Night of the Living Dead (1968) Review (Archive)

0:03What kind of a show are you guys putting on here today? You're not interested in art? No. Well, look, we're going to do this thing. We're going to have a conversation. Adam, I don't know if you've taken the time to do your top 10 horror films of all time ranked list on Letterboxd. Be curious to see that if you get to it. But right now, still on my list, right there, holding strong at number nine is George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, a movie I love. It's spooky season. So a movie that perhaps some folks are revisiting or maybe watching for the first time. It's also a movie that we talked about in depth.

0:45We gave it a sacred cow review in 2017 and we're sharing it now. It's this week's from the archive selection night of the living dead. Yeah. Did you say number nine? Number nine. On your list? Okay. I mean, it would definitely be in my top 10 and quite frankly, it might be in my top five. It'd be in the running with The Exorcist, which is also in our archive, episode 465. It'd be in the running with The Shining. I think I like it more than The Shining. That was episode 419. It'd be in The Conversation with Psycho. That was episode 907. I'm rounding out a pretty great top five list here, aren't I?

1:25I just can't go with The Silence of the Lambs as a horror movie. I don't know why. We can debate this some other time, Josh. We're not going to debate. I'm not going to debate you, Jerry. Okay. We're not going to debate that here, but we talked about that movie on episode 814. Great movie, but it just doesn't fit with the way I view horror, I guess, because I am such a horror expert. Of course, a movie that I know is in your top 10. In fact, is it your number one, A Nightmare on Elm Street? Number one. Yep. Wow. It's like number 51 for me. episode 609, A Nightmare on Elm Street. So we have a lot of classic horror in our archive, and we are digging out for you now the zombie classic Night of the Living Dead.

2:15The Film Spotting Archive has reviews, top fives, and more going back to 2005, and you can get access to it by becoming a member of the Film Spotting family. It's just one of the benefits you get by being a member. You can learn more about that at filmspottingfamily.com. From October 2017, here is that Sacred Cow review of Night of the Living Dead. Night of the Living Dead. The dead who live on living flesh. The dead whose haunted souls hunt the living. The living whose bodies are the only food for these. and godly creatures.

3:04Often for these sacred cow reviews, Adam, we try to imagine what it might have been like to see the movie at hand upon its initial release, to experience it as first audiences did. For 1968's Night of the Living Dead, George Romero's low-budget indie debut feature about a group of squabbling victims holed up in a Pennsylvania farmhouse trying to ward off a crowd of zombies, I want to tweak that thought experiment a bit. What would it have been like to watch Night of the Living Dead not only before its reputation as a horror landmark was set, but without any sense of what a zombie was, particularly at the movies?

3:38Keep in mind during the film's opening scene, the brother and sister who are visiting their father's grave are attacked by a single man. A lunatic, it seems, who then pursues the sister, played by Judith O'Day, to the farmhouse. It struck me watching Night of the Living Dead this time that initial audiences might have just thought of him as a lone maniac. Sure, a stiff, slow-moving one, but still a single threat. As I tried to forget what I knew about zombies while the story continued, it slowly dawned on me what an insidiously shocking, deeply horrifying experience Night of the Living Dead must have been.

4:13And maybe still is. Does the movie still hold a certain power for you, Adam? or is this simply considered a classic because it set the zombie template? And regarding my thought experiment, what do you think it would have been like to first encounter a zombie through Night of the Living Dead? It definitely still holds a lot of power, and I love that thought experiment. I happened to actually just randomly see that challenge that you posed for yourself on Letterboxd a couple hours before. I sat down to watch the movie. So I gave myself that challenge, too. I tried to watch it with that in mind, and I basically discovered that it's impossible to watch this film without the knowledge, without the perspective of having seen 20 to 30 years, in our case, of zombie movies, right?

5:01It's really difficult. You touched on it. The moment Barbara and Johnny get attacked in really kind of the second scene of the film, I'm thinking instinctively, don't get bitten. Why aren't you protecting yourself better? Don't you know what's going to happen to you? It's not just that they might be there to kill them. I'm thinking about how they should be protecting themselves very specifically. And later in the film, and I'm sure we can get to a lot of these examples, the one that really hit home for me was a scene involving the daughter, Karen, who we discover early in the film when our main character, Ben, discovers this group of people, this family, and this other couple that are holed up in the basement.

5:41This daughter, Karen, has been injured. That's all we really know at first. We come to discover later, no, she's actually been bitten. I had to think about the fact that these people, certainly, these characters wouldn't be aware, but we in 1968 wouldn't be aware ahead of the fact that she's definitely going to turn into a flesh-eating zombie as well. We'd have sympathy for her. Yes. Right? Right. So that was fascinating for me. We definitely wouldn't know, at least until the news brings it up. I think there's a point when the newscast, the TV reporters, and they have an expert on, and they bring up the idea that if you've been infected, that might go badly.

6:18But until then, we just assume that she's injured. And so we have a completely different reaction when we see her finally transform and we have to forget all that accumulated knowledge. Now, as you pointed out earlier, this is a case where we have seen other zombies in movies before this time, and I'm not an expert on Hollywood sci-fi movies, and there are elements of that at work here, or horror movies, B-grade or otherwise, but you don't have to be an expert to see the influence of a lot of different films at play here. There's one decidedly non-Hollywood film that I'll probably get to at some point as well.

6:55But one of the main pleasures of watching this film is definitely seeing a genre, or I suppose, if you will, a subgenre, being born right in front of our eyes. There is something mesmerizing about that. And my question for you, Josh, was going to be really why this movie still resonates with audiences. Why did a movie that at the time was made for, according to the numbers I saw,$114 ,000 and then made something like$12 million domestically? And here we are 50 years later still talking about this movie. Why did it resonate then so strongly with people? And I know we'll get to that. But first, I want to hear your answer to your own challenge.

7:34How did it go for you? Yeah, well, they're related, actually, because I think that I thought about asking that, too. You know, why does this thing last? Because it has a lot to overcome. It has some really bad performances. I think we'll get to one that I think is really strong. It has that threadbare budget, which you definitely sense in certain scenes as much as it's also effective in other scenes. So there were some hurdles to jump for this thing to land so firmly in the movie going consciousness. I think it has to do a lot with the shattering nature of those first-time shocks and the reverberations that they had in the culture that cemented the legend.

8:15And that way, even when we go back to see it, you're experiencing what you just described, this birth. And that's what becomes exciting. So, appropriately, it has a couple different lives that this movie has lived, and they all work in their own way. Yeah, for me trying to put on this lens, I'll talk about what I guess I would call first-time shocks, things that are different than the scares that I think have lasted across the years. A first-time shock for me was when we suddenly see more than the first attacker. Because, again, I was thinking this is like a monster movie and there's one guy we got to worry about.

8:54And Romero plays it so subtly. It's just a shot of the yard and there's maybe four people who are kind of notably walking in the same way. And right there you're like, holy crap. There's more of them. What is the scope of this? What's the scope, right? And I do like how the movie delicately balances over-explaining with being overly naive. There's a question there. I think O'Day asks, what is going on? And Dwayne Jones, who plays Ben, becomes pretty much the main character, doesn't really offer any sort of explanation. He doesn't know either. So we're confused along with them. So there's that moment.

9:33And then it's the use of the radio, as you discussed. And later there's a television. I think it's very clever how the film does that. You could say maybe this is a lazy device. But, man, did it amp up the horror for me because we're so desperate for information. We're going to latch on to anything we get. That's it. And what do we get? something we couldn't have even imagined. There's one word that's used on that radio broadcast, devoured. Consistent reports from witnesses to the effect that people who acted as though they were kind of trance were killing and eating their victims prompted authorities to examine the bodies of some of the victims.

10:08Medical authorities in Cumberland have concluded that in all cases, the killers are eating the flesh of the people they murdered. Repeating this latest bulletin just received moments ago from Cumberland, Maryland, civil defense authorities have told newsmen that murder victims show evidence of having been partially devoured by their murderers. Medical examination of victims' bodies shows conclusively that the killers are eating the flesh of the people they kill. And when you hear devoured, it's scarier than anything Romero could have shown, even though he goes on to show a lot more. I think this is related to that story Ben tells about his first encounter with zombies at the diner.

10:49His description is more terrifying than anything we could have seen. So there's a storytelling device in this film that's very effective where it lets our imaginations do a lot of the work for us. And I think there's another phrase that comes later, unburied dead. You know, this is, again, the first time our minds are even opening up to this possibility. Yeah, I'm with you completely on the device, I suppose, of the radio and the TV. There's something about it here that does not feel lazy at all. It's always adding. It's always creating more dread in our minds and giving us new information. So it doesn't just feel like a lazy sort of exposition device at all.

11:25It's really crucial to everything that's happening here. I think it also, and I did not think this through, so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about it, but there's something fundamental we will talk about that this movie is dealing with in terms of the sense of institutions and things that you just hold sacred and fundamental crumbling. And so I suppose almost as a juxtaposition to that, there's something comforting about this institution of the media actually being there in this communication tool, whether it's the radio or TV, we're going to be on. We're going to stay on through this whole thing.

11:55And the characters latch onto it like it's water, right? Like it's life-giving. But watching it through that lens of someone who would be watching this for the first time in 1968, you think about the year and the timing of this movie, one of the most volatile years in U.S. history. And this is something this year in particular, Josh, is something I think about a lot whenever I talk to people now about our current political state and how fractured and divided we are in America today. We all talk about how this is all uncharted territory. And it probably is. There are probably justifiably a lot of reasons why we all say that.

12:27There are distinctions. There are distinctions. Good word. But at the same time, I do genuinely wonder, as I think back to 1968 and I think about some of these events that occurred, how much different would it really feel? How much different does it feel to people who were our age, roughly, or teenagers and going through the late 1960s in America? You have obvious events that come to mind right away around this time, the Tet Offensive in 68. Martin Luther King assassinated, RFK assassinated. There are civil rights and anti-war protests breaking out all over the country, including the Democratic National Convention here in Chicago in that year.

13:01But you also have, and this is where the sci-fi element is tapped into, you also have Apollo 8, the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon, the first time people traveled to the quote-unquote dark side of the moon, the first images of that side of the moon sent back to people on Earth. And then, man, you talk about the relevancy and how this movie still resonates. The more things change, the more they stay the same. In January, I didn't have to do much Google searching at all on this, Josh. In January of 1968, North Korea captured a U.S. surveillance vessel and took the crew members hostage, 82 of them.

13:34So there was this this standoff, this diplomatic standoff with North Korea and then John Carlos and Tommy Smith at the Mexico City Olympics raising their fists in the Black Power salute protesting segregation and racism in the United States and also in South Africa. So as I touched on, there's this sense in 1968 that I think had to be quite powerful and quite vivid for anyone going into the theater to watch this film, that the fabric of American life had been turned completely upside down. The world as they thought they knew it no longer made any sense. And along comes Romero and his co-writer here, John Russo, not with traditional movie monsters at all, not monsters that you can write off as pure fantasy.

14:18they're just people. They are people like us. We could be them. And even that opening that we played at the beginning of the show, that they're coming to get you, it's a nod to those old monster movies, being scared of that kind of fantastic monster, that ghoul chasing you. And he's saying, I think in a kind of clever wink to us, I'm going to break that down and subvert that completely. But he does take something that should be inscrutable. You can't debate this. When we die, we die. Whether you have notions of the afterlife or not, your body is buried, and that's it with your body. And then Romero asks, well, what if that's no longer true?

14:56And not only that, they're feasting on the living. So humanity is now as inhuman as it can possibly be. And I think it was just tapping in to everything that was in the popular culture at the time. Since convening this conference of the presidential cabinet, the FBI, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, The CIA has not produced any public information. Why are space experts being consulted about an Earth-bound emergency? Yeah, so that plate of what people are dealing with in 68 is piled high, and here comes a movie that piles more on top of it relentlessly and then also pokes. This is where the film's subversive.

15:35It's poking all of those fears. I always forget that there is that sci-fi element where there's a news report about, Is it a satellite or is it, you know? Yeah, radiation from a Venus probe. Maybe this is why this is happening. And that slips my mind that that's thrown in there. Yeah, I want to talk about that a little bit more. But it is another way that the movie is poking at the anxiety of the era. And the racial dynamics, I mean, talk about provoking. Right away, he traps this young defenseless white woman in a home with a stronger black man. Yes. And I would say he doesn't insinuate in a way for me that's, you know, racially insensitive, but he lets it sit there and stoke again, as irrational as they might be, fears that some people had at the time.

16:27You mentioned the letterbox log that I did for this, and I got an interesting comment. This has to do with the very ending, so there will be a spoiler here. You might want to skip ahead if you really want to experience this for the first time without knowing anything. But that ending where Ben, played by Dwayne Jones, the lone survivor of this attack on the house, seems like he's going to make it. It's morning. Here comes the militia that's going through the countryside taking out all the zombies with shots to the head. they shoot and kill him before they even take a chance to see really they just see movement in the house and shoot him so again it's not specifically racially exploitative sure where these men make a conscious decision to shoot him because he's black so i like the restraint if you could call that romero has but it says everything it needs to say and this is what robbie newman commented on letterbox interestingly enough while the whole group is doomed it takes a supernatural force to kill the white characters.

17:27It only takes a group of white men with guns and permission to use them however they see fit to kill Ben. And again, the more things change. And I'm watching this knowing that happened, but not remembering exactly how it plays out. I didn't remember it until about five minutes before. I remember it ended that way, but oh, is it a punch in the gut? Still a gut punch. And then the use of still frame photos for the final credits. I guess it's just before the credits. But instead of we see his body being carried out, I think, are there like meat hooks that they're using? Yes. And it's a series of still photos that kind of, I haven't wrapped my mind exactly around what they do, except in a way reaffirm a sense of institution.

18:15Yeah. Going back to what you were talking about, try to provide this clinical distance from it that just makes it more horrifying because here we know this was a live, heroic, essentially, guy who's been ironically murdered being treated like one of these undead and maybe even worse. Yeah. You talk about why this is a movie we still need to discuss and reckon with. I'm going to second everything you said. At one point in the movie, we get a field report from that TV newscast, and the reporter asks the sheriff, if I were surrounded by eight or ten of these things, would I stand a chance with them?

18:49And the sheriff says, well, there's no problem. If you have a gun, shoot him in the head. That's a sure way to kill him. If you don't, get yourself a club or a torch, beat him or burn him. They go up pretty easy. And there's something about that that really struck me where Romero doesn't go incredibly out of his way to make that sheriff seem like a huge redneck or anything. He's just being very matter of fact. And as it turns out, there's a part of us as viewers that have to be thankful that there's someone like the sheriff going around killing these zombies. But on another level, there is that almost glee.

19:18That's what it is. Right. Just enough joy. Just enough. What a great excuse this is to get out here and have nothing restraining us. Yes. And we can shoot whatever we want. And you said Romero doesn't necessarily explicitly tell us that it does have something to do with his skin color that causes that moment at the end. But it's enough to suggest that if they see something that doesn't look like us, whatever the other is, then they have the right to kill it. And those end still photos are the most harrowing moments in the movie for me, even more than a young girl eating the flesh of her parents.

19:54if Romero did mean it is just some kind of ironic comment that the lone survivor gets mistaken for a zombie in a shot when he's actually being rescued, then why would he deliberate on those end shots and seeing those meat hooks go into his side? We don't actually see him enter, but we see that they're there. This posse is treating him like he's a piece of meat, literally. And they all strike a chord. We've seen photos like that from so many civil rights crimes in our country's past. And I think that Romero is definitely calling on our collective consciousness there. But it is so subtle up until that ending.

20:31And you touched on this as well. That racial angle really only comes directly to the fore at the end. But you can ask the question, how much are we as viewers supposed to be recognizing fear in Barbara at being saved by a black man? because I was thinking of the movie Detroit, and there are other references we could make here, but this is a movie from Catherine Bigelow we discussed earlier in the year. Remember the scene in that movie where I think it's Anthony Mackie is the military guy who's in a room, and one of the young women, maybe it's both of them, are in his room when the cops show up, these kind of college-age, late-teen girls, and here we've got that blonde, blue-eyed, typical, quote-unquote, American girl, and she's in the house with this black man.

21:15As I said, I don't know that it's suggested or not because she's clearly descending into madness the way it is, but maybe it is even heightened more by her immediate reaction to seeing him as her rescuer. And then that posse outside, how are they going to react to that? What if they came upon that house, like in the movie Detroit, and saw both of them in that house alive? It doesn't really matter who he is as a character, whether he's educated, how accomplished he is. he could be seen as potentially a threat to her by these people, by many people in our country at that time and even now. And you have to ask as well, is that why the Henry character, the father who is constantly resisting him and at one point openly wants him dead, is that why he opposes him so constantly?

22:00We don't know. Romero doesn't force us to confront that moment to moment. But by the end of the film, you have to think about all these things. And what I like about that dynamic with Henry the father is there's actual physical segregation going on where he's claimed the basement. Right. And Ben is on the main floor. And also there's the joke of once it sinks in that Ben's the most competent and most powerful and smartest guy for the situation. Right. Then the segregation starts to crumble, right? Because, OK, we're going to put our lives ahead of our prejudices to a degree. And going back to the Ben and Barbara dynamic, how about that crazy moment I don't know what to make of where she's hysterical and slaps him and he punches her unconscious?

22:48I mean, that's kind of just left there for us to take in. There isn't much commentary on that as the movie goes on. Before we get too far away from Ben, I want to return to that moment I talked about where Dwayne Jones is describing how he got to the house and how he fled from this diner where there was a gasoline truck explosion and he had to actually kill a number of these zombies. why I think this is a really strong performance is mostly that moment because not only again does it sell us as a spooky story gets us creeped out but what you sense there is this regret that he felt about killing people who he doesn't know what's going on right they were going to kill him so he killed them and this is like you talk about the birth of a genre this is one of the crucial seeds is that it gets exploited even further there's a bit here with the daughter But when our family turns on us, when loved ones turn and we have to make that decision, there's that early scene, right?

23:50Because Ben is expressing that sorrow over what he's had to do. And you feel it from that point on in every brutal blow of the tire iron that he gives to these zombies, which is – it's rough stuff. I mean, Romero, again, I don't think it verges into exploitation. But he definitely shows us what it takes for this guy to take care of one of these zombies. And it's nasty. I hadn't thought of it until you said it, but that seems to me another potential Vietnam analogy for this movie as well. Think about how many of our soldiers went over to Vietnam and had to kill people that, as the saying goes, didn't do anything to them, didn't do anything to harm them or their family, and yet they did have to kill them, and they did so, many of them, with regret.

24:36I think we get other references there that are unmistakable. The shot of the posse at the end where we have the helicopter. There's a news helicopter, something flying over, and we see fields of what look like soldiers walking with guns. And when they watch the TV and they're constantly listening to the radio for reports of casualties and all the latest developments and the zombies, I think you can make the case as well, among other things that they might be or represent. they are in a way the Viet Cong. They're this massive, mysterious, omnipresent threat to our soldiers, which is then mirrored here in the film.

25:11Another surprise for me with this film, I said I didn't remember that it ended the way it did. I didn't remember that it had the sci-fi element. I do want to talk about that a little bit more, but I forgot just how overly devoid of hope and cynical it was. These characters never really develop a plan. I kept waiting for that to happen because we've seen it so many times for them to find a way to survive at least a few of them. This is a case where the movie, it just starts bad for all the survivors, all the victims. And then it just gets worse and worse and worse. And the one escape attempt they make is laughably comes undone.

25:47Yeah, it's horrible. And you mentioned the segregation. And we do have to note that Henry is willing to have Ben, the black man, come with him to the basement. In fact, he wants him to. but how interesting is it, Josh, in terms of Romero pulling out the rug for Mundras? We think we have sort of footing. We understand what's going on with this movie and who the good guys and the bad guys are and you've said it. Ben is the most competent character in this movie. He's our hero. He's the one we side with. I don't know about you but in that moment where they're debating whether they should be downstairs or be upstairs, there's a case on both sides but I'm going to do whatever Ben thinks.

26:22I'm going to stick with Ben, right? Well, but at the end of the film, what's borne out? Mr. Cooper, the annoying crazy guy, his plan really was vindicated. This isolationism, this notion that he just wants to be hidden away down in the basement, doors boarded up. That's what's going to keep us safe. Let's get out of this main room where we have all these entry points. We think he's the unhinged one and we're going to follow Ben. Well, guess what? That's how Ben survives. So Mr. Cooper actually is the sane one by the end of the movie. Romero has that little twist as well. So we've been talking a lot about the thematic undercurrents and the resonance and the echoes.