Full Review: https://youtu.be/sVOxUzPqtJI

Intro

NotLD was released in 1968, it was originally called ‘Night of Anubis’ and then ‘Night of the Flesh Eaters’. The lawyers on behalf of the film ‘Flesh Eaters’ raised a fuss over the name so ‘Night of the Flesh Eaters’ was changed to ‘Night of the Living Dead’ by the Walter Reade Organization; Night’s distribution partner. I actually like Walter Reade’s name better.

There were only two working actors in the entire film. These were Duane Jones as Ben and Judith O-Dea as Barbara. EVERYONE else in the film was a non actor who never appeared in a movie before. They were all people the very small film crew knew personally who agreed to do the movie as a favor. Henry Cooper, played by Karl Hardman was one of the initial investors into the small indie film. Hardman owned an audio production studio that would go onto provide the score for the movie. Together with his wife Marilyn Eastman (who played Helen Cooper) they also were in charge of all the makeup effects!

All the zombie actors were local people who agreed to play the roles of the shambling undead based mostly on the fact that there would be free food and beer provided on set. Romero would go on to say, “We just said, “C’mon out, we’ll have a ball.” And we always had kegs of beer and a lot of food and got as many as we needed every time [chuckles remembering]. We wound up paying them all SAG wages as the money came in later, but nobody was paid on the spot.”

Walter Reade accidentally put film into public domain. When the name was changed to ‘Night of the Living Dead’ Walter Reade forgot to include the copyright notices with the new title. Since these notices were absent in the new name, it instantly went into public domain upon release where it remains today. That means anyone watching this is free to distribute, share, and make derivative works based on NotLD for profit or not.


Romero originally considered the undead to be ‘ghouls’ in NotLD; different from the zombies featured in similar films of that era. The emphasis on zombies pre Night were that of mind controlled people doing the bidding of some master. However, by time he released the sequel ‘Dawn of the Dead’ he conceded to public opinion and went with the zombie descriptor.

“I want to put a group of characters in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety—those are jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot—but to watch what happens and then write it down.

-Stephen King

George Romero said in an interview with Variety that he was inspired by Richard Matheson’s ‘I Am Legend’. In said story the entire world has been turned into vampires save for the last surviving human as the main character. NotLD plays with ‘I Am Legend’s survivor to monster ratio a lot more though.

Having watched IAL specifically to review this movie, I can see why Romero took inspiration from IAL and why I ran across so many comparisons in my research. Both films both feature former humans transformed into an undead looking to consume the living. Depending on what scenes one glanced from both movies it’s not unreasonable to assume they are from the same movie.


“The story was an allegory written to draw a parallel between what people are becoming and the idea that people are operating on many levels of insanity that are only clear to themselves.”

-George Romero

In the impossibly bleak situation where the dead are reanimating to consume the living you would think that the living could put aside their differences to work together… nope. And sadly this is entirely believable as this happens daily in real life. We may not be facing the undead but we face enough problems you would think we could put aside our differences and come together… nope. To think that personal squabbles still reign supreme in the face of the apocalypse is most definitely operating on various levels of insanity.

Doing research for this movie led me to discover there was a lot of meaning projected onto the movie concerning racism. The Civil Rights movement was still in full effect, Martin Luther King was assassinated the same year Night was released and Duane Jones was the very first black actor featured in a starring role in a horror film. The thing is this was all purely coincidental. Romero and his crew just happened to be one of the many not racists groups of people at the time and simply gave the leading role of Ben to the best actor who auditioned:

“A friend and I began writing a script, but we didn’t have it nearly completed when we started shooting. We cast around for people. That was kind of a random experience too: there wasn’t much to draw on in Pittsburgh except a friend of ours, Duane Jones, who is the black actor who plays Ben in the picture. We had no preconceived notion as to the role being a black role, Duane came in, he looked right, he read well, so we used him. We never took any further note of it. It’s not mentioned in the script at all, although I know we’re getting a lot of press comment over that fact”

However Duane Jones seemed to recognize the importance of his role and pushed to speak more intelligently than the script called for and wanted to stick with a dismal ending rather than be saved by the white man. So regardless of author’s intent some zeitgeist of the Civil Rights movement did seep into the film one way or another.

Analysis

One of the radio spots that aired for Night said this about the film:

“A bizarre adventure in fear and experience a shock more shattering than your strangest nightmare! A night of total terror!“

Night’s Criterion page reads:

“Shot outside Pittsburgh on a shoestring budget, by a band of filmmakers determined to make their mark, Night of the Living Dead, directed by horror master George A. Romero, is a great story of independent cinema: a midnight hit turned box-office smash that became one of the most influential films of all time. A deceptively simple tale of a group of strangers trapped in a farmhouse who find themselves fending off a horde of recently dead, flesh-eating ghouls, Romero’s claustrophobic vision of a late-1960s America literally tearing itself apart rewrote the rules of the horror genre, combined gruesome gore with acute social commentary, and quietly broke ground by casting a black actor (Duane Jones) in its lead role. Stark, haunting, and more relevant than ever, Night of the Living Dead is back.”

These are bold claims and I’m heavily inclined to agree with all of them.


In NotLD there is this pervasive feeling of dread; that all the characters are kinda f**ked, no one is safe and there may not be a tomorrow. This may be commonplace now in modern films but upon Night’s release it was an absolute rarity. When I cover the film’s importance in the Significance section in a bit, compared to all it’s ‘spooky horror’ peers, Night really was more shocking and shattering than the strangest on screen nightmares that were produced at the time indeed. It also most definitely rewrote the rules of the horror genre by redefining what the genre was capable of.

Why do I think this is? I think this is because Russo and Romero had the courage to adopt what was referenced by the Stephen King quote from earlier; the guiding hand of the plot was discarded in favor of just seeing how the characters in Night would just survive. This lead to a palpable sense of unpredictability; what can be referred to as ‘plot armor’ in modern parlance.

Simply put Night was an exceptionally rare movie at the time for it stripped plot armor away from all its characters. The entire focus is on ordinary people reacting to a horrific situation with all their merits and flaws that entails. In such a ghastly situation an ordinary person’s fate is not guaranteed. A normal person’s valor may shrivel up in the face of unearthly horror that all but promises an absolutely brutally painful death.

Night has the insidious power to get inside a viewer’s head and ask, “What would you do in this situation? Would you survive?” If there is any doubt in one’s conviction then Night implies humans return to something they have thought they have moved past: the food chain. To not only die but to be consumed by something unearthly is next level unsettling.

Significance
This film is so significant that I almost opted out of doing this as my third ever cinema review. I feared I would fail to capture just how impactful this film was. Let’s give it a shot.

Filmed on a budget of $100k, NotLD would go onto gross $30m worldwide. Not a bad return on investment. Ratings wise IMDB has Night sitting at 7.9 out of 10, Metacritic 89 out of 100, and Roger Ebert gave it a 3.5 out of 5.

The numbers just don’t capture how impactful this movie was and is. I feel Jon Towlson put it best in his article ‘Why Night of the Living Dead Was a Big-Bang Moment For Horror movies‘ for the British Film Institute:

“Barbara’s flight from the graveyard to the farmhouse feels like a journey not just to another location but to another film: she runs out of a classic horror movie and into a modern one.”

Roger Ebert also adds from his 1969 review, “I don’t think the younger kids didn’t really knew what hit them. They were used to going to movies, sure, and they’d seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else.”

In order to understand what was considered horor upon NotLD’s release I watched and researched a few older movies namely: ‘The Last Man on Earth’& ‘Zombies of Mora-Tau’, ‘The Birds’, and ‘White Zombie’.

In all these movies it feels like the characters are one outburst of bravado and swagger away from escaping the danger at hand. If they could just put their back into it and get a stiff shot of whiskey, they can advance their heroic arc with trumpets blaring before they deliver a passionate kiss to their romantic interest. I’m not speaking of special effects limitations of the time; I’m strictly speaking about the willingness to put a movie’s main characters in real and plausible danger.


When fake cobwebs and jack-o-lanterns are put out for Halloween this isn’t done to instill a sense of horror. Instead they are meant to instill horror’s much lighter sibling - spooky. From a modern perspective it’s easier to think of pre NotLD horror films as ‘spooky’ movies instead. Theaters across the globe featured spooky fun horror movies parents could safely let their kids watch. Night changed all that. Night was in many ways cinema’s first nightmare. Spooky horror didn’t disappear overnight of course but the bar was forever raised by NotLD.

Romero has stated multiple times that Night wasn’t meant to be an analogy for racial issues going on at the time. However, there was the Civil Rights movement going on at the time and MLK was assassinated the year Night was released. This combined with Duane Jones being the very first black actor to have the starring role in a horror movie and his role wasn’t an ethnic stereotype on top of that… all of this combined to give Night a way to merge with the zeitgeist of the time that its peers simply didn’t have.


I considered cementing how significant NotLD by citing each time a NotLD inspired zombie appeared in pop culture whether that be other films, books, video games, etc. About an hour into this task I realized that to do that to completion might literally turn this review into a series of videos that span dozens of hours each. So please just enjoy this zombie montage that’s been playing that’s just a fraction of a fraction of a sliver of all the zombie media out there.


Recommendation
Let’s start with who shouldn’t watch this: people who are truly against watching modern horror films. Not everyone is a horror fan for a variety of reasons. This movie is not for them.

For everyone else? Yes this is a must watch. It’s a well made classic that broke new ground and has stood the test of time. Even if you’re the type of person to avoid older films… listen I hear you. They tend to be corny, cheesy, and unbearably campy by modern standards. BUT..If you have room in your life for one old classic then NotLD should be that one film.

Night has quite a few sequels that span different timelines and versions with it being public domain. However, Romero directed two canonical sequels ‘Dawn of the Dead’ and ‘Day of the Dead’. He even remade Night in 1990. If you like what the original Night has to offer I highly suggest you watch these films.

Even though Night is a great film, I wish the ghouls that appeared in Night were more aggressive. While nowhere near the weak pushover undead featured in ‘Last Man on Earth’ looking at the original Night having been spoiled by decades of modern horror movies I do wish the ghouls were a tad bit more on the relentless side. But it’s something I can easily look past for a movie that was literally redefining its own genre.

Sources

Anubis/Flesh Eater Names
https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/19843IAL
https://books.google.com/books?id=qI8YDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT29&lpg=PT29&dq="NIGHT+OF+THE+living+dead”+and+“basically+ripped+off”+and+“i+am+legend”&source=bl&ots=yxUIXl2YhD&sig=nLFXNGxTcFjne27mlB1UaEjcNHE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi9suqtw-fRAhUs94MKHV7kB_oQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=“NIGHT%20OF%20THE%20living%20dead”%20and%20"basically%20ripped%20off"%20and%20"i%20am%20legend"&f=false

variety interview
https://variety.com/2017/film/news/george-romero-discusses-night-of-the-living-dead-in-previously-unavailable-1972-interview-1202598349/

Radio Spot Ad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkWyFSVgocI

Jon Towlson Article for British Film Institute
https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/night-living-dead-george-romero

Roger Ebert review
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-night-of-the-living-dead-1968

Criterion page
https://www.criterion.com/films/29331-night-of-the-living-deadbox office:https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Night-of-the-Living-Dead-(1968)#tab=summary

Time interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZnJtny6C6w


Music Info
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1944860126/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_44J99X2VZZYT9FQV2KDD
&
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/how_george_romero_found_the_perfect_music_for_his_zombie_horror_classic_nig

Stephen King
https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Memoir-Craft-Stephen-King-ebook/dp/B000FC0SIM/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=on+writing&qid=1634261889&sr=8-4

IMDB
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063350/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Duane Jones changing script
https://www.thewrap.com/night-living-dead-casting-cult-classic-20545/