“They ought to make the day the time changes the first day of summer.”
This is the first line uttered in George A. Romero‘s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. It’s a strangely stylish line for a movie made almost 60 years ago—a movie that earned 240 times its budget at the box office and ignited a wave of zombie flicks that has never stopped.
That offbeat, unassuming quality is the DNA of the film. It’s in the acting, the cinematography and the storytelling itself, and it’s what makes Night of the Living Dead watchable today.
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S. William Hinzman and Judith O’Dea in “Night of the Living Dead”Continental Distributing
‘A Sudden, General Explosion of Mass Homicide’
Night of the Living Dead follows Barbra (Judith O’Dea), who travels to a rural Pennsylvania cemetery with her brother Johnny (Russell Streiner) to place a wreath on their father’s grave. While there, they are attacked by a strange man who appears to have come back from the dead. Johnny is killed, and Barbra escapes and eventually finds shelter in an isolated farmhouse, where she meets Ben (Duane Jones), a black man who has also been attacked by the creatures.
Ben and Barbra barricade themselves inside the house, but they soon discover that they aren’t alone. Five other people are hiding in the basement, and outside, a growing crowd of reanimated corpses gathers around the house. As the night progresses, the danger outside becomes increasingly difficult to separate from the conflict among the people trapped inside.
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Duane Jones and Judith O’Dea in “Night of the Living Dead”Continental Distributing
Performances That Don’t Feel Like 1968
The dialogue in Night of the Living Dead is almost naturalistic. There’s a distinct Mid-Atlantic accent, a staple of old movies, but the characters have a casual way of speaking that sounds modern. This is evident from the opening scene where Barbra and Johnny are arguing about having to make the long drive to their father’s grave.
“Look at this thing,” Johnny says, reading the message on the wreath. “‘We still remember.’ I don’t. You know, I don’t even remember what the man looks like.”
Romero worked with a cast that included local actors, friends and colleagues from Pittsburgh, and he gave them room to find their own rhythms. O’Dea recalled to Daily Dead that the scene in which Barbra tells Ben what happened at the cemetery was not scripted. Romero gave her things to include and let her and Jones play out the scene, which they nailed in the first take. Some of it is almost a little mumblecore, if a ’60s movie could approach anything like mumblecore.
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Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman and Kyra Schon in “Night of the Living Dead”Continental Distributing
The Rough Filmmaking Is Part of the Appeal
The cinematography in Night of the Living Dead is messy but expressive, with dark, blotted contrast, frequent handheld shots and occasional little jumps in the footage due to lost frames. It is clearly a low-budget movie, but that low budget allows Romero’s artistry to come through. In the age of streaming originals, when carefully formulated visual styles have removed so much of the human charm from the art form, Night of the Living Dead looks and feels astonishingly human.
Romero himself was well aware of the film’s technical shortcomings. Looking back years later, he said he could still see the mistakes, including basic problems with eye direction and screen direction.
“I was clueless about all of that,” he said in an interview with the British Film Institute, explaining that his experience making commercials had taught him to approach filmmaking one shot at a time rather than thinking through an entire sequence.
But those shortcomings give the movie some of its roughest and most appealing qualities. The camera doesn’t always feel like it’s imposing order on the action. It often feels like it’s simply there, watching. Even the lulls in the movie, like when Barbra and Ben work together to board up the house, are made interesting thanks to Romero’s unpolished presentation.
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These Aren’t the Zombies You’re Used To
The “ghouls” in the film—they wouldn’t be more popularly called “zombies” until the mid-1970s—are quite unlike the zombies we know today. Their expressions are demented and their movements deliberate. They’re violent and desperate. But on the spectrum of zombie behavior, they’re a sort of middle-ground between the sluggish, mindless creatures in The Walking Dead and the enraged sprinters in 28 Days Later.
They’re scarier than modern zombies, because they’re not entirely stupid. They act as if there is still a light on upstairs. If they can’t break through your car window by pounding on it, they’ll find a rock to smash it out.
Romero later developed a loose approach to directing his zombie performers in future films. He explained to Vanity Fair that when he tried to demonstrate a movement, actors would simply imitate him, so he preferred to let them invent their own physical behavior. His direction to zombie actors was essentially to “Do your best dead.”
This might explain why the ghouls in Night of the Living Dead don’t all move exactly alike. They look like individual people who have died and returned, rather than a uniform army of extras performing the same choreography.
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Duane Jones in “Night of the Living Dead”Continental Distributing
Duane Jones Made Ben One of Horror’s Most Important Heroes
About 13 minutes into the movie, Barbra is trying to escape the farmhouse when headlights suddenly shine into her face. A vehicle pulls up, and a man gets out to help her. It is Duane Jones, playing Ben, and his entrance changes the movie.
Jones is strikingly handsome, composed and considerably more controlled than the frantic people around him. He gives easily the best performance in the film. His restrained, naturalistic delivery would have fit right in with modern styles of acting.
Jones was not an untrained actor picked at random. He had studied in Norway and Paris and was completing an M.A. at New York University when he was cast. Romero later said Jones was “the best actor we met to play Ben.” The original Ben had been conceived as a white, lower-class, uneducated truck driver, but Jones changed the character’s presentation, including his dialogue and wardrobe.
Jones understood the significance of the casting in a way the filmmakers initially did not. Romero later told the BFI, “We thought, we’ll be hip and not even notice that he was black. Duane was very aware of it. He was really conscious of being a black guy in this role, and of course because he is black it takes on a completely different personality—a completely different texture and politics. We were a bit blind to it.”
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Judith O’Dea, Duane Jones and Keith Wayne in “Night of the Living Dead”Continental Distributing
Is Night of the Living Dead Really About Race?
Romero spent much of his career resisting the idea that he consciously made Night of the Living Dead as a racial allegory. He said that Ben had originally been written as white and that Jones was cast because he was the best actor for the role. Race, however, is hardly absent from the movie.
The film was released in 1968, the same year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Romero later recalled that he and Streiner were driving the first print of the movie to New York when they heard the news of King’s assassination on the radio.
“All of a sudden, the film became a racial statement,” Romero told The Village Voice. “These two things were accidents that benefited us. Millions of people saw the film because of our lack of a copyright…and the fact that it was perceived as a kind of racial statement lent it gravitas.”
The ending of Night of the Living Dead makes the racial reading even harder to ignore. Ben survives the night, only to be shot and killed by a white posse that mistakes him for one of the ghouls.
S. William Hinzman and Duane Jones in “Night of the Living Dead”Continental Distributing
Jones embraced the racial implications of Ben’s fate. When Romero and his collaborators considered an alternate ending in which Ben survived, Jones argued against it, believing that killing the black hero would have a greater impact.
“I convinced George that the black community would rather see me dead than saved, after all that had gone on, in a corny and symbolically confusing way,” Jones explained (via TheWrap). “The heroes never die in American movies. The jolt of that and the double jolt of the hero figure being black seemed like a double-barreled whammy.”
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How a $125,000 Movie Started the Zombie Boom
Night of the Living Dead was made for just $125,000. That’s roughly $1.2 million today. The movie went on to gross around $30 million worldwide, putting its theatrical return at roughly 240 times its production cost.
Its influence was even larger than its financial return. Night of the Living Dead helped establish the modern flesh-eating zombie, replacing the older cinematic idea of the zombie as a person controlled through Haitian voodoo. Romero’s creatures were originally called ghouls, and he said he never called them zombies when he made the film. The term was applied later and became the standard name for the creatures he had created.
Romero returned to the subject with Dawn of the Dead in 1978 and Day of the Dead in 1985. Other filmmakers soon adopted and reworked the flesh-eating undead, with Italian director Lucio Fulci‘s Zombi films becoming prominent early examples. The zombie eventually spread far beyond movies, becoming a staple of television, video games and popular culture. Romero’s basic concept of the reanimated dead as flesh-eating monsters has become one of horror’s most recognizable ideas.
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A Classic Pick for the Halloween Season
It’s easy to see how Night of the Living Dead kicked off a new era of horror. Romero was doing something wildly different from other filmmakers of his time, but it wasn’t different for its own sake. The film is scary, entertaining and—critical to its legacy—laced with meaning. What’s most surprising is how well it holds up today.
Don’t let the 1968 date chase you off it. You don’t have to be a film nerd or an old head to enjoy this one. If you’re tired of the overly polished, formulaic oatmeal being churned out by studios and streaming giants, give Night of the Living Dead a watch. It’s free on YouTube.
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