Film Review - Night of the Living Dead

Film Review:

Night of the Living Dead

NIGHT of the Living Dead is a bold and challenging movie, one that challenges one of the central archetypes of our society: are women really from Venus? Maybe ghouls are from Venus, it posits.

A Cabin in the Woods

THE movie starts inauspiciously, burning with low-key anticipation. We're quickly introduced to siblings Barbara and Johnny, and just as quickly we're unintroduced to Johnny as he is murdered by a shambling ghoul. Panicking, Barbara flees from her pursuer, eventually finding herself taking refuge in an abandoned cabin in the woods.

Soon she is joined by the resourceful Ben, and shuts down into a state of shock. As good as alone, Ben has to find ways to keep the shambling dead at bay whilst protecting Barbara. But are they really as alone as they think?

Eye of the Tiger

ROCKY is undoubtedly the most famous boxing movie of all time - arguably, the most famous sports movie all time. Yet, there's barely a punch thrown all movie. The movie is defined by almost everything else except the boxing - primarily the characters, their relationships to each other and their differing relationships to wider society. Such it is for Rocky, such it is for Night of the Living Dead.

Zombie films tend to be defined by two things - the emotional stress the situation puts on the characters, and the way it forces them to make choices; also big gory set-pieces. You don't watch The Evil Dead series for its intricate characterisation and deep emotional resonance. By contrast, Night of the Living Dead is relatively slight on set-pieces and almost lacking gore by any contemporary measure (although for the time its gore was admittedly considered utterly shocking and depraved). The drive of the film comes less from the shambling corpses, and more from the way characters are shoved together in small and claustrophobic confines. It's a real twister of expectations, and in many ways a very different beast from most modern zombie romps.

In Your Heeeeeeeead

WHEN paradigm shifts, it's very sexy to pretend that they happen over night. There's this big, important and easily digestible event that happens overnight, and suddenly we're all waking up in a different world. The truth is that this is an absurd and rather juvenile way to view the world.

George A Romero's seminal Night of the Living Dead is rightly hailed as one of the most important horror movies of contemporary cinema, as well as one of the modern pieces of myth making that defined the idea of zombies - at the same time, it's a fairly obvious soft adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. I Am Legend has been adapted three times, and its most recent Will Smith-helmed version, it was marketed as both a zombie film and a vampire film. This have-your-cake-and-eat-it comes from the ambiguity of the source material: it is never clear what exactly the creatures that torment the main character are.

Night of the Living Dead plays the same card: radio broadcasts at first refer to this national crisis as an epidemic of "murders". Later, the reanimated corpses are referred to as "ghouls". The word zombie is never used at all, and at this point it was generally heavily associated with Haitian voodoo, inextricable from the culture and, indeed, racial subtext.

In modern times, our cultural schema of what a zombie is almost always links it with plague or disease. Infected wounds make people become zombies - during Night of the Living Dead, however, it is posited that a radiation from a space satellite from Venus is causing the dead to rise. The dead don't need an infection to rise, too - characters that die during the movie arise again regardless of what killed them, or what contact they have had with the ghouls.

Whisper, Don't Shout

HORROR is filled with screaming women. On this current horror rampage I'm undergoing, I've had my ear-drums assaulted any number of times. Barbara spends a good section of the start of the movie chased by a corpse, and finding herself in the gravest peril, yet she barely makes a noise. Judith O'Dea takes a role that is very much a staple of many horrors (both pre and post '68) and plays it with a real sense of weight, where it easily could have been silly.

Her performance, and generally silent presence throughout, encapsulate much of what makes this movie power. It's all about the silence, all-low key. Some movies look to evoke emotion and atmosphere by screaming in your face, but Romero underplays his hand as much as he can. It's also nice to see a movie that doesn't feel like it needs to over-explain plot details or character actions, and handles trusts its audience to follow along with some very strong visual storytelling without handholding.

Penis Measuring Contests

IT has been written many times that Romero's "of the Dead" series is not really about the zombies at all. Night of the Living Dead is, it has been postulated, about race.

It takes a while for that really to thematically make sense: sure, there is the fact that the main character is black, and a resourceful and well spoken black man at that too, but that itself seems a little on the slim side. What seems much more prominent, and what seems to resonate much more strongly with the times it was living with, is the overbearing and obnoxious hyper-masculinity that happens between Ben and Mr Cooper. Both have very specific ideas about how to survive the crisis and after a point it seems like being right is more important to either than actually surviving. In a scenario where doom seems almost inevitable, both lose sight of what is really at stake.

A Matter of Aesthetics
NIGHT of the Living Dead is an atmospheric and tense film shot in black and white, and as such immediately evokes a sense of German expressionist cinema. The film brilliantly uses darkness to suspended characters almost in a vacuum at times. The dead feel very original, surprisingly - they look distinct from zombies in many ways, despite setting a lot of the tropes about what zombies will look like in cinema afterwards. The low-key settings and rustic production compliment the lower key performances. Apart from when it is at its most intense, Night of the Living Dead is a film that is subtle and quietly intense.

*

Seminal or not, Night of the Living Dead is a fun sit, and a classic story executed well.