Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Dir: GEORGE A. ROMERO
Country: USA

In a tribute to utter pointlessness I present yet another review of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I’ll get all those predictable words like seminal, legendary, and landmark out of the way now. No review of this film would be the same without them. Unfortunately I don’t believe that Romero’s film is seminal, legendary or a landmark, but that is probably besides the point. Three other adjectives do spring to mind though - amateurish, crude, and rudimentary. I’m not one to herd the sacred cows of the horror genre into the slaughterhouse just for the sake of it, but neither am I party to the sort of unthinking and mindless worship of a film on the say so of a bunch of ex hippy critics and academics who were around at the time of the films release. Histories are written retrospectively and its rarely mentioned for example that Night of the Living Dead was not a major success when it was first released. Instead the film languished for three or four years before it became a success on the Midnite Movie circuit. One version of history will have you believe that Romero’s film distilled all the anxieties of the day and was a white hot rebuke to mainstream American culture up there with Easy Rider (1969). The fact is all these qualities were drawn out of the film retrospectively. Therefore the much lauded allegorical dimension of the film was only appreciated when the time had passed. However Romero did have an effective metaphor for consumerism in his depiction of a zombie horde stripped of the mystique of voodoo.



To Romero’s credit he did identify a need for the horror genre to address socio/political concerns, and clearly found the gothic melodrama’s of AIP and Hammer to be reductive and regressive. The turmoil apparent in the real world was steadfastly ignored by horror films, and the direction offered by Psycho (1960), Peeping Tom (1960), Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) had largely been ignored by the majority of producers. Romero’s success was in marrying a staple component of the horror genre (the zombie) to an everyday milieu that had chilling echoes of the real world. Nothing was more horrifying than the images of the Vietnam War presented on newscasts and Romero cleverly invested his film with the grainy black and white realism of television footage. The content and its self-consciously allegorical overtures is considerably less interesting than the formal and stylistic decisions forced on the filmmakers by an ultra low budget. Few films at the time were daring enough to combine the basest elements of the exploitation arena with an aesthetic presentation more in line with Cinema Veritè. This gave the film an added sense of realism and power that even dreadful acting and clumsy editing couldn’t dilute .

The title itself is a concession to the reverse psychology apparent in Romero’s approach. One approaches the film lulled into a false sense of security (an attitude of mind which is almost impossible now because of those that pathetically genuflect at the altar of Romero), but I can imagine at the time audiences expected a brainless and moronic film and instead got the reverse. Every aspect of form and content is about challenging expectations, and it is in this attitude to generic expectations that Night of the Living Dead shows its most radical side. The politics of the film might be counter-cultural, but few people took that reading away with them at the time, however the effect of Romero’s challenge to generic conservatism meant the film still had the power to unsettle. The deaths of the romantic couple in a fire for example, the lack of explanation to the events, the failure of mainstream patriarchy to restore the status quo. The surprise death of the man we have come to view as the hero of the film.

Romero is able to stand tall on his soap box because of the microcosm of society he places within the four walls of a house from which there is no escape. We are party to simmering racial tensions, and we are party to Romero’s less than progressive attitude to gender. Romero goes as far as to make Barbra a literal dumb blonde. We are also party to the breakdown of traditional American family values. Romero’s all too frequent reliance on sub-Hitchockian devices is a feeble attempt to add atmosphere, atmosphere which is regularly assassinated by the botched sound design. For me the most illuminating element of the film is the whiteness of the zombies. In this film the zombie disease only affects white Americans, and this becomes a damning statement against mass conformity and mindlessness. Romero would tweak this in later entries, perhaps aware that he might seem a hypocrite if he didn’t extend racial equality to the undead. All of these elements are interesting, but to what purpose? Romero makes his statement, he vents his spleen, but does he offer a remedy or an alternative? The answer is no, he doesn’t even try to show alternative positions. Romero has his view of the world, and its his film, so who cares what anyone else might think. The tone of nihilism and despair comes as much from Romero’s own cowardice to offer solutions as it does the posse of rednecks who shoot Ben dead.

© Shaun Anderson - 2010