Let’s start things off with a bang. First up for review is Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero’s 1968 black-and-white film in which zombies took a giant lurch toward becoming an icon of the horror genre.

Due to a copyright mishap, Night of the Living Dead lapsed into the realm of public domain. This is unfortunate if you’re, say, George A. Romero. The upside is that the entire movie can be viewed online, absolutely free of charge. I’ve embedded the YouTube video below, and absolved myself of guilt by buying the DVD.

The funny thing is that the word zombie is not uttered once throughout the entire film. In fact, George A. Romero never intended for the living dead to be branded as zombies.

“In my mind, zombies were those boys in the Caribbean. I didn’t want zombies. I wanted ghouls.”

- George A. Romero

This is, of course, just an issue of nomenclature, but it’s interesting to pinpoint the moment that zombies shifted from voodoo slaves to the living dead in the public’s eye. It’s also interesting that Night of the Living Dead is the first major motion picture to cast a black actor (Duane Jones) as the lead without the role specifically calling for it. In fact, the issue of race is said to be a theme in Night of the Living Dead.

If you haven’t watched the movie yet, then read past this point at your own risk. I’m going to be spilling spoilers like zombies spill blood and guts from this point out.

I think that the basic plot of Night of the Living Dead is common knowledge at this point, but I’ll summarize just in case. A handful of people take shelter in an abandoned house after a global phenomenon causes the recently deceased to return to life and feast on human flesh. You would think that the greatest threat would be the horde of zombies beating down the doors, right? Wrong. Zombies are slow, stupid, and really only a force to be reckoned with when they’re coming at you en masse. The real tragedy of Night of the Living Dead is that these people can’t stop fighting amongst themselves, and that they all die because of it.

That’s right, they all die! In fact, I’ll go through the list according to the order that they die in.

Johnny dies within the first ten minutes of the film when a zombie shows up and cracks his head against a tombstone; Tom and Judy go up in flames during an attempted escape because Tom couldn’t figure out that getting a torch near gasoline probably isn’t a great idea; Ben shoots Harry after he’s finally had enough of his shit; Karen succumbs to infection hours after being bitten and then gets up to stab her mother, Helen, to death with a trowel; Barbra gets pulled outside by her own zombified brother, Johnny, and is presumably eaten; and Ben survives through the night by hiding in the basement, only to be shot in the head by a roaming posse the very next morning.

If only they had worked together as a team, they all could have survived. Well, all of them except Johnny. He was pretty much screwed.

As I said, race is said to be a theme in Night of the Living Dead. From where I stand, it’s all a matter of how you look at it. The issue is never actually discussed, but Ben and Harry both take an immediate dislike to one another. I see it as a power struggle, but perhaps Harry just didn’t like being ordered around by a black man. Then there’s the ending, with Ben being mistaken for a zombie. Some might say that Ben was shot because he was black. Perhaps if the posse had spotted someone poking around in an abandoned house who just so happened to be white, they wouldn’t have taken such a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later kind of attitude.

The issue of sex has been raised as well. I’m sorry if I got anyone excited, but I meant sex as in gender. Feminists have sharply criticized Night of the Living Dead for its lack of any strong female characters, and perhaps rightly so; Barbra is catatonic with fear throughout most of the movie, Judy has very little depth beyond being Tom’s girlfriend, and Helen is constantly being stifled by her husband, Harry. Whether or not this was intentional, feminism became a major theme in the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, a film that I will no doubt be reviewing in the near future.

In the end, the zombies themselves are not what makes Night of the Living Dead such a great movie. The living dead merely serve as a backdrop to the story. What’s really important are the survivors, how they interact with one another in a time of crisis, and what it says about the human condition. I like zombies, don’t get me wrong, but I just think that they belong in the background until the story calls for them.