Night of the Living Dead (1968)

The setup

Two siblings drive to a rural Pennsylvania cemetery to lay flowers on their father's grave, and something shambles toward them between the headstones. A handful of strangers end up in an isolated farmhouse, boarding up windows while a radio and a television set report that the dead are walking everywhere. The danger outside is obvious. The harder question is whether the people inside can agree on anything.

Context

The film grew out of a Pittsburgh company that made commercials and industrial films. George A. Romero and Russell Streiner ran The Latent Image, which produced ads and segments for the children's program Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. A lavish Calgon commercial that parodied the science-fiction film Fantastic Voyage convinced Romero that his team could handle a feature. They pitched a horror picture to Hardman Associates, an industrial film firm run by Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman, and the two companies merged into Image Ten, a corporation chartered to make exactly one film.

The money began small. The initial budget was about $6,000, with each founding member investing $600, and more investors joined until the total reached roughly $114,000. Sources give the final cost anywhere from about $100,000 to $125,000. Filming ran from July 1967 into January 1968, mostly around Evans City, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles north of Pittsburgh, using a condemned farmhouse scheduled for demolition. The film was shot on 35mm black-and-white stock, partly because of the cost.

Why it matters

Night of the Living Dead did not invent the undead in film, but it created the modern zombie as most viewers know it: a slow, mindless, relentless crowd that threatens to overrun any shelter. The film paired that threat with a story about people who panic, argue and make bad decisions under pressure. That combination, a monster plus a siege plus social breakdown, became the template for decades of zombie fiction.

It is also a landmark of independent filmmaking. Made far outside Hollywood by a group of local professionals, it found its audience through drive-ins, matinees and midnight shows, and it grossed many times its cost. Its influence reaches past horror, since it showed that a determined regional crew could make a work with national impact. The film also carries a political charge that keeps critics returning to it, in part because of its choice of lead actor and its portrayal of an American community that cannot cooperate.

What to look for

• A single, claustrophobic location, with a basement, a boarded-up main floor and a few rooms upstairs.
• News broadcasts that widen the story and tell the audience what the characters can only guess.
• A grainy black-and-white image with hard shadows and unusual angles, which Romero said he borrowed from comic book artists.
• Duane Jones as Ben, the film's most capable and level-headed character, written without a racial label and cast on the strength of his audition.
• An improvised, sometimes rough-edged feel, with dialogue that the cast helped shape.
• A soundtrack assembled largely from library music cues borrowed from earlier films and television.

Development: aliens, ghouls and an old novel

The story was shaped by committee and by budget. John Russo, who co-wrote the script with Romero, first suggested a tale about a young man who discovers aliens harvesting bodies in a cemetery. The group dropped the idea because they could not afford a believable spaceship. Romero then combined the premise with an unpublished short story of his own about flesh-eating ghouls, and the film took shape around that.

Romero has often said that Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (1954) was an inspiration, although he wanted to take it in a different direction. Where Matheson's book looks at the aftermath of a plague, Romero was interested in how people react while a catastrophe is still unfolding. Matheson himself was not impressed and reportedly called the result cornball. The working titles passed through Monster Flick, Night of Anubis and Night of the Flesh Eaters before the distributor changed the title again.

Casting and the choice of Duane Jones

Judith O'Dea, a 23-year-old commercial and stage actress, played Barbra, the character who opens the story. Several members of the production team also took roles: Streiner appears as her brother Johnny, Hardman and Eastman play the Coopers, Bill Hinzman is the cemetery ghoul, and George Kosana, who also worked as production manager, plays the sheriff. Hardman's real-life daughter Kyra Schon played the child Karen. Bill Cardille, a Pittsburgh television horror host, appears as himself.

The part of Ben was originally written as an uneducated truck driver, with no specific race. Romero has said that Duane Jones gave the best audition, and the script was not rewritten to explain his race. Jones rewrote Ben's speech and manner, and the result is a calm, practical man who tries to run the house. In 1968, a Black actor leading a mostly white cast was unusual in American films, and the performance is central to how the film has been read ever since.

Shooting on almost nothing

The shoot depended on improvisation. Image Ten members loaded magazines, built props, recorded sound and edited, and the crew moved between the farmhouse, the cemetery and the Latent Image offices, where the basement scenes were filmed. Judith O'Dea later recalled that she was not sure there was an actual working script. The blood was chocolate syrup poured over the actors, and the flesh that the ghouls eat was meat and offal donated by a butcher shop connected with one of the investors.

The makeup for the ghouls began as little more than pale skin and darkened eyes, and later scenes used mortician's wax to simulate wounds and decay. Romero's visual approach was to use hard shadows and odd angles, borrowing from comics. For music, the producers could not afford a composer and used cues from existing library recordings, including pieces from the low-budget science-fiction film Teenagers from Outer Space (1959). The result is a film whose rough edges now seem part of its design.

Distribution trouble and a famous legal mistake

Finding a distributor was difficult. Columbia declined because the film was in black and white, and American International Pictures passed after the filmmakers refused to soften the film and reshoot the ending. The Walter Reade Organization agreed to release it uncut, but it changed the title to Night of the Living Dead. In doing so, it accidentally removed the copyright notice from the prints.

Under the law of the time, a film released without a notice entered the public domain. The producers discovered the problem some years later and fought it in court without success, and the film has been in the public domain ever since. That has had large practical effects: it is easy to find, it has been released by many companies in many versions, and it has been remade more than almost any other film.

Release and reception

The film opened in Pittsburgh in early October 1968, and it spread in Saturday matinees in the weeks that followed. The MPAA rating system took effect only a month later, so children could still buy tickets. In a review published on January 5, 1969, Roger Ebert described an audience of children who grew silent and frightened, and he criticized theaters and parents for letting them in. Variety called the film an unrelieved orgy of sadism, while Pauline Kael praised its crude realism.

Box office estimates vary widely. Estimates run from a few million dollars in the first years to tens of millions of dollars over the film's lifetime. All agree it was extraordinarily profitable for its cost. The Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 1999, and AFI ranked it 93rd on its 2001 list 100 Years...100 Thrills.

The word nobody says: ghouls and zombies

The word zombie is never used in the film. Romero called the creatures ghouls, because he considered them something new, not the folklore-based zombies of earlier films. The label was attached later, once the film's cannibal undead had become the dominant American image of the zombie. That history is covered more fully in the entry on zombies.

The change in the monster matters. Earlier screen zombies were usually tied to folklore and a controlling master. Romero's ghouls have no master and no clear cause, and the film hints at explanations without settling on any. The effect is to make the threat feel impersonal, like a disaster, while keeping it close to home. For the genre's later development, see the library's survey of zombie and apocalyptic horror.

Reading the film

Scholars have read the film in many ways. The critic Robin Wood saw horror monsters as expressions of what a society represses, and later critics extended that idea to the strains of the 1960s, from the civil rights movement to the war in Vietnam. Some writers connect the film's grainy look and its scenes of search-and-destroy operations to television coverage of the war. Others, such as Gregory Waller, find a critique of the nuclear family, private property, the media and civil defense.

The question of race has been debated for decades. Many critics regard Ben's role as a deliberate statement, and some link the film's bleak mood to the racial violence of the civil rights era. Romero, asked about this in 2013, said that he had not been inspired by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The film was largely written and shot before that event. The disagreement shows what makes the film durable: it leaves enough open for each generation to find its own concerns in it.

Legacy: sequels, remakes and the Romero line

Romero returned to the idea with Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985), among others, and he became known as the central figure of the genre. His career is described in the entry on George A. Romero. A 1990 remake, written by Romero and directed by the makeup artist Tom Savini, gave the heroine a more active role. John Russo's 30th Anniversary Edition of 1999 added new scenes and a new score; Romero said he had not wanted to touch the original.

The film's structure has been borrowed countless times, from the siege plots of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween to modern outbreak films. It also sits in a line that starts with early horror, as covered in the timeline of horror cinema, and runs through the monster stories of Nosferatu and the everyday menace of Psycho. Romero's film belongs to that tradition, but it changed its direction.

Verified details

• Image Ten's first budget was about $6,000, from ten founders investing $600 each.
• The film was shot between July 1967 and January 1968, mostly near Evans City, Pennsylvania.
• The working titles included Monster Flick, Night of Anubis and Night of the Flesh Eaters.
• The blood effects used chocolate syrup.
• Karl Hardman's real-life daughter, Kyra Schon, played Karen when she was nine.
• Marilyn Eastman, who played Helen Cooper, also appears as an uncredited ghoul.
• Pittsburgh horror host Bill Cardille appears in the film as himself.
• Much of the score was drawn from library music used in earlier films.
• The official 1990 remake was written by Romero and directed by Tom Savini.
• The film was selected for the National Film Registry in 1999.
• AFI ranked it 93rd on its 2001 list of the most thrilling American films.

Connections

• Creature profile: The Zombie.
• Subgenre: Zombie and Apocalyptic Horror.
• Director profile: George A. Romero.

Sources and further reading

• Night of the Living Dead, Wikipedia
• Night of the Living Dead (1968), AFI Catalog
• On Location: Evans City Cemetery, Pittsburgh Magazine
• National Film Registry, Library of Congress