When people – horror fans or not – first hear mention of George A. Romero, their automatic response is usually to think of the decades-long Living Dead saga comprised of Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1979), Day of the Dead (1985) and Land of the Dead (2005). Romero was, for better or worse, the man who took the zombie and redefined it for cinematic audiences. Whereas the zombies of the past were usually the resurrected slaves of voodoo sorcerers, mad scientists and aliens bent on the conquest of Earth, Romero, with Night, single-handedly transformed the zombie into an autonomous being hell-bent on destroying, devouring and converting human victims, all while using the zombie as a socio-political metaphor to critique the horrors of the real world’s newly untrusted post-WWII institutions, including government, family, the military, and even religion.
For me – as with many other diehard fans of the horror genre – real, unrestrained, contemporary “modern/post-modern” horror began with Romero. Although many followed in his wake, Romero’s work has been incredibly influential, and his films will undeniably outlive their creator, with a new generation of fans on the rise, and with far more zombie film fans who continue to eat away at Comic-Con conventions, midnight cult movie showings and more, than those who went to see the first three films of his Dead saga upon their initial release prior to the end of the 20th Century.
The Early Years
George Andrew Romero was born on February 4, 1940, about a year before the United States entered World War II, into a multi-ethnic, devout Catholic family. His father, a commercial artist, was a La Coruña, Spain native who had lived in Cuba before coming to America with his Lithuanian wife and young George himself. A graduate of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute University (latterly Carnegie-Melon), where his studies included the techniques of Spanish masters such as Bosch and Goya, Romero lived in the Italian-dominated Bronx, where in childhood he was picked on regularly as a “spic” kid. The Catholic school he attended didn’t offer much support.
His only true spiritual boost came at the cinema, where he ate up everything from westerns to sci-fi B-movies. In early adulthood contemporary filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman fascinated him. He loved the filmmakers of the French New Wave. And he counted Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann (1951), amongst his favourite films, along with Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and Touch of Evil (1957). In order to broaden his education of the medium, Romero rented a 16mm reel copy of a different film in Manhattan almost every week and would ride with it back home on the subway to screen it from a projector at his house.
Such was Romero’s love for celluloid that at age 14, he began to make films. He had a rich uncle whose 16mm camera he borrowed to make his first film, a short “mini-epic” called The Man from the Meteor. Although he was arrested during production for throwing a burning dummy from a roof, it didn’t deter him from his love of the craft. He later worked as a grip on Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and with the financial assistance of his uncle went on to start a commercial ad business in industrial Pittsburgh called The Latent Image, along with several other people including John Russo and Rudolph Ricci.
Conditions during ad production were tough – the studio furniture was from Goodwill’s, most of the sleeping and eating they did was in the studio space, and because they couldn’t afford a heating system, the toilet water would freeze in winter and had to be chipped to thaw. But with integrity and teamwork – including what Russo called “snappier scripts, more fluid camera techniques and jazzier editing” – the mavericks gradually developed a reputation. Their commercials covered everything from beer and barbeques to cars (including Chevys) and political campaigns. Their most famous ad was The Calgon Story, a detergent ad inspired by Fantastic Voyage (1966): “We’ve got to find out what’s on those fibers!”
Eventually they made enough to afford a used 35mm Arriflex camera, lights, 16mm editing tables, projectors, and more. They won gold and silver awards for their shorts at international film festivals, and eventually decided to make a feature film together, a horror flick with uninhibited honesty and fury that would end up becoming a benchmark not only of the American New Wave but for horror cinema globally.
Night of the Living Dead
“They’re coming to get you, Barbra!” A man, Johnny (Russell Streiner), and his sister, Barbra (Judith O’Dea), have driven 200 miles to a remote cemetery in rural Pennsylvania to place a wreath on their father’s grave. Seeing a strange tall pale man (S. William Hinzman) stumbling a la Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s Monster some distance away, Johnny begins to tease Barbra with a Karloff accent. Then the man attacks Barbra, and Johnny comes to her rescue only to be killed in the struggle. Seeking refuge from her assailant, Barbra takes cover in a farmhouse, only to realize there are more zombified people closing in from outside… and a recently-mutilated corpse rotting on the top of the stairs. Shortly afterwards, a drifter, Ben (Duane Jones, the only African-American actor in a largely white cast), rushes in, hoping to find the key to a gas pump near the barn so he can use it to fill up a truck and escape.
Barbra (Judith O’Dea) runs for her life.
With more attackers closing in, he turns the house into a makeshift fortress, whilst Barbra sinks into a catatonic state. Soon, other “normals” emerge from the farmhouse cellar: a dysfunctional husband and wife, Harry and Helen Cooper (Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman) their daughter Karen (Kyla Schon) who has been bitten; and young couple Tom and Judy (Keith Wayne and Judith Ridley). While arguing over how to survive – either stay upstairs and fight it out or hold up in the basement and wait it out -both these characters learn through radio and television reports that the attackers outside the farmhouse are actually a horde of recently-deceased cadavers resurrected by the radiation of a NASA probe returning from Venus. Apparently, these creatures are starting to take over the world, seeking living humans to devour in their new state as “flesh-eating ghouls.” Although rescue stations are being set up and zombie-hunting teams are being assembled to counter the threat, there are no guarantees that help will arrive in time or that an attempt to make it to a rescue station will end well. All hell has literally broken loose, and the dead are closing in…
In October of 1968, Night of the Living Dead flickered across the drive-in screens of America. Originally called Night of Anubis and Night of the Flesh Eaters, it was loosely inspired by Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, which four years before had been filmed as The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price. Made for a scant $114,000, beginning with $6000 collected from Romero and nine other multi-tasking collaborators at The Latent Image and beyond, who for this film called themselves Image Ten, the film became a counterculture phenomenon and monument of the American New Wave that defied mainstream expectations while redefining the horror genre with graphic, unflinching scenes that moved well beyond the boundaries previously set to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). It was a feature-length Twilight Zone episode that went off the chain, complete with a bleak twist ending that not even Rod Serling could have seen coming. It gave African-Americans in the Civil Rights Movement an onscreen presence through its main protagonist, Ben, a role that was originally Caucasian until Romero decided to cast the charismatic Duane Jones (the best actor he knew in Pittsburgh). And it gave zombies a voice, too. Removed from the control of voodoo, mad scientists and alien invaders of zombie films past, these creatures were autonomous, revolutionary, and hungry for the human flesh of those living in dysfunctional Middle American institutions caught up in the socio-political upheaval of the USA of the post-JFK 1960’s – the bloodiest domestic period in America’s history since the Civil War a century ago.
The most conservative critics savaged Night during its initial release, with Variety calling it a ”pornography of violence” and an “unrelieved orgy of sadism”. Then-struggling critic Roger Ebert was so nauseated by it, that in writing his review for Reader’s Digest, he condemned it as an example of how Hollywood horror corrupts. This was quite ironic given that the film was not a product of Hollywood, and that Ebert wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyer’s highly controversial Beyond the Valley of the Dolls the following year. But all the controversy only fueled the film’s blockbuster success.
Following its regional premiere, it took in between $12 and $15 million in the United States and $30 million internationally. It inspired newcomers such as Craven, Carpenter, Hooper, Cronenberg, Larry Cohen and Sam Raimi to follow the mold, along with indie filmmakers like John Sayles and John Waters. And over half a century after its release, Night of the Living Dead, followed by several sequels and countless parodies and imitations, is still recognized and praised worldwide as a cinematic masterpiece. It’s been added by the Library of Congress to its National Film Registry and earned additional accolades from the American Film Institute, Empire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and a now far more progressive Variety and Reader’s Digest.
With Night, arguably the Citizen Kane of all contemporary modern horror films, both independent filmmaking and the horror genre had fully matured. It invoked the aesthetic of Vietnam War footage combined with techniques found in the French New Wave (stark shadows, handheld panning and kinetic editing) and German Expressionism. It marked the first time that horror films would be officially recognised as tools for sociopolitical critiques of the world right outside the cinema, and not just as tame, tacky escapist fare with the usual happy or gratifying endings prevalent in the 1950s. No longer would horror films primarily utilise monsters of antiquity or those of Atomic Age sci-fi. From Night onward, the horrors and evils of the real world, including humanity’s worst faults and the most degenerate aspects of institutions society was told to trust, would now be under the microscope.
Ben (Duane Jones) working hard to keep everybody alive.
A truly angry film, Night did not provide a false, complacent or deliriously happy ending, choosing instead to subvert audience expectations, from the opening graveyard scenes right down to the nerve-shattering demise of its black hero following moments of unbearable horror. Mistaken for a zombie, Ben is shot by the only rescue team that does come, a posse of trigger-happy white rednecks led by a tobacco-chewing sheriff (George Kosana), who resemble a lynch mob more than actual civil order. “That’s another one for the fire.” And it came complete with partial nudity, swearing and (thanks to a local butcher) actual flesh-eating, complete with chomping, slurping and ripping sounds. All of this is in defiance of the defunct William Hays Production Code from 1934, a salute to rebellious artistic freedom less than a month prior to the establishment of the new ratings system of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). This was horror as it needed to be, and it came at the right time.
Film audiences were changing. Most of the family audiences from the early widescreen years of Old Hollywood had dwindled, and the studio system had become bloated to the extent of near-bankruptcy, particularly with expensive failures like 20th-Century Fox’s Cleopatra (1963) demonstrating a failure to understand the tastes of contemporary audiences. Many of the filmmakers that audiences depended upon were either dead or retired, and film production overseas in Europe had also hit a slump, all of which resulted in a lack of quality product. As Newsweek best put it: “The great Hollywood empire that ruled American tastes for more than half a century lies in dust, its tyrannical moguls dead or deposed, its back lots empty, its sound stages still, its ranks diminished or in disarray. But out of the ruins of the city of dreams a new film industry is rising.” Later, Tom Bernard, founder of Orion Pictures, would add, and long before the indie film craze of the 1990’s, “In the next three or four years, I think the American independent filmmaker is going to be quite a powerful person.”
Beyond the silver screen, America’s politics were advancing, but things were also turning bitter and violent. People were beginning to lose faith in traditional conceptions of the nuclear family, religion, government and other commonly accepted conservative societal norms of the early Cold War era. The sexual revolution was in full swing, complete with hippie communes, sex bars and uninhibited lifestyles on full display, aided by the growing popularity of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, and the ensuing range of less reputable publications that followed. In addition, a growing demand for an end to segregation and racial persecution was filling public discourse. Prior to Night’s completion in the spring of 1968, the USA had seen race riots; the assassinations of President JFK, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy; the crimes of the Manson Family; and violent imagery of the war in Vietnam broadcast on national television.
America’s Hollywood began to reflect the age, giving us films like Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967), Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969), Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). But Romero’s debut would stand apart. Horror films like Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Peter Bodagnovich’s Targets, released the same year as Night – were made within the system with studio money. Night of the Living Dead was filmed in between beer commercials by newcomers without formal training, making up the rules as they went along.
Interpreting Night of the Living Dead
It’s fitting to see the farmhouse of Night and its occupants as a microcosm of the experiences of Americans struggling to live under increasingly claustrophobic traditional values – a devout Catholic blonde, a black man, a traditional nuclear family and a young couple. The catatonic Barbra lacks a voice, with men making up her own mind for her, beginning with her brother Johnny and later Ben. The family is dysfunctional, with the cowardly father attempting to seek total control while his dissatisfied housewife Helen merely pouts (“We may not enjoy living together, but dying together won’t solve anything”), both failing to provide for their wounded daughter Karen. The couple, Tom and Judy, is initially regarded as society’s best hope for the future. But Judy is ditzy while Tom, advocating for cooperation between Harry and Ben, is largely ineffective and inept. As for Ben, who the audience mostly roots for throughout the picture… he is intelligent, proud and resourceful, but has a self-destructive anger, going so far as to hit Barbra when she becomes hysterical and eventually gunning Harry in cold blood.
This feeling of persistent nihilism accompanies the film’s every frame, successfully undermining both the protagonist’s dwindling hope and the audience’s expectations, aided brilliantly by the use of chiaroscuro contrast in the scenes where the lights go out. During their attempt to fuel up the truck and drive for help, an accident at the gas pump causes an explosion that kills Tom and Judy, leaving their charred remains to be devoured by zombies, while Ben is left to fend for himself against the dead closing in. When Harry locks out Ben, attempting to break in as the living dead close in around him, Ben breaks down the door and after barricading it again, beats Harry to a pulp (“I ought to drag you out there and feed you to those things!”).
It’s no wonder that Karen, the bitten child, joins the dead with ease, eventually gnawing on father Harry’s severed arm and taking a trowel to mother Helen in the film’s most shocking scene. There was no doubt that the peace-and-love generation – including those ill-fated students who two years later were shot to death by National Guardsmen at Kent State University – as well as the Black Panthers and their armed wing, the Black Liberation Army (whose own leader, Fred Hampton, was gunned down by policemen in Chicago), wanted to do something equally unwholesome to the complacent America they were told to respect and obey. Night of the Living Dead is a film of rebellion, tearing the Production Code rulebook to shreds.
S. William Hinzman acting very undead in Night of the Living Dead
Night of the Living Dead Copyright
In one of cinema’s more embarrassing bungles, when the Walter Reade Organization changed the title of George Romero’s zombie classic from Night of Anubis to Night of the Living Dead, they also inadvertently lifted the film’s copyright restrictions, allowing the film to enter the public domain. As a result, the film was sold by countless video companies during the booming VHS market from the 1970s. Although the film became a sleeper blockbuster upon its initial release, the Image Ten team – including director, co-writer, cinematographer, editor and unbilled actor Romero barely saw a cent in returns.
Over the years, the Living Dead team tried different methods to win back their film, for a long time to no avail. A colorized version of Night on VHS in the 1980’s was one approach. The Savini-directed 1990 remake, also in color – with most of the original team returning to oversee it – was another. Easily the worst of all these attempts was the infamous “30th Anniversary Edition” on VHS in 1998. The Image Ten team – without Romero’s involvement – ended up shooting a completely new, irrelevant and mind-numbing subplot involving a wacked-out evangelical priest (Scott Vladimir Licina) and his two idiotic assistants, while providing a background to the iconic Graveyard Ghoul (Hinzman reprising his role) who opened the first film, revealing him to be an executed killer about to be buried just before he re-animates. The new footage – complete with an epilogue that takes place one year later showing that the priest is immune to zombie bites – was amateurishly shot and edited into the original, resulting in a downright embarrassing and insulting mutilation of a masterpiece, complete with harebrained dialogue (“Spike the dead to prevent them from rising before Judgment Day!”), even hammier acting, and lazy attempts at make-up to alter the elderly Hinzman to look like his younger self. Romero himself went on record despising this version, needless to say.
Fortunately, just in time for its 50th Anniversary, the original, uncut, uncensored and untampered classic was remastered in 4K resolution and added as spine #909 to the Criterion Collection in 2017, with the Image Ten copyright put back in. But of course, Night of the Living Dead was just the beginning of George A. Romero’s illustrious career…