Night of the Living Dead: The Movie
Created | Updated Apr 15, 2003
"They're coming...they're coming for you, Barbra!"
Written by a first-time director, filmed by a small-time company more experienced in producing tv adverts and shot entirely on location in Pittsburgh with a cast consisting more of the production crew, investors in the project and local extras than actual actors, The Night of the Living Dead is, on paper at least, far from the stuff of traditional cinematic legend.
But despite all these points against it, or maybe because of them, soon after it was released on an unsuspecting audience in the late 1960's the film rose to a position of cult status and marked the beginning of a new style in the horror genre that still predominates in the Hollywood of today.
THE SYNOPSIS
The screenply for NOTLD was based upon a short story written by Romero and inspired by Richard Matheson's seminal novel "I am Legend." In the book the solitary survivor of a mystreious plague which has transformed the population into zombie-like vampires struggles against the odds to evade the creatures after his blood; the parallels between book and film are plain to see.
Set in an isolated part of rural Pittsburgh, NOTLD follows the fortunes of a small and disparate group of characters thrown together in a bleak farmhouse against the desparate background of a world invaded by the walking dead. As if the idea of corpses getting up from the slab and wandering around wasn't bad enough, the audience soon learn that the newly awakened dead are in the grip of an insatiable hunger for the flesh of the living. Of course when the dead have hunted down and devoured all they can of a living human being the result is another dead one, and these victims soon join the ranks of their own killers in the hunt for the flesh of the living.
As bizarre and ludicrous as the premise may be the film has a certain stark quality that renders the shambling cadavers of the departed more terrifying than anything cooked up in a Hollywood effects studio. As the film progresses the situation of the survivors becomes evermore desperate as they struggle to save themselves from their relentless foes. The film asks the question: can the few isolated individuals put aside their own fears, prejudices and neurosis long enough to survive an assault of the massed ranks of the dead?
THE PROTAGONISTS
The characters involved in NOTLD can be divided into three distinct groups: the living, the undead and the media. Of course the fact that a character starts the film as a part of the first group does not necessarily mean that they will stay there as the ranks of the second are ever expanding. Perhaps the most logical reading of the protagonists is that the disparate and distinct personlities trapped togehther are representative of the individual struggling to escape the masses which seek to comsume that which sets him apart and add him to their own mindless ranks.
Barbra (Judith O'Dea)
The first of the main characters to appear on screen, Barbra and her brother Johnny arrive in a lonely rural grayeyard just as dusk is falling. The pair have driven for hours in order to complete their annual pilgrimage to the grave of their father on behalf of their remaining infirm parent. Whilst returning to the car they are attacked by a solitary zombie and separated from each other. Forced to flee for her life, Barbra finds her way to a seemingly deserted farmhouse nearby. Locking herself in and collapsing with fear and exhaustion, Barbra spends most of the film in a state of near catatonia and denial refusing to believe that her brother is most likely dead and the danger which she is herself in. perhaps the most obvious stereotype of the genre to feature in the film, Barbra contributes little to the efforts of the protagonists other than to provide one more innocent unable and unwilling to protect herself.
Ben (Duane Jones)
Energetically portrayed by Jones (in one of the first instances of a black actor playing a lead where his colour was not overtly part of the plot in the history of Hollywood) Ben reaches the farmhouse shortly after Barbra has hidden away inside. Driving a pickup truck that he has aquired in the ensuing chaos, Ben at first intends to do nothing more than fill the truck's tank with gasoline from a pump in the yard. But as the pump is locked he is forced to enter the house in search of the key. Here he finds Barbra insensible upon the couch. After rousing her and finding that she has no idea where the key to the gasoline pump might be he decides that for the moment they are both safest in the house and sets about barricading the windows and doors and gathering together any weapons left in the house by its former occupants. Ben even makes the effort to find shoes for Barbra, who lost her own in her flight from the graveyard. Quite the opposite of Barbra, Ben approaches their desperate situation with a stern determination to survive and refuses to give up hope in the face of the overwhelming odds. The final survivor among those who seek refuge in the farmhouse, Ben is in the end shot and killed by a member of the local sheriff's party as they dispatch the remaining zombies and search for living survivors. Some have argued that this makes a statement about the inability of the white gunman to differentiate between the zombies he is hunting and Ben, whom he also sees as less than human due to the colour of his skin. But as mentioned earlier the character of Ben was never conceived as black or white by Romero, so this reading of the final, and exceptionally bleak scene of the film is in the end down to the interpretation of the individual.
Henry Cooper (Karl Hardman)
Played by one of the film's financial backers, Henry Cooper is an irritable, nervous and paranoid man trying desperatly to protect his wife and daughter from a fate worse than death at the hands of the undead. The Cooper family are forced to flee to the farmhouse when their car is swarmed on the road by a pack of zombies and overturned. Cooper manages to get the family into the house (before either Barbra or ben arrive) and holes them up in the basement where he and his wife Helen try to save the life of their young daughter Karen who was injured in the attack. They remain hidden until a young local couple named Tom and Judy seek refuge in the house and join them in the basement. Hearing movement upstairs and accompanied by Tom, Cooper eventually ventures upstairs and happens upon Ben and Barbra. Convinced that the only place they will be safe is in the basement, Cooper insists violently that everyone retreat down there and bar the door. Ben, on the other hand, is adamant that the only hope is to refuel the pickup truck and drive to safety. In the end Ben wins the battle of wills and forces Henry to let go of his one piece of security in the basement and work towards their escape.
Tom (Keith Wayne)
Level-headed and practical, Tom is a young local man who brought his fiancee Judy to the isolated farmhouse after finding that they were in the middle of the same waking nightmare as the other protagonists. Neither paranoid like Cooper nor confrontational like Ben, Tom is called upon time and again to act as the voice of reason and mediate between the two. Tom accompanies Cooper when he finally goes to investigate the noises upstairs, when Ben expalins his plan to refuel the pickup truck Tom not only locates the key but also voulnteers to dirve the vehicle as well. But for all his positive action, Tom seems to have little independance or individuality and is for the most part simply swept along in the plans of the other male characters. Before the arrival of Ben he remained in the basement with Cooper, but as soon as Ben asserts his authority over the group Tom agrees to help him in any way he can. Perhaps the one person over whom Tom has any influence is his girlfriend Judy who looks to him for reassurance. It seems likely that Tom's willingness to aid both Cooper and Ben in turn stems from his need to take positive action to save Judy and himself but lacking the intelligence and initiative to formulate his own plan of action.
Helen & Karen Cooper (Marilyn Eastman & Kyra Schon)
Trapped in the dank cellar of a strange house while their husband and father respectivly tries the best he can to protect them from the flesh-eating undead outside, Helen Cooper and her daughter Karen spend most of the film in the background and play little part in the efforts by the men to effect their escape. Tending to her wounded child in the basement, Helen Cooper is forced to listen as her husband clash with new arrival Ben above. Later agreeing to emerge from the basement in an effort to make her husband co-operate with Ben and his plan to refuel the pickup truck, she also finds herself caring for Barbra who is still in a dazed state on the sofa. Karen Cooper on the other hand, is kept firmly away from the action until the film's climax.
Judy (Judith Ridley)
A simple country girl caught up in the centre of a plague of the living dead, Judy was led to the farmhouse by her boyfriend Tom and once their was posed with the pressing question of how to get out again in one piece. As with the other female characters in the film, Judy is portrayed as a vulnerable and rather helpless individual who looks to the men around her for protection. Also much like Tom, Judy seems to be quite suggestable. Despite the fact that she voices her concerns to Tom about Ben's plans for escape she is easily comforted and talked around into helping those plans along. Perhaps the one point at which Judy, or indeed any other female character in the film, shows a glimmer of practicality and independance is when she insists that she accompany Tom and Ben in the pickup truck as they race to unlock the gasoline pump out by the barn. But even then Judy does this more to be near Tom than for any desire to take a hand in her own fate.
The Newscaster (Charles Craig)
One of the most striking elements of NOTLD is the use of radio and television newscasts to tell the story of the events taking place beyond the confines of the farmhouse where the film's main protagonists are trapped. Periodically the audience is treated to a fleeting glimpse of military and scientific experts on their way to emergency meetings in Washington DC, accounts of mass-hysteria in major cities in the eastern US and the ever more desperate measures that private citizens are urged to take by the authorities in the face of the walking dead at large in the streets.
The television newscasts that appear in the film were actually shot in the sound gallery of the studio where NOTLD was cut and edited. Here the newscaster delivers a chilling mixture of accounts from around the country of the chaos resulting from the rising of the dead and information intended to keep the survivors alive and out of the clutches of the zombies hungry for their flesh.
Perhaps taking his cue here from Orson Welles infamous radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" earlier in the twentieth century, Romero took great pains to ensure that the content of the news broadcasts was as convincing as possible in order to draw the audience into the world of the film. As the television newscaster delivers his stories a list of local "refuge centres" are flashed upon across the bottom of the screen and people are urged to leave their homes and make their way to the nearest centre where they will be protected by detatchments of the National Guard and attended to by medical personnel. The names and locations of these were deliberatly chosen from places in the area that the film was shot so as to lend an element of reality. The idea was that as the names of well known landmarks popped up the local audience would be drawn into the experience of the characters as their world was overrun by the undead.
BEYOND NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
As this was the first full-length movie he had written and directed, Romero made the mistake of failing to register NOTLD with the proper authorities when it was first released. As a result the film immediatley entered into the public domain and became one of a batch of black and white US films to be tinted to give the impression of being shot in colour (a technique that results in unconvincing pastel shades) by another distributer simply because Romero had no legal rights to stop the release.
When he came to make the sequels "Dawn of the Dead" (1978) and "Day of the Dead" (1985), Romero made sure he did not fall into the same trap once more. Many zombie films have followed in the wake of NOTLD bearing titles such as "Return of the Living Dead" or "Night of the Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue," but none have been as original or innovative in their genre as the original and pale in comparison.
Romero produced a colour remake of NTOLD with Tom Savini at the helm as director. Savini had been a stuntman and make-up guru for the two later films in what has become known as the "Dead Series" and played the role of a rapacious biker in "Dawn of the Dead." Both Romero and Savini aquited themselves well with the remake, but it still failed to reach the heights of the original as by the time it was made cinema-goers had become fairly comfortable with the stark and often extreme style of horror which had been pioneered by the original all those years ago.
Romero also wrote and shot additional footage for a special anniversary edition of NOTLD. The new scenes were added to the start and the close of the film as well as a few more scenes of zombies in various stages of decay shambling about on country roads in persuit of prey. Though most of the scenes fitted the mood of the original footage, they served in the end to add very little to the actual impact of the film overall. Predictably the new edition was met with mixed reviews, but disdained by purists.
Related Internet Links
The Internet Movie Database entry for Romero's seminal film can be found at:
http://us.imdb.com/title?0063350
Written by a first-time director, filmed by a small-time company more experienced in producing tv adverts and shot entirely on location in Pittsburgh with a cast consisting more of the production crew, investors in the project and local extras than actual actors, The Night of the Living Dead is, on paper at least, far from the stuff of traditional cinematic legend.
But despite all these points against it, or maybe because of them, soon after it was released on an unsuspecting audience in the late 1960's the film rose to a position of cult status and marked the beginning of a new style in the horror genre that still predominates in the Hollywood of today.
THE SYNOPSIS
The screenply for NOTLD was based upon a short story written by Romero and inspired by Richard Matheson's seminal novel "I am Legend." In the book the solitary survivor of a mystreious plague which has transformed the population into zombie-like vampires struggles against the odds to evade the creatures after his blood; the parallels between book and film are plain to see.
Set in an isolated part of rural Pittsburgh, NOTLD follows the fortunes of a small and disparate group of characters thrown together in a bleak farmhouse against the desparate background of a world invaded by the walking dead. As if the idea of corpses getting up from the slab and wandering around wasn't bad enough, the audience soon learn that the newly awakened dead are in the grip of an insatiable hunger for the flesh of the living. Of course when the dead have hunted down and devoured all they can of a living human being the result is another dead one, and these victims soon join the ranks of their own killers in the hunt for the flesh of the living.
As bizarre and ludicrous as the premise may be the film has a certain stark quality that renders the shambling cadavers of the departed more terrifying than anything cooked up in a Hollywood effects studio. As the film progresses the situation of the survivors becomes evermore desperate as they struggle to save themselves from their relentless foes. The film asks the question: can the few isolated individuals put aside their own fears, prejudices and neurosis long enough to survive an assault of the massed ranks of the dead?
THE PROTAGONISTS
The characters involved in NOTLD can be divided into three distinct groups: the living, the undead and the media. Of course the fact that a character starts the film as a part of the first group does not necessarily mean that they will stay there as the ranks of the second are ever expanding. Perhaps the most logical reading of the protagonists is that the disparate and distinct personlities trapped togehther are representative of the individual struggling to escape the masses which seek to comsume that which sets him apart and add him to their own mindless ranks.
Barbra (Judith O'Dea)
The first of the main characters to appear on screen, Barbra and her brother Johnny arrive in a lonely rural grayeyard just as dusk is falling. The pair have driven for hours in order to complete their annual pilgrimage to the grave of their father on behalf of their remaining infirm parent. Whilst returning to the car they are attacked by a solitary zombie and separated from each other. Forced to flee for her life, Barbra finds her way to a seemingly deserted farmhouse nearby. Locking herself in and collapsing with fear and exhaustion, Barbra spends most of the film in a state of near catatonia and denial refusing to believe that her brother is most likely dead and the danger which she is herself in. perhaps the most obvious stereotype of the genre to feature in the film, Barbra contributes little to the efforts of the protagonists other than to provide one more innocent unable and unwilling to protect herself.
Ben (Duane Jones)
Energetically portrayed by Jones (in one of the first instances of a black actor playing a lead where his colour was not overtly part of the plot in the history of Hollywood) Ben reaches the farmhouse shortly after Barbra has hidden away inside. Driving a pickup truck that he has aquired in the ensuing chaos, Ben at first intends to do nothing more than fill the truck's tank with gasoline from a pump in the yard. But as the pump is locked he is forced to enter the house in search of the key. Here he finds Barbra insensible upon the couch. After rousing her and finding that she has no idea where the key to the gasoline pump might be he decides that for the moment they are both safest in the house and sets about barricading the windows and doors and gathering together any weapons left in the house by its former occupants. Ben even makes the effort to find shoes for Barbra, who lost her own in her flight from the graveyard. Quite the opposite of Barbra, Ben approaches their desperate situation with a stern determination to survive and refuses to give up hope in the face of the overwhelming odds. The final survivor among those who seek refuge in the farmhouse, Ben is in the end shot and killed by a member of the local sheriff's party as they dispatch the remaining zombies and search for living survivors. Some have argued that this makes a statement about the inability of the white gunman to differentiate between the zombies he is hunting and Ben, whom he also sees as less than human due to the colour of his skin. But as mentioned earlier the character of Ben was never conceived as black or white by Romero, so this reading of the final, and exceptionally bleak scene of the film is in the end down to the interpretation of the individual.
Henry Cooper (Karl Hardman)
Played by one of the film's financial backers, Henry Cooper is an irritable, nervous and paranoid man trying desperatly to protect his wife and daughter from a fate worse than death at the hands of the undead. The Cooper family are forced to flee to the farmhouse when their car is swarmed on the road by a pack of zombies and overturned. Cooper manages to get the family into the house (before either Barbra or ben arrive) and holes them up in the basement where he and his wife Helen try to save the life of their young daughter Karen who was injured in the attack. They remain hidden until a young local couple named Tom and Judy seek refuge in the house and join them in the basement. Hearing movement upstairs and accompanied by Tom, Cooper eventually ventures upstairs and happens upon Ben and Barbra. Convinced that the only place they will be safe is in the basement, Cooper insists violently that everyone retreat down there and bar the door. Ben, on the other hand, is adamant that the only hope is to refuel the pickup truck and drive to safety. In the end Ben wins the battle of wills and forces Henry to let go of his one piece of security in the basement and work towards their escape.
Tom (Keith Wayne)
Level-headed and practical, Tom is a young local man who brought his fiancee Judy to the isolated farmhouse after finding that they were in the middle of the same waking nightmare as the other protagonists. Neither paranoid like Cooper nor confrontational like Ben, Tom is called upon time and again to act as the voice of reason and mediate between the two. Tom accompanies Cooper when he finally goes to investigate the noises upstairs, when Ben expalins his plan to refuel the pickup truck Tom not only locates the key but also voulnteers to dirve the vehicle as well. But for all his positive action, Tom seems to have little independance or individuality and is for the most part simply swept along in the plans of the other male characters. Before the arrival of Ben he remained in the basement with Cooper, but as soon as Ben asserts his authority over the group Tom agrees to help him in any way he can. Perhaps the one person over whom Tom has any influence is his girlfriend Judy who looks to him for reassurance. It seems likely that Tom's willingness to aid both Cooper and Ben in turn stems from his need to take positive action to save Judy and himself but lacking the intelligence and initiative to formulate his own plan of action.
Helen & Karen Cooper (Marilyn Eastman & Kyra Schon)
Trapped in the dank cellar of a strange house while their husband and father respectivly tries the best he can to protect them from the flesh-eating undead outside, Helen Cooper and her daughter Karen spend most of the film in the background and play little part in the efforts by the men to effect their escape. Tending to her wounded child in the basement, Helen Cooper is forced to listen as her husband clash with new arrival Ben above. Later agreeing to emerge from the basement in an effort to make her husband co-operate with Ben and his plan to refuel the pickup truck, she also finds herself caring for Barbra who is still in a dazed state on the sofa. Karen Cooper on the other hand, is kept firmly away from the action until the film's climax.
Judy (Judith Ridley)
A simple country girl caught up in the centre of a plague of the living dead, Judy was led to the farmhouse by her boyfriend Tom and once their was posed with the pressing question of how to get out again in one piece. As with the other female characters in the film, Judy is portrayed as a vulnerable and rather helpless individual who looks to the men around her for protection. Also much like Tom, Judy seems to be quite suggestable. Despite the fact that she voices her concerns to Tom about Ben's plans for escape she is easily comforted and talked around into helping those plans along. Perhaps the one point at which Judy, or indeed any other female character in the film, shows a glimmer of practicality and independance is when she insists that she accompany Tom and Ben in the pickup truck as they race to unlock the gasoline pump out by the barn. But even then Judy does this more to be near Tom than for any desire to take a hand in her own fate.
The Newscaster (Charles Craig)
One of the most striking elements of NOTLD is the use of radio and television newscasts to tell the story of the events taking place beyond the confines of the farmhouse where the film's main protagonists are trapped. Periodically the audience is treated to a fleeting glimpse of military and scientific experts on their way to emergency meetings in Washington DC, accounts of mass-hysteria in major cities in the eastern US and the ever more desperate measures that private citizens are urged to take by the authorities in the face of the walking dead at large in the streets.
The television newscasts that appear in the film were actually shot in the sound gallery of the studio where NOTLD was cut and edited. Here the newscaster delivers a chilling mixture of accounts from around the country of the chaos resulting from the rising of the dead and information intended to keep the survivors alive and out of the clutches of the zombies hungry for their flesh.
Perhaps taking his cue here from Orson Welles infamous radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" earlier in the twentieth century, Romero took great pains to ensure that the content of the news broadcasts was as convincing as possible in order to draw the audience into the world of the film. As the television newscaster delivers his stories a list of local "refuge centres" are flashed upon across the bottom of the screen and people are urged to leave their homes and make their way to the nearest centre where they will be protected by detatchments of the National Guard and attended to by medical personnel. The names and locations of these were deliberatly chosen from places in the area that the film was shot so as to lend an element of reality. The idea was that as the names of well known landmarks popped up the local audience would be drawn into the experience of the characters as their world was overrun by the undead.
BEYOND NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
As this was the first full-length movie he had written and directed, Romero made the mistake of failing to register NOTLD with the proper authorities when it was first released. As a result the film immediatley entered into the public domain and became one of a batch of black and white US films to be tinted to give the impression of being shot in colour (a technique that results in unconvincing pastel shades) by another distributer simply because Romero had no legal rights to stop the release.
When he came to make the sequels "Dawn of the Dead" (1978) and "Day of the Dead" (1985), Romero made sure he did not fall into the same trap once more. Many zombie films have followed in the wake of NOTLD bearing titles such as "Return of the Living Dead" or "Night of the Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue," but none have been as original or innovative in their genre as the original and pale in comparison.
Romero produced a colour remake of NTOLD with Tom Savini at the helm as director. Savini had been a stuntman and make-up guru for the two later films in what has become known as the "Dead Series" and played the role of a rapacious biker in "Dawn of the Dead." Both Romero and Savini aquited themselves well with the remake, but it still failed to reach the heights of the original as by the time it was made cinema-goers had become fairly comfortable with the stark and often extreme style of horror which had been pioneered by the original all those years ago.
Romero also wrote and shot additional footage for a special anniversary edition of NOTLD. The new scenes were added to the start and the close of the film as well as a few more scenes of zombies in various stages of decay shambling about on country roads in persuit of prey. Though most of the scenes fitted the mood of the original footage, they served in the end to add very little to the actual impact of the film overall. Predictably the new edition was met with mixed reviews, but disdained by purists.
Related Internet Links
The Internet Movie Database entry for Romero's seminal film can be found at:
http://us.imdb.com/title?0063350
