Sam Christopher's DVD Picks - Night of the Living Dead

Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars (Highest Rating)

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

In my freshman year of high school, my homeroom teacher was an art instructor named B. Davis. I never took a class of his—he taught art, and I can’t draw blood with a syringe—and I think this was his only year of teaching there, but right before Halloween that year he got a print of and permission to show Night of the Living Dead. Now this was just as videotapes were about to come into vogue (my family was the first I knew of that had a VCR, a monstrous machine I could barely lift on my own), so the print we saw was a reel-to-reel, maybe 16-mm print that was projected onto as big a screen as an old high school had and the several of us who had stayed after school that day huddled on the floor of the old rec room and watched. Watched the horror unfold as something unlike anything before came across the screen. A couple years before I had been snuck into a theater to see the original Dawn of the Dead, ostensibly the sequel to NotLD, so I knew a little of what to expect. But this was somehow the scarier of the two for me. Whereas Dawn had the gore and the cannibalism was right in your face, there was something even more unsettling about watching this all in black-and-white. It seemed to lend the production an authenticity that no other horror film I had seen before had. Even today, this film has a power for me in which the whole transcends the sum of its parts.

The film begins with a brother and sister driving down a lonely road to a cemetery to visit the grave of their mother. Johnny (Russ Streiner) and Barbra (Judith O’Dea) are arguing over the drive, Johnny complaining about their mother being buried this far out and them having to blow their whole day on the trip, Barbra trying to be reasonably tolerant of his whining. As Barbra places the flowers on the grave, Johnny slips into an old habit he has of teasing her for being scared of the cemetery. “They’re coming to get you, Barbra,” he says in an approximation of Boris Karloff. Then, seeing a gaunt man walking through the tombstones a little ways off, Johnny says, “Look! There comes one of them now!” How right he is. The Cemetery Zombie (Bill Hinzeman) attacks Barbra and, when Johnny comes to her defense, ends up killing Johnny. Barbra runs back to the car only to find that Johnny took the keys. She pulls the parking brake and the car rolls downhill away from her attacker, who has already smashed out a window. She rolls into a tree (which became necessary when the car, borrowed for the production from Streiner’s mother, was damaged in an accident away from the set) and sets off on foot, running until she finds a seemingly abandoned old house to hide out in. She finds a woman upstairs dead, with part of her face missing. Scared beyond reason, Barbra runs out the front door, where we’ve already seen that a couple other “walkers” have joined Hinzeman, right into the headlights of a truck.

Ben (Duane Jones), the driver of the truck, hustles Barbra back into the house and then goes back out to beat down the couple of attackers walking around. He comes back in to find that she is threatened by a zombie (co-scripter John Russo) that came in through the back door, a would-be assassin Ben beats down and destroys with a tire iron through the forehead. Ben begins to get things organized. He builds a fire, having seen the attackers are afraid of it, and begins boarding up the doors and windows. (There’s a very famous scene where Ben tells Barbra that everything is pretty secure but behind him in plain sight is a completely undefended window. This is explained in commentaries that that window was about fifteen feet off the ground, but there’s no way for the viewer to know that.) He then goes upstairs to see what else he can find, leaving Barbra alone until the people from the basement come out. Two couples, Tom (Keith Wayne) and Judy (Judith Ridley), last names unknown, and Harry (Karl Hardman) and Helen (Marilyn Eastman) Cooper, along with the latter’s young daughter, Karen (Kyra Schon), it turns out, have been holed up in the cellar. The Coopers, we’re told, had car trouble and were attacked by several zombies who turned over their car and bit their daughter on the arm. Tom and Judy are a young boyfriend-girlfriend from the area who heard about the trouble and ran to the old house they knew was there. Friction immediately develops between Harry, who is an irascible villain, and the more reasonable but strong-willed Ben, which is usually attributed to the difference in color (Ben is black), but I always saw Harry as just an irritant; he doesn’t get along with his wife either.

Through the course of the rest of the film, our protagonists watch newscasts and listen to radio reports that flesh out the over-arching story of the dead rising to devour the living. They try and escape using the truck, only to end up killing Tom and Judy and watching by firelight as the two are devoured in the yard outside. Barbra saves Helen, only to have Johnny return to drag her outside. Karen, in one of the single most horrific scenes ever filmed, murders her mother with a trowel and feeds on both her, and, finally, her father after Harry and Ben shoot it out. Ben hides out in the cellar when all the defenses break down and the undead take over the house. In the morning, no longer hearing the rummaging, staggering dead stomping above him, Ben comes out and peers through a window outside, only to be shot dead by one of the organized hunting parties sent out to clear the countryside.

There are so many stories around this film. Stories such as the now-preeminent master of makeup effects Tom Savini being asked to work on this film (as he would later work on the follow-ups Dawn and Day of the Dead) but being drafted and sent to Vietnam instead. Stories such as director George Romero and John Russo “throwing the film into the trunk” of their car and driving around to find someone to show it on April 4, 1968, the night Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. It was made at a time when the world was changing, and it was about a drastic change. I’ve always looked at this as the definitive adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I am Legend to screen, even though that’s not what it is. That’s the great thing about great film and stories, though, we each bring our own realities to the party. We shape them every bit as much as they shape us.

-Sam Christopher

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