[ April 19, 2024 ]
Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema feature is the horror classic, Night of the Living Dead, in keeping with Halloween, of course. George A. Romero’s debut “set the template for the zombie film, and features tight editing, realistic gore, and a sly political undercurrent.” Political undercurrent, indeed. The zombies remind me of the millennials.
When “Night of the Living Dead” opened in 1968, mostly in grindhouse theaters, Vincent Canby of The New York Times dismissed it in a three-sentence review as “a grainy little movie acted by what appear to be nonprofessional actors, who are besieged in a farmhouse by some other nonprofessional actors who stagger around, stiff-legged, pretending to be flesh-eating ghouls.” He said the filmmakers were “some people in Pittsburgh.”
As it happened, “Living Dead” followed a trajectory rare in American film: Partly fueled by other, more scandalized reviews (including one by a young Roger Ebert, in Reader’s Digest), it went on to cult success, and two years later was recognized as being sufficiently artful to be placed in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Its influence, particularly on the now nearly ubiquitous subgenre of zombie horror (“The Walking Dead” on TV, and the movies “28 Days Later,” “World War Z” and “Shaun of the Dead”) is broadly recognized.(NYT)
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A Half-Century Later, Night of the Living Dead Still Shocks
| October 11, 2017 | LA Weekly:Fifty years ago, in 1967, Cool Hand Luke, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night and The Dirty Dozen rocked American cinemas. And somewhere in a field outside Pittsburgh, George Romero and John Russo were shooting on black-and-white 16mm and 35mm film a low-budget movie that would create and define an entire horror subgenre. While those of-the-moment studio films were polished, Night of the Living Dead, released in 1968, seemed amateur on the surface — the frames were noisy with film grain, the sound always corrupted with a hint of static. But the immediate, quasi-documentary feel, a result of budgetary constraints, actually served the film’s horror, jolting audiences because it all seemed just a little too real. (It will look more real than ever in Janus Films’ new 4K restoration.)
Roger Ebert wrote an editorial for Reader’s Digest that slammed the film’s violence, which
included little girls killing their mothers with a trowel and the undead gnawing on the charred flesh of characters the audience had come to like. This was not a gleefully ghoulish Vincent Price vehicle, where an air of silliness could ease an audience’s anxieties. The film was brutal as few horror hits had been before, and Romero, the director, had no interest in offering the comforts familiar to the genre. He hadn’t even set out to make a horror film. He and Russo, who co-wrote, had to abandon their script about space-roving teenagers who bop down to Earth and pull pranks on some townies because of budget issues. Horror, well — that was cheaper and could make money.
In the film, Duane Jones plays Ben, the lead and putative hero. Ben is wise and calm, and as he recounts to a catatonic stranger named Barbra (Judith O’Dea) a horrifying encounter with the zombies (called “ghouls” in the film), we come to understand that he’s seen some shit and is not easily shaken. He’s immediately at odds with other survivors in the farmhouse where they hole up for the night, such as loudmouth Harry (Karl Hardman) and his hesitant wife, Helen (Marilyn Eastman). And though Ben seems to know best, he’s adrift with this inharmonious crew. That Jones was African-American didn’t matter at all to Romero and Russo — they merely wanted the best actor who could afford to work essentially for free for 20 days in exchange for back-end points on the film. But Jones knew from the beginning how his blackness would be read by audiences, and his situation of trying to convince the people on set that he knew better how things should be done often mirrored his character’s struggles on screen.
Jones was wary of the scene where Ben must punch a white woman. He was uneasy about Ben having to challenge an alpha white man like Harry. He was annoyed by his character’s low-intellect dialogue — the script hadn’t changed from when the character was supposed to be white — and helped to rewrite some of his lines to match his own theater-learned proper diction. Whether Romero had intended this, the film became very much about race, especially since Sidney Poitier had starred alongside a predominantly white cast in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner that same year, priming audiences for this sort of social commentary. Colorblind casting simply wasn’t done back in 1967, except for Night of the Living Dead.
Jones would become an enigmatic and mysterious figure after the film premiered, dodging interviews as much as possible. He went on to found a theater in New York City and teach at universities there but had mostly been silent about that time in his life. He told Tim Ferrante in his last interview, “The questions take on a remarkable predictability of what people want to talk about.”
In that same interview, he recounts eating at a restaurant with a few of his students who noticed that he had been glancing up at a TV playing the film. At first, the students didn’t even recognize him on the screen.When one at last did, and mentioned it, the other two argued that the first student must be wrong, while Jones sat there letting them decide for themselves. As Jones tells the story, he stayed silent out of his disinterest in their discussion. But in a sense there may have been no real right or wrong answer Jones could have given; that was him on the screen but also wasn’t. He said it was a different life, a role that could have easily pigeonholed him, and he was insulted by the Los Angeles and New York critics’ assumption that everyone involved in the film was an amateur because they came from Pittsburgh. Jones had been acting in New York for years, and the production team had been making commercials and industrial films for a long time as well.
When he did speak about Night of the Living Dead, Jones defended its merits, especially what he saw as the most overlooked aspect: the editing. And Jones is right. Because Romero, Russo, Eastman and Hardman were reared in what we might call short-form content, they knew how to condense a story to its most necessary parts — we have a cemetery and a girl, and something is chasing her.
Barbra’s hysterical monologue about losing her brother Johnny to the ghouls is delivered while we’re watching Ben rip a table apart and demonstrate that the undead don’t like fires. By overlapping these elements, Romero created a suspenseful cognitive dissonance but also advanced the story in as little time as necessary. Take the scene where Harry collapses next to his daughter’s body. Audiences today may take for granted the tension that Romero builds by not lingering on the moment — where we suspect the daughter will return and devour her father — and cutting instead back to Ben upstairs. Romero’s decision not to show how the arm was ripped off probably stemmed from a confluence of budgetary and censorship concerns, but the final effect is a chilling revelation for Helen, as the child emerges from the shadows, wielding dad’s arm like a roasted turkey leg. These scenes are precisely constructed, which is why the surprising uncertainty in the film’s final scene registers today as still shocking.
included little girls killing their mothers with a trowel and the undead gnawing on the charred flesh of characters the audience had come to like. This was not a gleefully ghoulish Vincent Price vehicle, where an air of silliness could ease an audience’s anxieties. The film was brutal as few horror hits had been before, and Romero, the director, had no interest in offering the comforts familiar to the genre. He hadn’t even set out to make a horror film. He and Russo, who co-wrote, had to abandon their script about space-roving teenagers who bop down to Earth and pull pranks on some townies because of budget issues. Horror, well — that was cheaper and could make money.The Truth Must be Told
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10 Comments
6 years ago
Muzz, Bolsheviks, welfare thugs, Deep State bureaucrats, traitorous Republican Congressional leaders, anti-First Amendment thugs (antiFA), each in their own way gnawing away at the flesh of the civil society. Good Halloween movie to reflect what is going on in our civilization in a symbolic guise.
6 years ago
“For sheer demonic strangeness, he is excelled” – H.P. Lovecraft
The Double Shadow by Clark Aston Smith
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhnwtFwY0KE
6 years ago
George Romero has made his last zombie flick. RIP George Romero.
6 years ago
Roger Ebert said he saw Night of The Living Dead at a matinee — before there were any ratings for films! He said the kids at the movie were stunned and a little girl was crying by the end of the movie.
6 years ago
One if the greatest films of all time. Romero who recently died made several sequels including the follow up classic “Dawn of the Dead”. In fact Romero was well skilled in documentary and commercial work. Right after this film he made a commercial that he even said cost more than night of the living dead.
Roger Ebert eventually came around and praised Romero and called his vampire movie “Martin”, one of the best. The ending to night of the living dead was in fact changed by Duane Jones where he was to have survived. He convinced Romero to change the ending which gave the film greater impact.
6 years ago
In the good old days before real monsters like head chopping “peace” terrorists, diseases-from-across-the-border illegals, moronic students tools, uh “protesters”, holy wood pedophilia producers and actors, satan worshiper models, wall street participants in orgies, and the government circus of the deep state there was return of the living dead and the 10 most scariest alien movies –
6 years ago
I understood this show caught the “essence” of something and started a new genre of sorts?
I wouldn’t mind watching the movie with you – on my mother’s couch, of course. For my protection. 🙂
6 years ago
I never liked the series, including the first movie. There was no connection as to WHY the dead rose and were hungry for “brains”. It just flopped, in my humble opinion, and although I have seen about three of the movies, I was never impressed at all. I suppose I watched that number wondering if any improvement to the story line was done, but I never could get past the dead being killed – again and again, ad infinitum.
6 years ago
Yeah we allah know it’s the “cultural Marxists” who are slaughtering/enslaving/persecuting people of other faiths en mass allah over the world Tariq Al Taqiyya.
6 years ago
The original Ben was to be played by a Muslim in which he forms an alliance with the zombies to destroy eat all white people and form a new nation based on an Islamic/ zombie ideology wtf…
