Talk us through itJohnny and Barbara have just spent three hours driving to an isolated cemetery to lay a wreath on their father’s grave. Ominously, Johnny can inform us that the car radio isn’t at fault, it must be an issue with the station. Talk about your sibling rivalry, these two never stop bickering with Johnny trying to freak Barbara out. Notably what appears to be a derelict is shambling in the background towards them. Johnny tells Barabra “They're coming to get you” which turns out to more realistic than Johnny would have wished for as the derelict attacks Barbara. Johnny rushes to her rescue but dies in the process. The derelict then returns to trying to get Barbara, who does a runner including the ubiquitous falling down requirement that horror seems to have. She manages to escape and takes refugee in an apparently vacant farm house. Later she’s joined by Ben, a black dude on the run from what we now know are flesh eating ghouls. They board up the farmhouse and attempt to wait it out till help arrives, real bad decision right there. When things have settled down, i.e. Ben has finished the hard yards fortifying the house, Harry Cooper and Tom emerge from the cellar where, with their better halves and Cooper’s injured daughter Karen, they have been hiding, hoping to wait out the plague erupting right across the U.S. Clearly there's a whole bunch of waiting for help going down, not that you would want help from the locals. If you thought Johnny and Barbara’s bickering was edgy, well that’s just the intro for Ben and Harry Cooper, who argue over every possible thing, not least of which being where they should make their stand. Ben wants to wait upstairs so they have escape routes, Harry wants to go back down the cellar. Can our mixed group survive the night, and is help coming? – a classic horror movie ensues. Ready to see what Uncle George knocked up over the weekend?
Review“They're coming to get you, Barbara, there's one of them now!” – Johnny.Well kids here at ScaryMinds, everyone's favourite Down Under horror site, we have been put under a lot of pressure to include some reviews of the classic and not so classic movies from abroad that define the dark genre. After giving it some thought, then saying hell yeah, we have caved in and decided to add a foreign movie section. To kick things off the decision was made to go buck naked wild in covering George A. Romero's classic "dead world" movies. Let's get down to munching on some flesh folks. Simply put, one of the greatest horror movies ever made, and high up in my top twenty horror movies of all time. Night of the Living Dead (NOTLD) revolutionised the horror genre from the staid gothic swamp it had found itself mired in and led to the total revitalisation of filmdom’s only wholly created monster, the zombie. Horror would never be the same again due to a group of Pennsylvania part timers who were taking time out of making “a glass of beer look like a million bucks” to shoot their first feature length movie. NOTLD has thus far had four sequels, and two direct remakes; (Night of the Living Dead (1990), and Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006). There’s also been a remix, Night of the Living Dead 30th Anniversary Edition that I’ll get around to reviewing in the next few weeks. So why has Romero’s NOTLD been so influential and why do horror fans hold it in such high regard? Let’s break it down – get ready for a long review, kids. George A. Romero freely admits his movie project, originally from a self-penned short story called “Night of Anubis”, was heavily informed by another classic horror outing, the Vincent Price vehicle The Last Man On Earth (Ubaldo Ragona 1964). From the earlier movie Romero took the concepts of the fortified farm house, the rampant unexplained ghouls, and the notion that the monsters are the least of your worries in a good horror flick, though Romero does turn that notion on its head somewhat. What the director then did was add a whole bunch of other themes, some social commentary, and the idea that you can tell a good horror story through a single night. He also pretty much brought forward the notion of nihilism; nobody is going to get out of this one. Right from the start of NOTLD, Romero turns audience expectations on their head, and then he just keeps on going with the left field ideas. We get an opening long shot of a deserted road as Johnny and Barbara gradually drive up a hill towards the cemetery of their fates. This shouldn’t work, as it’s pretty much static, but in Romero’s hands it adds the expected doom and gloom start that a good horror flick should have. The director inserts enough cuts to keep it compelling. The first shock for the audience is that Johnny and Barbara are brother and sister rather than the expected young lovers. Following almost directly on the second shock is that Johnny is killed when they encounter the first ghoul in the movie. Audiences would have picked the character as the irritating dude who only needs something to hit the fan in order to bring out the best in him, who will get everyone through the current situation. Johnny certainly manfully goes to the aid of his sister but then has his screen time cut short courtesy of a headstone. Startling stuff from Romero, with the director putting you on notice that this movie isn’t going to play out as expected. Romero follows up with knocking cinematic cliché after cinematic cliché for six as he re-invents the horror movie and just what audience members could expect. There is no love angle between Barbara and Ben, Barbara is pretty much comatose for the rest of the movie and is generally unappealing. I’m not going to get into Ben being black; you get the feeling that Romero and team cast Duane Jones for the role because he was the best they could get and not due to the colour of his skin. Besides which there had been plenty of previous movies taking time out of their busy schedules to look into interracial romance. As it turns out Ben is our nominal hero for the evening, and surprisingly he makes wrong decision after wrong decision as the undead hoards whittle down the survivors. As the house is overrun in one of the tightest scenes I have ever seen, Ben is forced to seek shelter in the cellar, something Harry Cooper had advocated and Ben had been against. The ending of NOTLD is the final nail in the coffin of audience expectations. Ben may be flawed but by heck he looks to be making it to the final credits. Not so fast, a local posse spots him peaking out of a window and immediately shoots him in the head (a recurrent zombie theme, btw). Now that would have been truly shocking to audiences of the time, though by now regular horror viewers are used to the “no one gets out alive” mode of horror which is starting to get slightly stale to be honest. 
Not content with turning cinema traditions on their head, Romero also layers on a social message, no doubt much to the displeasure of teenage cinema-goers of the time. Sherriff McClelland’s ragtag militia scouring the country side for ghouls reminds the audience of U.S. military operations during the Vietnam War that was raging at the time; we even have the news media on hand to beam footage back to audiences and the requisite helicopter overhead. McClelland’s band of gun-toting locals are using the same tactic of sweep and destroy that was used ineffectively in Vietnam as they seek to join forces with the National Guard at some forsaken rescue station. McClelland also gets to voice one of the classic lines of horror; “Yeah, they’re dead. They’re all messed up.” So what do you do if you are holed up in an isolated farmhouse surrounded by flesh-eating ghouls? Uncle George supplies the answer, you drag out the TV, switch it on and watch developments through the local news station. I’m not entirely sure if Romero was making a statement here, but for sure it adds in the wider picture developing as the dead start munching. Another horror innovation the director started that has since been used in diverse projects and is losing its impact through overuse. Regardless, the plot device is working for Romero and helps the audience keep abreast of what’s going down. Remember the vast majority of NOTLD takes place in the isolated farmhouse, hence through the TV Romero shows we are seeing a microcosm of a much larger picture. Romero once again is masterful in developing the technique almost imperceptibly. Early reports are of an outbreak of murders that have “Officials” worried, we next learn that the dead are coming back to life, before finally the icing on this blood-stained cake: the dead are chewing down on the living. Regular horror movie attendees would have been thinking “I know where this is headed” and Romero doesn’t disappoint them in one of the earlier gore moments for horror, the infamous outdoor barbeque all-you-can-eat scene. A couple of other points that Romero sums up in NOTLD can’t be brazenly swept under the carpet either. The Director knows exactly where the taboo lines are and quite happily crosses them without issue. Matricide gets a run, with Cooper’s daughter finally succumbing to zombification and dealing to Mum with a garden trowel. And I can’t emphasise enough that the ghouls aren’t the only thing you need worry about as the situation worsens. As later movie makers would make explicit but which Romero hints at, the ghouls are us. Overall there’s no lag in this movie, with Romero showing good use of pace to get things happening. The attack scenes are frenetic, the developments continue throughout, and there are no static scenes after the director’s opening gambit. Romero uses “Hitchcockian” touches in the basement, and shows he is in complete control of every frame’s composition. A truly remarkable achievement given the low budget and the decision to use almost news report quality film to make the movie. Duane Jones (Ben) is our surprise lead for the movie and Jones nails it. The audience are left with the impression that Ben is right, even though every one of his decisions leads to calamity throughout the movie. Judith O’Dea (Barbara) was the only other professional actor involved, and O’Dea like Jones nails her role as the chick unable to cope with what she has been experiencing. The rest of the cast are on occasion wooden, but then they weren’t professionals and at least don’t stare directly to camera. Once again Romero proves he knows how to make a movie. T&A is pretty much absent from the movie, though this time round I did note one of the chick ghouls is naked. Well okay, that’s never going to be a Kleenex moment at the best of times folks. Scott Vladimir Lucian added the score and it’s a mixed bag. We get some pretty good audio for some scenes, but that 1950s Sci-Fi sound at one stage irritated the living dead out of me for some reason. Not the best score by any stretch of the imagination but strong enough in context.
Summary ExecutionGeorge A. Romero had me roped, hog-tied, and branded with his small time zombie flick that started the revival of the sub-genre. I can watch this one over and over and still pick up on little nuances I’ve missed in previous screenings. The Director turned in a classic that has stood the test of time and I’m now itching to play the sequels in order. Excellent movie, total shock considering it’s a debut feature, it grabbed me by the balls and didn’t let go. Nobody does zombies like Romero.On release Night of the Living Dead got hammered from pillar to post by the Critics who were expecting just another horror movie. Romero threw them a curved ball and they simply couldn’t work out what was going down here. A couple of festivals, rave reviews from the Europeans, and the Smithsonian adding the movie to their modern film archive changed a lot of opinions. Personally I hate that revisionist shite, you either like it or you don’t, if you can’t dig a Director’s beat then get out of the movie criticism game. This statement is aimed directly at a couple of Critics who went out of their way to try and get the movie banned, and who are now gushing over it. Sorry chaps, the zombies in this movie are more film critics than you are. Full recommendation on Night of the Living Dead to movie buffs. It’s a must-see movie for horror fans, and does enough to keep non horror movie fans interested. One of the handful of horror flicks that translates well outside its genre. Let night fall and I’ll catch you on the flip side when we see what dawn might bring us.
ScaryMinds Rates this movie as ... A classic horror movie that helped define the modern dark genre approach.
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