The best and scariest movies aren’t funny. No sassy little kids who know how to cuss, no before/after the kill puns, no teenage shenanigans or montages. What makes them scary is that you still think about them long after it’s over. Not a brief boo, or a loud jump in music that’s forgotten about before you get to your car. Fifty years ago, George A. Romero knew this and made one of the best and scariest movies of all time, Night of The Living Dead. Since this movie is the genesis of a massively popular subculture of horror films that has crossed every culture in the world I’ll be brief.
I waited till tonight to write this because it was playing in my local theater and had not seen it in some time. The first time I saw Night of the Living Dead, it was a victim of my inexperience and ignorance of horror films. Not enough gore, not enough color, where are the naked chicks? This could use some profanity! Is the pizza here yet? True art grows with the viewer over time and tonight was no exception. Seeing it on the big screen was truly special. The stark colors only enhanced the dread that surrounded that house. What is keeping me awake as I write is the end. Ben has survived the night in the cellar and emerges as he hears people and shooting outside. Without any regard he is quickly murdered and dragged off to the fire with the rest of the bodies. The parallels of the civil rights struggle fifty years ago and our own contentious political climate today is palpable and undeniable.
It wasn’t only about zombies and a little bit of guts being chewed on. Night of the Living Dead was about choices made in fear and irrationality. It was about survival at any cost whether you were alive or dead, whether you wanted to stay in the basement or not. The final frames are of a raging fire with the bodies burning, it left me feeling that nothing was resolved and there is no end in sight. In America today and in 1968 the thought of no resolution is truly terrifying.
— Raul Reyes
Released in the year of our lord, 1968, Night of the Living Dead changed everything. It’s also the year I was born, but I’m pretty sure I had nothing to do with the seismic shift in horror cinema and the sheer nihilistic brutality that followed. It’s not just one of my favorite horror films, but one of my favorite films, period. I’ve watched it grainy and crystal clear, I’ve watched it colorized, I’ve even watched a version that had been animated over (but I didn’t watch that Russo money-grab, so there). I’ve owned a variety of copies on VHS, DVD, and now Blu-ray, but in all my fifty years, I’d never seen it on the big screen.
Until now.
Fathom Events arranged a two-night showing of the recently remastered Night of the Living Dead to celebrate its Fiftieth Anniversary and you can bet my ass was in a seat. And even though it was the lowest-budget of Romero’s Dead features and I have a love for all but the very final film, it still stands out as the most brutal and impactful of Romero’s work.
Every film in that original trilogy captured its respective decade and each still resonates to this day with their savage critiques of consumer culture and the military-industrial complex, but it was Night that took swings at our most primal fears and anxieties, our inability to truly come together even in the face of disaster, the inevitability of death, children born into a dying world, corruption, the breakdown of families, and the absolute absurdity of living and dying for no reason in the modern world.
Rewatching the film on the big screen, I was struck at just how disturbing two scenes in particular still were after fifty years; when Karen Cooper (Kyra Schon) returns from the dead and murders her parents – especially the trowel stabbing of her mother and the insistent chunking sounds as the blade plunges into meat over and over beyond all reason – and that final moment when you think Ben (Duane Jones) has survived the night – the only survivor – knowing that he had been wrong about the safety of the basement, only to be shot in the head by rednecks and then burned on a pile of zombie bodies.
If there was anything that summed up 1968, it was these two images.
I’m still not convinced that Romero didn’t know the impact that casting Jones would have thematically. In his humble way, he always just said that Jones was the best actor for the role, and he undoubtedly was. But it was still bold and brave casting. The impact of that final shot ringing out and the still photos that play out in montage as the final credits roll wouldn’t have half their power with a white protagonist.
I sat in the theater, chilled and silent, among an audience that also seemed to feel the numbed stillness that the film invokes. It’s a powerful film that hasn’t lost a single bit of its strength and importance, especially in a contemporary world that seems to be on the brink of a very similar chaos that rocked the world in ’68.
— Paul Brian McCoy