Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Posted on October 24, 2005
Filed Under Black and white, Classics, Zombies
Okay, so it’s taken us an unreasonably long time to get round to one of the genre’s defining classics, but is there really all that much to say about Night of the Living Dead? Probably not, and I’m certainly not going advance the art of film criticism by announcing that it’s both a historical and an artistic milestone for cinema. What is interesting is viewing it in the context of the three Dead films that followed it. I rewatched Night for the first time in about 18 months, hot on the heels of revisiting both Dawn and Day and seeing Land and the superlative Martin for the first time, and found it fascinating how Romero managed to bring so many new ideas to the table whilst simultaneously learning his craft both as a film-maker and as a storyteller.
Many of the prevailing traits of Romero’s work - characters in conflict against a backdrop that is supernatural but has very real practical consequences - arrive fully formed; indeed, the conflict between the seven inhabitants of the farm house is really the entirety of the film, with the frenzy of killing in the final reel really only serving to accelerate the plot towards its brutally ironic climax. But if the ideas are there, the characterisation isn’t; the survivors are a rather obvious cross-section of late 60s America, who fight one another from the word go - there’s little interaction other than shouting, which rather leads one to the conclusion that those massacred by the zombies rather deserve their fate for being so wooden-headed. Many of the films quieter moments are the scenes between Ben and Barbara, but the fact that she’s permanently shell-shocked means there’s little opportunity to understand her as a person. It’s presumably intentional that it’s only really Ben who earns the full respect of the viewer, and this is probably in part down to Duane Jones’ commanding but subtle performance.
This rather one-note characterisation is probably the only weak link in the film, but for my money it makes it a lesser film than both Dawn of the Dead and Martin, both of which feature far more rounded protagonists. There’s a lot less wall-to-wall splatter than in Dawn as well, but this means that when it all kicks off in the finale the gore scenes have extra punch. The photography captures events with a claustrophobic, almost documentary realism, which really makes the best of the director’s limited resources. Though I feel Romero went onto greater things, Night of the Living Dead more than deserves its place at the top of the horror tree, simply for the way it broke horror out of the Universal / Hammer mould and gave it a new shape that carried both shocks and contemporary resonance. He gave us a new form of horror movie in which terrible events struck real people in real places and had real consequences, and for this reason alone many later classics owe him an inestimable debt.
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