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Night of the Living Dead shot like news

By the PopJunk Serials desk. Published

Review details

Title
Night of the Living Dead
Format
Film or TV
Year
1968
Where
Theatrical release, October 1968 (Continental Distributing)
Scare type
Siege dread and a pitiless ending, not jump scares.
Content note
Graphic violence and cannibalism, groundbreaking for 1968, and a bleak finish. Black and white.
Covered
The film's documented production, form and reception record, plus its public-domain history. Sourced analysis, not a viewing.
Verdict
A landmark that still earns the title on form, not shock value. The newsreel look and the ending are why it outlived a hundred-thousand-dollar budget.

Night of the Living Dead frightened people because it looked like the evening news. George Romero shot his 1968 debut in stark black and white with the run-and-gun habits he had built making commercials and industrial films, and the result reads less like a monster movie than like footage smuggled out of a real emergency, per Wikipedia. Romero directed, shot and cut it, he and John Russo wrote it, and Continental released it in October 1968 on a budget of about a hundred thousand dollars.

The form is the fear

There is no gloss on it. The handheld camera, the flat farmhouse interiors and the radio and television bulletins that feed the characters their information all borrow the grammar of documentary and newsreel, so the horror arrives in the register of a thing actually happening. It ends the way a news story ends. The lone survivor, Ben, is shot by an armed posse the next morning and his body dragged off, shown in a run of grainy stills as the credits roll, per The Telegraph. The film goes out on what looks like a page of press photographs.

The lineage is a borrowed novel

Romero never hid where the idea came from. The script drew first from Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend, the story of one man besieged in his house by the infected dead, per Wikipedia. Romero kept the siege and the plague and threw out the vampires. The creatures in his film are called ghouls, never zombies, yet the movie is credited with inventing the modern zombie whole. Romero later called himself, dryly, "the grandfather, or the godfather, of zombies," per IndieWire. Every slow, flesh-eating crowd that has shuffled across a screen since traces back through this farmhouse to Matheson's one besieged man.

It helped make the modern horror film

The picture reached theaters shortly before the MPAA ratings system existed, so its cannibalism and gore went out with no age gate, which fed both the controversy and the reputation, per Wikipedia. It later landed on lists of the most important films ever made and, in 1999, in the Library of Congress National Film Registry. Casting Duane Jones, a Black actor, as the capable lead in 1968 gave that ending a charge Romero said was not planned but that no one watching in that year could miss.

The one odd bonus

Here is the part a collector should know. When the distributor changed the title late, the copyright notice was left off the prints, and Night of the Living Dead fell into the public domain on release, per Wikipedia. It has been free to copy and screen ever since. There is nothing to chase and nothing to pay. The most influential horror film in America is a legal giveaway, which is a hell of a way to turn immortal.

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