Rating:

Night of the Living Dead is a highly respected and influential film, it ushered in the modern era of horror, blah blah blah, we know all this already. Is there, then, any real reason to discuss a film that’s been analyzed and overanalyzed for decades? Of course there is! For one thing, the abundance of information available will make it easier for me to plagiarize and consequently not have to work very hard. Secondly, although still a famous movie, George Romero’s original zombie picture has, at least for the casual horror viewer, been somewhat overshadowed by its bigger, badder brother, Dawn of the Dead. That being the case, let’s go back to a time before that successful sequel and ask ourselves that all important question: All its import and influence aside, is Night of the Living Dead actually a good movie?

The answer, if we’re going to be frank and totally forthright, is “Well, yes, but…” What does that mean exactly? It means the film has things about it that are genuinely good, other things that are good by virtue of being so wackily off-kilter, and other things that are actually pretty bad. These elements combine to make a movie that is worthy of the fan following it has garnered but is not necessarily one you’re going to want to watch very often.

So what’s good about it? First and foremost, it has zombies. You could show me an otherwise unexciting production of a classical ballet and put one zombie (or as this movie would say, a “ghoul”) lurching across the stage in the background, and I’d buy tickets night after night. Also in the film’s favor is the atmosphere created by the shooting style. While there are few if any moments that modern audiences would actually consider scary, jaded as we are by a world where even a PG family film might contain as many as thirty beheadings, the overall feel of the picture is one of closed-in creepiness and a stifling, impending threat. The low budget and amateur status of the filmmakers helped rather than hindered the movie’s effectiveness in this way. Shot in black and white at a time when color was the norm and utilizing tight, small spaces and close camera work simply because there was no massive crew or studio backlot on which to do otherwise, the picture is lent an almost documentary feel. While no viewer is going to suspend his disbelief to the point where he actually assumes this is a National Geographic special on the impending invasion by cannibalistic corpses, these added touches of stylistic realism do allow the movie to rise above the norm and let history judge it as more than just “that show where everybody ate everybody.”

Granted, it’s not without its share of unintentionally enjoyable elements. There’s one zombie who looks a lot like Al Franken and another who could pass for Ozzy Osbourne (although perhaps it might be more accurate to say that Ozzy Osbourne could likely pass for a zombie). When our hero, Ben, rises up righteous and slaps the hell out of the catatonic Barbara, I can’t help but chuckle at how much the useless broad deserved it. Best of all is Mr. Furious. That’s not his real name, of course, but that’s what I like to call him; he’s the father of the sick little girl who will ultimately become a zombie and eat him, and from the moment he comes on screen he is royally pissed off. It’s never made clear just what he’s so all-fired angry about, but whatever it was it must have been serious because even in the beginning his level of anger is already off the scale of all modern science’s wrath detectors, and from that point on he just keeps getting angrier! He gets angry about radios, he gets angry about attics, he gets angry about wooden planks, he gets angry about cigarettes, and he’d probably get angry about the weird scuff mark on the top of his head if he knew it was there. Watching him grow more and more incensed at nothing, I always expect his head to simply explode from the pressure, Scanners style, and rain a shower of angry skull fragments down on his surroundings.

But Night of the Living Dead is not all rage and Al Franken. There are negative aspects, too. Most obvious of these is the pacing, which at times is gut-wrenchingly slow. Approximately 800 minutes are devoted to shots of Ben nailing boards to things, or shots of the cast sitting around hearing about what’s happening on radio or the TV instead of the audience actually seeing what’s happening. Trumping all this is the fact that the film opens with a discussion of the inconvenience of Daylight Saving Time. While I suppose it is conceivably the sort of conversation two real people might have (if those real people had already exhausted every other possible avenue of discussion), I nevertheless doubt that I’m the only viewer to want to scream at the set: “Oh come on! You just have to change your clocks! It’s not like you have to run laps!”

What of the movie’s often discussed hidden political messages? To be honest, I just don’t think there are any, at least not in the intent of the director, in spite of Romero making no secrets about his liberal politics. Any number of ideas have been read into the film. The casting of a black man in the lead role has been seen as a commentary on racism, although Romero himself freely admits that he simply cast the best actor available for the part and gave no thought to his color. The radiation that causes the dead to rise, mentioned in passing as little more than an aside in the film, is thought by some to be a statement on either the threat of nuclear war or the dangers of a polluted environment. The zombies themselves have been looked at as commentary on the Vietnam War (people killing each other, basically) or even as hordes of white middle class Republicans attempting to kill off liberalism personified as a strong black figure as they murder their way into dominance of the world. Interesting theories all, and in other films perhaps they would be not without justification. But these ideas do require the viewer to put in at least some outside thought or to put two and two together, as it were. It’s never spelled out in bold, sixty-foot-high letters. One look at Romero’s other zombie films (Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead) reveals that, although he may be a fine moviemaker, he wields his political agenda like a club, utilizing it with all the subtlety of a right cross to the testicles. I find it hard to believe if any message had been laid into Night of the Living Dead that Romero could have hidden it so well.

Controversial and declared so utterly vile and wretched that it would probably cause you to die if you watched it when it was first released, Night of the Living Dead’s content likely won’t make you bat an eye today. But it’s still a movie worth looking at, and there’s fun to be had. For example, you can hold a contest to see which of your friends can do the best impression of the line “They’re coming for you, Barbara!” Maybe that’s not the impact Romero intended for his movie to have but, really, when you make a movie about flesh-eating monsters and people still talk about it four decades later, you’re pretty lucky no matter what the people are saying.

If you don’t like Night of the Living Dead, you will also totally hate:

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• Dawn of the Dead
• Dead Alive
• Halloween: Resurrection
• Halloween (2007)
• Wednesday Top Ten: Superior Sequels