Shortly after Barbara and her brother, Johnny, arrive at a rural Pennsylvania cemetery to place flowers at their father's grave, they are attacked by a ghoulish man. Johnny is killed, but Barbara escapes and flees to a nearby farmhouse, where she takes shelter as her mind succumbs to psychological trauma. All the while, the strange man lurks outside, and the house is soon surrounded by other similarly eerie figures. Ben, a lone motorist who is also seeking refuge, arrives on the scene and barricades the doors and the windows to keep the growing numbers of grotesquely monstrous people at bay. As emergency radio news updates reveal that the dead are coming back to life all over the eastern United States and eating the flesh of their victims, Ben and Barbara encounter other survivors who have been hiding in the cellar. Tension erupts as these diverse protagonists argue among themselves about what to do next, while the living dead crowd outside against the sealed entrances.
I have seen the 1968 George A. Romero horror masterpiece,
Night of the Living Dead, dozens of times, but I have always been at a loss when it comes to writing a coherent review, because this is one of those all-time favorite films about which I just cannot seem to convey my thoughts in words. In technical terms, this movie is a train wreck, because its low budget is apparent in every sequence, its night scenes often seem to take place in broad daylight, and it features one of the most obtrusive music soundtracks in cinema. Nonetheless, its black-and-white imagery, which mirrored newsreel footage of the time, has a stunning immediacy that brings a starkly homespun flavor of fear and foreboding to the proceedings.
Night of the Living Dead is one of those horror films that unrelentingly captures the pure crystalline essence of the genre, and the experience of watching it is like being pulled underwater by a whirlpool. Terrible events quickly unfold on the screen as the movie starts, and then the situation just keeps getting worse and worse with no respite or hope for salvation. The screenplay puts a fresh spin on the 1959 western,
Rio Bravo, which featured a group of misfits protecting a prison from murderous outsiders, but also invites comparisons to "The Shelter", a taut 1961 episode of
The Twilight Zone that told the story of normal suburban neighbors fighting fiercely for control of a basement bomb shelter after a Civil Defense alert indicates a threat. The idea that civilized society is three square meals away from total anarchy is one that has been revisited countless times since in movies like Stephen King's
The Mist and in television shows like
The Walking Dead, but
Night of the Living Dead, which benefits immensely from the simplicity of its microcosm focus on seven people in one house during a widespread crisis, still has an urgency that its narrative descendants have not been able to match. Romero's own 1978 follow-up,
Dawn of the Dead, which expanded the scope of this story to a broader canvas and added brilliant satire to the recipe, is another landmark milestone of zombie horror, but I have always preferred the straightforward intensity of this first directorial feature.
Like many classic works of cinema,
Night of the Living Dead takes on a magnified effectiveness because of the context of its era. The black actor, Duane Jones, who plays Ben, was chosen simply because he was the best available actor for a role that was originally written with a white character in mind, but Ben's assertive take-charge interactions with Barbara, played by Judith O'Dea, and the rest of the unfortunate occupants of the farmhouse struck a nerve with late 1960s audiences who were braving their way through a series of racially tense real-life events. His final scene is all the more chilling as a result.
Night of the Living Dead was initially released as a Saturday matinee alongside more conventional horror movies, and countless children undoubtedly walked out of the theater in tearful silence after the closing credits rolled. Roger Ebert and other prominent critics at the time expressed their shock and outrage that such a movie would be accessible to younger audiences. The MPAA rating system would take hold soon after. Even today, however, most of us adults who sit through this film lie awake in the night hours haunted by the visual of a child feasting on her dead father.
The director-supervised 4K restoration on this Criterion Blu-ray is a grisly treat for all of us who have been clamoring for this movie to have the home video release that it has always deserved. This film has risen above its public domain history to shine with a renewed vigor in high definition.
This disc is rich with wonderful supplementary features, with a long 2012 interview with the late great Romero being the best of the bunch.
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