooky! 🧟‍♂️🪦🏚️🔪🩸