Night Of The Living Dead (other)

''Night of the Living Dead'' is a 1968 American independent horror film that introduced the flesh-eating ghouls that would become synonymous with the term "zombie". The story follows seven people trapped in a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, under assault by reanimated corpses. The movie was directed, photographed, and edited by George A. Romero, written by Romero and John Russo, and produced by Russell Streiner and Karl Hardman. It stars Duane Jones and Judith O'Dea.

Having gained experience through directing television commercials and industrial films for their production company the Latent Image, Romero and his friends Russo and Streiner decided to make a feature film. They elected to make a horror film that would capitalize on commercial interest in the genre. The script primarily drew influence from Richard Matheson's 1954 novel '' I Am Legend''. Principal photography took place between July 1967 and January 1968, mainly on location in Evans City; the cast and crew consisted of the production team's friends and relatives, local stage and amateur actors, and residents from the area. Romero used guerrilla filmmaking techniques he had honed in his commercial and industrial work to complete the film on a budget of approximately .

''Night of the Living Dead'' premiered in Pittsburgh on October 1, 1968. It grossed domestically and internationally, earning more than 250 times its budget and making it one of the most profitable film productions ever made at the time. Released shortly before the adoption of the Motion Picture Association of America rating system, the film's explicit violence and gore were considered groundbreaking, leading to controversy and negative reviews. It eventually garnered a cult following and critical acclaim and has appeared on lists of the greatest and most influential films by such outlets as ''Empire'', ''The New York Times'', and ''Total Film''. Frequently identified as a touchstone in the development of the horror genre, retrospective scholarly analysis has focused on its reflection of the social and cultural changes in the United States during the 1960s, with particular attention towards the casting of Jones, an African-American, in the leading role. In 1999, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

''Night of the Living Dead'' created a successful franchise that includes five sequels released between 1978 and 2009, all directed by Romero. Due to an error when titling the original film, it entered the public domain upon release, resulting in numerous adaptations, remakes, and a lasting legacy in the horror genre. An official remake, written by Romero and directed by Tom Savini, was released in 1990.

Plot

Siblings Barbra and Johnny drive to a cemetery in rural Pennsylvania to visit their father's grave, where a pale man in a tattered suit kills Johnny and attacks Barbra. She flees to a nearby farmhouse but finds the resident's corpse lying half-eaten on the stairs. A growing horde of ghouls soon surround the house, as a stranger, Ben, arrives and initially mistakes Barbra for the homeowner. After driving back several ghouls, he boards the windows and doors. While searching the home for supplies, he locates a lever-action rifle.

A nearly catatonic Barbra is surprised to find people already taking shelter in the home's cellar. Harry, his wife Helen, and their young daughter Karen fled there after a group of the same monsters overturned their car and bit Karen on the arm, leaving her seriously ill. A couple, Tom and Judy, took shelter after hearing an emergency broadcast about a series of brutal killings. Tom and Ben secure the farmhouse while Harry protests that it is unsafe aboveground before returning to the cellar. Ghouls continue to besiege the farmhouse in increasing numbers.

The refugees listen to radio and television reports of an army of cannibalistic corpses committing mass murder across the east coast of the United States and of the posses of armed men patrolling the countryside to exterminate the living dead. Reports confirm that the ghouls can die again from heavy blows to the head, bullets to the brain, or being burned. Various rescue centers offer refuge and safety, and scientists theorize that radiation from an exploding space probe returning from Venus caused the reanimations.

Ben devises a plan to obtain medical supplies for Karen and transport the group to a rescue center by refueling his truck at a pump on the farm. Ben, Tom, and Judy drive there together, holding the ghouls off with torches and Molotov cocktails. However, the gas from the pump spills and causes the truck to catch fire and explode, killing Tom and Judy. Ben returns and breaks down the door when Harry does not let him in.

The remaining survivors attempt to figure a way out. They pause their discussion to watch the 3 AM news update until the power cuts out. The ghouls soon break through the doors and windows of the unlit home. In the chaos, Harry grabs Ben's gun but is disarmed and shot by Ben. Harry staggers down to the cellar and dies next to his daughter.

Karen dies from her injuries, becomes a ghoul, and eats her father's remains. She stabs her mother to death with a masonry trowel. Barbra tries to help Ben keep the ghouls out, but a reanimated Johnny drags her away. As the horde breaks in, Ben takes refuge in the cellar, where he shoots Harry's and Helen's ghouls.

In the morning, an armed posse arrives to dispatch the remaining ghouls. Awoken by their gunfire and sirens, Ben emerges from the cellar, but they shoot him, mistaking Ben for a ghoul. His body is thrown onto a bonfire and burned with the rest of the ghouls.

Cast

* Duane Jones as Ben. The casting was potentially controversial in 1968, when it was rare for a black man to be cast as the hero of an American film primarily composed of white actors, but Romero said that Jones performed the best in his audition. He went on to appear in other films, including ''Ganja & Hess'' (1973) and ''Beat Street'' (1984). Jones was in charge of the literature department at Antioch College until 1976, when he became executive director of the Black Theatre Alliance, and continued working as a theater actor and director until his death in 1988. Despite his other film roles, Jones worried that people only recognized him as Ben.
* Judith O'Dea as Barbra. A 23-year-old commercial and stage actress, O'Dea previously worked for Hardman and Eastman in Pittsburgh. O'Dea was in Hollywood seeking entry to the movie business when she auditioned. O'Dea remarked in an interview that starring in the film was a positive experience for her. However, O'Dea admitted horror movies terrified her, particularly Vincent Price's '' House of Wax'' (1953). In addition to acting, O'Dea performed her own stunts. O'Dea was surprised by film's cultural impact and the renown it brought her: "People treat you differently. 'mho-hum Judy O'Dea until they realize 'mBarbra from ''Night of the Living Dead''. All of a sudden 'mnot so ho-hum anymore!"
* Karl Hardman as Harry Cooper. One of the film's producers, Hardman, played the role of husband to his real-life partner Eastman.
* Marilyn Eastman as Helen Cooper. Vice president of Hardman Associates, Marilyn Eastman, played the doomed mother Helen Cooper, helped finance the film, assisted with makeup and sound, and also played the role of an unnamed, bug-eating zombie. She would later appear in '' Santa Claws'' (1996), directed by John Russo.
* Kyra Schon as Karen Cooper. Hardman's daughter in real life, 9-year-old Schon also portrayed the mangled corpse on the house's upstairs floor that Ben drags away.
* Keith Wayne as Tom. "Keith Wayne" was the actor's stage name; his real name was Ronald Keith Hartman. After this lone acting role, Wayne went on to work as a singer, dancer, musician, and night-club owner. Wayne would later become a successful chiropractor in North Carolina. During a 1992 interview, Wayne addressed the incongruity between his careers as a young performer and a chiropractor saying, "I am not that person anymore. ..I got to a point in my life where I wanted to have some control. I didn't want to wake up at 40 or 50 and not be in control." In 1995, he took his own life at age 50.
* Judith Ridley as Judy. The 19-year-old receptionist from Hardman Associates auditioned for Barbra and was given the less-demanding role of Judy. Ridley explained, "I'd never done any acting. I think they took pity on me." Ridley starred in Romero's unsuccessful second feature ''There's Always Vanilla'' (1971).
* Bill Hinzman, who played the first ghoul encountered by Barbra and Johnny in the cemetery, went on to work on a number of horror films. He directed ''The Majorettes'' (1986) and '' Flesheater'' (1988).
* George Kosana as Sheriff McClelland. Kosana also served as the film's production manager.
* Bill "Chilly Billy" Cardille as himself. Cardille was well known in Pittsburgh as a TV presenter who hosted a horror film anthology series, ''Chiller Theatre'', on late Saturday nights from 1964 to 1983.

Production

Development and pre-production

Romero embarked upon his career in the film industry while attending Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He directed and produced television commercials and industrial films for The Latent Image, a company he co-founded with his friend Russell Streiner. The Latent Image started small, but after a high-budget Calgon commercial spoofing ''Fantastic Voyage'' (1966), Romero felt that The Latent Image had the experience and equipment to produce a feature film. They wanted to capitalize on the film industry's "thirst for the bizarre", according to Romero. He, Streiner, and John A. Russo contacted Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman, president and vice president respectively, of a Pittsburgh-based industrial film firm called Hardman Associates, Inc. The Latent Image pitched their idea for a then-untitled horror film.

These discussions led to the creation of Image Ten, a production company chartered to produce a single feature film. The initial budget was $6,000; each member of the production company invested $600 for a share of the profits. Ten more investors contributed another $6,000, but this would still be insufficient. Production stopped multiple times during filming while Romero used early footage to persuade additional investors. Image Ten eventually raised approximately $114,000 for the budget ($ today).

Writing

The script was co-written by John Russo and George A. Romero. They abandoned an early horror comedy concept about adolescent aliens, after realizing they would not have the budget to create a convincing spaceship. Russo proposed a more constrained narrative where a young man runs away from home and discovers aliens harvesting human corpses for food in a cemetery. Romero combined this idea with an unpublished short story about flesh-eating ghouls, and they began filming with an incomplete script under the working title ''Monster Flick''. According to Russo, the screenplay written prior to filming only covered events up to the emergence of the Cooper family. Russo would complete the script while filming and Romero would later expand the final pages of his short story into the sequels '' Dawn of the Dead'' (1978) and ''Day of the Dead'' (1985).

Romero drew inspiration from Richard Matheson's '' I Am Legend'' (1954), a horror novel about a plague that ravages a futuristic Los Angeles. The infected in ''I Am Legend'' become vampire-like creatures and prey on the uninfected. Matheson was not impressed by Romero's interpretation, describing it as "kind of cornball", though he later said, "George Romero's a nice guy, though. I don't harbor any animosity toward him." Discussing the creation of ''Night of the Living Dead'', Romero explained:

According to lead actress Judith O'Dea, much of the dialogue was improvised. She told an interviewer, "I don't know if there was an actual working script! We would go over what basically had to be done, then just did it the way we each felt it ''should'' be done". One example offered by O'Dea concerns a scene where Barbra tells Ben about Johnny's death. O'Dea said that the script only called for her to talk about Johnny riding in the car with her and being attacked in the cemetery while Ben dismantles a table for wood. She described Barbra's dialogue for the scene as entirely improv. Eastman modified cellar scenes featuring dialogue between Helen and Harry Cooper. Karl Hardman attributed Ben's lines to lead actor Duane Jones:

Although the film is regarded as one of the launching pads for the modern zombie movie, the screenplay never uses the word. In a 2013 interview, Romero said that he felt the film's antagonists were not the zombies of Haitian folklore and that he actively avoided any similarities. Professor of religious studies, Kim Paffenroth, has noted that Romero's antagonists broke with earlier traditions of "voodoo zombies" by having no human villain in control of the zombie and thus no potential to ever restore the monsters' humanity.

The lead role was initially written for a white actor, but upon casting African-American actor Duane Jones, Romero intentionally did not alter the script to reflect this. The film appeared in theaters at a time when very few black actors played leading roles. The rare exceptions, like the consciously black heroes played by Sidney Poitier, were written as subservient to make those characters palatable to white audiences. Asked in 2013 if he took inspiration from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. that same year, Romero responded in the negative, noting that he only heard about the shooting when he was on his way to find distribution for the finished film.

Filming

Principal photography

The small budget dictated much of the production process. According to Hardman, "We knew that we could not raise enough money to shoot a film on a par with the classic horror films with which we had all grown up. The best that we could do was to place our cast in a remote spot and then bring the horror to be visited on them in that spot". Scenes were filmed near Evans City, Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh in rural Butler County; the opening sequence was shot at the Evans City Cemetery on Franklin Road, south of the borough.

Lacking the budget to build and destroy a house, the filmmakers rented a nearby farmhouse scheduled for demolition. The building's neglected cellar was not a viable location for filming, so the few basement scenes were shot beneath The Latent Image offices. The basement door shown in the film was cut into a wall by the production team and led nowhere.

Props and special effects were simple and limited by the budget. The blood, for example, was Bosco Chocolate Syrup drizzled over cast members' bodies. The human flesh consumed by ghouls consisted of meat and offal donated by an investor's butcher shop. Zombie makeup varied during the film. Initially, makeup was limited to white skin with blackened eyes. As filming progressed, mortician's wax simulated wounds and decaying flesh. Filming took place between July 1967 and January 1968 under various titles. Filming began under the generic working title ''Monster Flick'', followed by ''Night of Anubis'' after Romero's short story that provided the basis for the script, and was completed as ''Night of the Flesh Eaters'', a title not used in the final release due to a potential conflict with a similarly-named film. The small budget led Romero to shoot on 35 mm black-and-white film. The completed film ultimately benefited from the decision, as film historian Joseph Maddrey describes the black-and-white filming as " guerrilla-style", resembling "the unflinching authority of a wartime newsreel". He found the exploitation film to resemble a documentary on social instability.

Directing

''Night of the Living Dead'' was the first feature-length film directed by George A. Romero. His initial work involved filming advertisements, industrial films, and shorts for Pittsburgh public broadcaster WQED's children's series ''Mister Rogers' Neighborhood''. Romero's decision to direct ''Night of the Living Dead'' launched his career as a horror director. He took the helm of the sequels as well as '' Season of the Witch'' (1972), '' The Crazies'' (1973), ''Martin'' (1978), ''Creepshow'' (1982) and ''The Dark Half'' (1993). Critics saw the influence of the horror and science-fiction films of the 1950s in Romero's directorial style. Stephen Paul Miller, for instance, witnessed "a revival of fifties schlock shock ... and the army general's television discussion of military operations in the film echoes the often inevitable calling-in of the army in fifties horror films". Miller admits that "''Night of the Living Dead'' takes greater relish in mocking these military operations through the general's pompous demeanor" and the government's inability to source the zombie epidemic or protect the citizenry. Romero describes the mood he wished to establish: "The film opens with a situation that has already disintegrated to a point of little hope, and it moves progressively toward absolute despair and ultimate tragedy." According to film historian Carl Royer, Romero "employs chiaroscuro (film noir style) lighting to emphasize humanity's nightmare alienation from itself."

While some critics dismissed Romero's film because of the graphic scenes, writer R. H. W. Dillard claimed that the "open-eyed detailing" of taboo heightened the film's success. He asks, "What girl has not, at one time or another, wished to kill her mother? And Karen, in the film, offers a particularly vivid opportunity to commit the forbidden deed vicariously." Romero featured social taboos as key themes, especially cannibalism. Film historian Robin Wood interprets the flesh-eating scenes of ''Night of the Living Dead'' as a late-1960s critique of American capitalism. Wood argues that the zombies' consumption of people represents the logical endpoint of human interactions under capitalism.

Post-production

Members of Image Ten were involved in filming and post-production, participating in loading camera magazines, gaffing, constructing props, recording sounds and editing. Production stills were shot and printed by Karl Hardman, who stated in an interview that a "number of cast members formed a production line in the darkroom for developing, washing and drying of the prints as I made the exposures. As I recall, I shot over 1,250 pictures during the production". Upon completion of post-production, Image Ten found it difficult to secure a distributor willing to show the film with the gruesome scenes intact. Columbia rejected the film for its lack of color, and American International Pictures declined after requests to soften it and re-shoot the final scene were rejected by producers. Romero admitted that "none of us wanted to do that. We couldn't imagine a happy ending. ... Everyone want da Hollywood ending, but we stuck to our guns".. The Walter Reade Organization agreed to show the film uncensored, but changed the title from ''Night of the Flesh Eaters'' to ''Night of the Living Dead'' because of an existing film with a similar title. While changing the title, the copyright notice was accidentally deleted from the early releases of the film.

Soundtrack

The film's music consisted of existing pieces that were mixed or modified for the film. Much of the soundtrack had been used by previous films. According to WRS, "We chose a selection of music for each of the various scenes and then George made the final selections. We then took those selections and augmented them electronically". A soundtrack album featuring music and dialogue cues from the film was compiled and released on LP by Varèse Sarabande in 1982. In 2008, recording group 400 Lonely Things released the album ''Tonight of the Living Dead'', an instrumental album with music and sounds sampled from the 1968 film.

Release

Premiere controversy

''Night of the Living Dead'' premiered on October 1, 1968, at the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh. Nationally, it was perceived to be a Saturday afternoon matinée type of film—typical for horror films of the era—targeting the core horror film audience of mainly pre-teens and adolescents. The MPAA film rating system was not in place until the following month, so children were able to purchase tickets. Roger Ebert of the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' chided theater owners and parents who allowed children access to a film they were entirely unprepared for. Ebert noted that the children in the audience initially displayed typical reactions to 60s horror films, including shouting when ghouls appeared on the screen. He said that the atmosphere in the theater shifted to grim silence as the protagonists each began to fail, die, and be consumed—either by fire or the undead. The deaths of Ben, Barbra, and the supporting cast showed audiences an uncomfortable, nihilistic outlook that was unusual for the genre. According to Ebert:

Response from ''Variety'' after the initial release reflects the outrage generated by the film: "Until the Supreme Court establishes clear-cut guidelines for the pornography of violence, ''Night of the Living Dead'' will serve nicely as an outer-limit definition by example. In mere 90 minutes this horror film (pun intended) casts serious aspersions on the integrity and social responsibility of its Pittsburgh-based makers, distributor Walter Reade, the film industry as a whole and xhibitorswho book he picture as well as raising doubts about the future of the regional cinema movement and about the moral health of film goers who cheerfully opt for this unrelieved orgy of sadism ..."

Critical reception

Despite the controversy, five years after the premiere Paul McCullough of '' Take One'' observed that ''Night of the Living Dead'' was the "most profitable horror film ever ... produced outside the walls of a major studio". In the decade after its release, the film grossed over $15 million at the U.S. box office. It was translated into over 25 languages. ''The Wall Street Journal'' reported that it was the top-grossing film in Europe in 1968. In a 1971 ''Newsweek'' article, Paul D. Zimmerman noted that the film had "become a bona fide cult movie for a burgeoning band of blood-lusting cinema buffs".

Decades after its release, the film enjoys a reputation as a classic and still receives positive reviews. In 2008, the film was ranked by ''Empire'' magazine No. 397 of ''The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time''. ''The New York Times'' also placed the film on their ''Best 1000 Movies Ever'' list. In January 2010, ''Total Film'' included the film on its list of ''The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time''. ''Rolling Stone'' named ''Night of the Living Dead'' one of ''The 100 Maverick Movies in the Last 100 Years''. ''Reader's Digest'' found it to be the 12th scariest movie of all time. The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives ''Night of the Living Dead'' a 96% approval rating based on 74 reviews, with an average rating of 8.8/10.

''Night of the Living Dead'' was awarded two distinguished honors decades after its debut. The Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry in 1999 with other films deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". In 2001, the film was ranked No. 93 by the American Film Institute on their '' AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Thrills'' list, a list of America's most heart-pounding movies. The zombies in the picture were also a candidate for AFI's '' AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Heroes & Villains'', in the villains category, but failed to make the official list. The Chicago Film Critics Association named it the 5th scariest film ever made. The film also ranked No. 9 on Bravo's ''The 100 Scariest Movie Moments''.

''New Yorker'' critic, Pauline Kael, called the film "one of the most gruesomely terrifying movies ever made – and when you leave the theatre you may wish you could forget the whole horrible experience. ... The film's grainy, banal seriousness works for it – gives it a crude realism". A ''Film Daily'' critic commented, "This is a pearl of a horror picture that exhibits all the earmarks of a sleeper." While Roger Ebert criticized the matinée screening, he admitted that he "admires the movie itself". Critic Rex Reed wrote, "If you want to see what turns a B movie into a classic ... don't miss ''Night of the Living Dead''. It is unthinkable for anyone seriously interested in horror movies not to see it."

Copyright status and home media

''Night of the Living Dead'' entered the public domain in the United States because the original theatrical distributor, the Walter Reade Organization, failed to place a copyright indication on the prints, and at that time, United States copyright law held that public dissemination required copyright notice to maintain a copyright. Image Ten displayed such a notice on the title frames of the film beneath the original title, ''Night of the Flesh Eaters'', but the distributor erroneously removed the statement when it changed the title.

Because ''Night of the Living Dead'' was not copyrighted, it has received hundreds of home video releases on VHS, Betamax, DVD, Blu-ray, and other formats. Over two hundred distinct versions of the film have been released on tapes alone. Numerous versions of the film have appeared on DVD, Blu-ray, and even LaserDisc with varying quality. The original film is available to view or download for free on many websites. , it is the Internet Archive's second most-downloaded film, with over 3.4 million downloads.

The film received a VHS release in 1993 through Tempe Video. The next year, a THX certified 25th anniversary Laserdisc was released by Elite Entertainment. It features special features, including commentary, trailers, gallery files and more. In 1998, Russo's revised version of the film, ''Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition'', was released on VHS and DVD by Anchor Bay Entertainment. In 2002, Elite Entertainment released a special edition DVD featuring the original cut. Dimension Extreme released a restored print of the film on DVD. This was followed by a 4K restoration Blu-ray released by The Criterion Collection on February 13, 2018, sourced from a print owned by the Museum of Modern Art and acquired by Janus Films. This release also features a workprint edit of the film under the title of ''Night of Anubis'', in addition to various bonus materials. In February 2020, Netflix took down ''Night of the Living Dead '' from its streaming service in Germany following a legal request in 2017 because "a version of the film is banned in that country."

Revisions

The first revisions of ''Night of the Living Dead'' involved colorization by home video distributors. Hal Roach Studios released a colorized version in 1986 that featured ghouls with pale green skin. Another colorized version appeared in 1997 from Anchor Bay Entertainment with grey-skinned zombies. In 2009, Legend Films coproduced a colorized 3D version of the film with PassmoreLab, a company that converts 2-D film into 3-D format. The film was theatrically released on October 14, 2010. According to Legend Films founder Barry Sandrew, ''Night of the Living Dead'' is the first entirely live action 2-D film to be converted to 3-D.

In 1999, co-writer John A. Russo released a modified version called ''Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition''. He filmed additional scenes and recorded a revised soundtrack composed by Scott Vladimir Licina. In an interview with ''Fangoria'' magazine, Russo explained that he wanted to "give the movie a more modern pace". Russo took liberties with the original script. The additions are neither clearly identified nor even listed. ''Entertainment Weekly'' reported "no bad blood" between Russo and Romero. The magazine quoted Romero as saying, "I didn't want to touch ''Night of the Living Dead''". Critics disliked the revised film, notably Harry Knowles of ''Ain't It Cool News'', who promised to permanently ban anyone from his publication who offered positive criticism of the film.

A collaborative animated project known as ''Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated'' was screened at several film festivals and was released onto DVD on July 27, 2010, by Wild Eye Releasing. This project aims to "reanimate" the 1968 film by replacing Romero's celluloid images with animation done in a wide variety of styles by artists from around the world, laid over the original audio from Romero's version. ''Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated'' premiered theatrically on October 10, 2009, in Ramsey, New Jersey at the Zombie Encounter and Film Festival. ''Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated'' was nominated in the category of Best Independent Production (film, documentary or short) for the 8th Annual Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards, but lost to ''American Scary'', a documentary on television horror movie hosts.

Starting in 2015, and working from the original camera negatives and audio track elements, a 4K digital restoration of ''Night of the Living Dead'' was undertaken by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and The Film Foundation. The fully restored version was shown at MoMA in November 2016 as part of ''To Save and Project: The 14th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation''. This same restoration was released on Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection on February 13, 2018, and on Ultra HD Blu-ray on October 4, 2022.

Related works

Romero's ''Dead'' films

''Night of the Living Dead'' is the first of six '' ... of the Dead'' films directed by George Romero. Following the 1968 film, Romero released '' Dawn of the Dead'', ''Day of the Dead'', ''Land of the Dead'', ''Diary of the Dead'' and ''Survival of the Dead''. Each film traces the evolution of the living dead epidemic in the United States and humanity's desperate attempts to cope with it. As in ''Night of the Living Dead'', Romero peppered the other films in the series with critiques specific to the periods in which they were released. Romero died with several "Dead" projects unfinished, including the posthumously completed novel, '' The Living Dead'', and the upcoming film, '' The Twilight of the Dead''.

''Return of the Living Dead'' series

The ''Return of the Living Dead'' series takes place in an alternate continuity where both the original film and the titular living dead exist. The series has a complicated relationship with Romero's ''Dead'' films. Co-writer John Russo wrote the novel ''Return of the Living Dead'' (1978) as a sequel to the original film and collaborated with ''Night'' alumni Russ Streiner and Rudy Ricci on a screenplay under the same title. In 1981, investment banker Tom Fox bought the rights to the story. Fox brought in Dan O'Bannon to direct and rewrite the script, changing nearly everything but the title. O'Bannon's ''The Return of the Living Dead'' would arrive in theaters in 1985 alongside ''Day of the Dead''. Romero and his associates attempted to block Fox from marketing his film as a sequel and demanded the name be changed. In a previous case, ''Dawn Associates v. Links'' (1978), they had prevented Illinois-based film distributor William Links from re-releasing an unrelated film under the title ''Return of the Living Dead''. Fox was forced to cease his advertising campaign but allowed to retain the title.

''Rise of the Living Dead''

George Cameron Romero, the son of director George A. Romero, wrote a prequel to his father's classic, under the working titles ''Origins'' and ''Rise of the Living Dead''. George Cameron Romero said that he created ''Rise of the Living Dead'' as an homage to his father's work, a glimpse into the political turmoil of the mid-to-late 1960s, and a bookend piece to his father's original story. Despite raising funds for the film on Indiegogo in 2014, the film has yet to go into production. In April 2021, ''Heavy Metal'' magazine began publishing a graphic novel adaptation of the story titled ''The Rise'' from Romero's script and with art by Diego Yapur.

Remakes and other related films

The first remake debuted in 1990. It was directed by special effects artist Tom Savini, who had planned to work on the 1968 film before being drafted into the Vietnam War, and, after the war, did work with Romero on the sequels. The remake was based on the original screenplay but included a revised plot that portrayed Barbra (Patricia Tallman) as a capable and active heroine. Tony Todd played the role of Ben. Film historian Barry Grant interprets the new Barbra as a reversal of the original film's portrayal of feminine passivity. He explores how the 1990 Barbara embodies—arguably masculine—virtuous professionalism, as depicted in the works of classic Hollywood director Howard Hawks, a major influence on Romero. Grant describes her as the film's only Hawksian professional. After changing from a mousy outfit that mirrors the original into the visually militaristic clothing she discovers in the farmhouse, Barbra is the lone character able to separate her emotions from the objective necessity to exterminate the living dead. According to Grant, Romero is able to offer one of the most important feminist outlooks in horror because the undead disrupt all traditional values including patriarchy.

The second remake was in 3-D and released in September 2006 under the title ''Night of the Living Dead 3D'', directed by Jeff Broadstreet. Unlike Savini's film, Broadstreet's project was not affiliated with Romero. Broadstreet's film was followed in 2012 by a prequel, '' Night of the Living Dead 3D: Re-Animation''.

On September 15, 2009, it was announced that Simon West was producing a 3D animated retelling of the original film, originally titled ''Night of the Living Dead: Origins 3D'' and later re-titled '' Night of the Living Dead: Darkest Dawn''. The movie is written and directed by Zebediah de Soto. The voice cast includes Tony Todd as Ben, Danielle Harris as Barbra, Joseph Pilato as Harry Cooper, Alona Tal as Helen Cooper, Bill Moseley as Johnny, Tom Sizemore as Chief McClellan and newcomers Erin Braswell as Judy and Michael Diskint as Tom.

Director Doug Schulze's 2011 film '' Mimesis: Night of the Living Dead'' relates the story of a group of horror film fans who become involved in a "real-life" version of the 1968 film.

Due to its public domain status, several independent producers have done remakes.
* '' Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection'' (2012): British filmmaker James Plumb directed this Wales-set remake.
* ''A Night of the Living Dead'' (2014): Shattered Images Films and Cullen Park Productions released a remake with new twists and characters, written and directed by Chad Zuver.
* ''Rebirth'' (formerly ''Night of the Living Dead: Rebirth'') (2021): Rising Pulse Productions' updated take on the classic film was released in June 2021 and brings to light present issues that impact modern society such as religious bigotry, homophobia and the influence of social media.
* ''Night of the Animated Dead'' (2021): Warner Bros. Home Entertainment announced in June 2021 that they were in production of an animated adaptation. Directed by Jason Axinn (''To Your Last Death'') and featuring the voices of Dulé Hill (Ben), Katharine Isabelle (Barbra), Josh Duhamel (Harry Cooper), James Roday Rodriguez (Tom), Katee Sackhoff (Judy), Will Sasso (Sheriff McClelland), Jimmi Simpson (Johnny) and Nancy Travis (Helen Cooper), it was released via video on demand on September 21, 2021.
* ''Night of the Living Dead II'': In June 2021, director Marcus Slabine debuted his secretly filmed sequel. The film stars Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander and Jarlath Conroy of ''Day of the Dead''.
* ''A Night of the Undead'' (2022) was released to select theaters in October 2022. In January 2023, the film saw wider release. Directed by Kenny Scott Guffey, Jake C. Young and stars Denny Kidd, Briana Phipps-Stotts, and Mason Johnson.
* ''Festival of the Living Dead'': In May 2023, the Soska sisters announced an in-universe followup taking place half a century after the events of the 1968 film, starring Ashley Moore and Camren Bicondova. It was set to be released on Tubi in fall 2023.

In other media

At the suggestion of Bill Hinzman (the actor who played the zombie that first attacks Barbra in the graveyard and kills her brother Johnny at the beginning of the original film), composers Todd Goodman and Stephen Catanzarite composed an opera ''Night of the Living Dead'' based on the film. The Microscopic Opera Company produced its world premiere, which was performed at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, in October 2013. The opera was awarded the American Prize for Theater Composition in 2014.

A play called ''Night of the Living Dead Live!'' was published in 2017 and has been performed in Toronto, Leeds and Auckland among others.

Legacy

Romero revolutionized the horror film genre with ''Night of the Living Dead''; according to Almar Haflidason of the BBC, the film represented "a new dawn in horror film-making". The film and its successors spawned countless imitators in cinema, television, and video gaming, which borrowed elements invented by Romero. ''Night of the Living Dead'' ushered in the splatter film subgenre. As one film historian points out, earlier horror films had mostly involved rubber masks, costumes, cardboard sets, and mysterious figures lurking in the shadows. They were set in locations far removed from rural and suburban America. Romero revealed the power behind exploitation and setting horror in ordinary, unexceptional locations and offered a template for making an effective film on a small budget. According to author Barry Keith Grant, the slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s such as John Carpenter's ''Halloween'' (1978), Sean S. Cunningham's ''Friday the 13th'' (1980), and Wes Craven's ''A Nightmare on Elm Street'' (1984) are indebted to Romero's use of gore and violence.

The film has also effectively redefined the "zombie". Before the film's release, the term "zombie" described a concept from Haitian folklore whereby a bokor could reanimate a corpse into an insensate slave. Early zombie films like '' White Zombie'' (1932) combined this with racial and postcolonial anxieties. Romero never used the word "zombie" in the 1968 film or its script—using instead, ''ghoul''—because he said that his flesh-eaters were something new. The term would be retroactively applied to ''Night'' after its cannibalistic undead became the dominant zombie concept in the United States, to such an extent that zombie became a byword for concepts that failed to "die". Compared to the vampires and Haitian zombies that served as inspiration, Romero's antagonists derive more horror from abjection, the disgust that arises from an inability to separate clean from corrupt. While the vampire myth offers a potential escape from mundane life, the zombie offers an infinite decay more abject than conventional death. Cultural critic Steven Shaviro has remarked that—unlike with other movie characters—audiences cannot identify with the zombies because there is no identity left within their bodies, and that they instead provide audiences a combination of disgust and fascinated attraction.

Critical analysis

Since its release, many critics and film historians have interpreted ''Night of the Living Dead'' as a subversive film that critiques 1960s American society, international Cold War politics, and domestic racism. Film historian Robin Wood organized "The American Nightmare"—a retrospective framing horror in terms of oppression and repression—for the 1979 Toronto International Film Festival. His essay from the program notes, "An Introduction to the American Horror Film", was highly influential, especially in film criticism where horror as a genre had not previously been considered a topic for serious analysis. Wood interprets notable horror films including ''Night'' through a psychoanalytic framework. He discusses how traits deemed unacceptable are repressed on the personal level or when not repressed, oppressed on the societal level. He identifies repressed taboos and othered groups as the psychological basis for horror monsters. Wood and later critics used this framework to discuss ''Night'' as a commentary on repressed sexuality, the marginalized groups of 1960s America, and the disruption to societal norms resulting from the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.

Elliot Stein of ''The Village Voice'' sees the film as an ardent critique of American involvement in the Vietnam War, arguing that it "was not set in Transylvania, but Pennsylvania – this was Middle America at war, and the zombie carnage seemed a grotesque echo of the conflict then raging in Vietnam." Film historian Sumiko Higashi concurs, arguing that ''Night of the Living Dead'' draws from the visual vocabulary the media used to report on the war, noting especially that the photographs of the napalm girl and the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém would be fresh in the minds of the film's creators and audience. She points to aspects of the Vietnam War paralleled in the film: grainy black-and-white newsreels, search and destroy operations, helicopters, and graphic carnage. In 1968, the news was still broadcast in black and white, and the graphic photographs that appear during the closing credits resemble the contemporary Vietnam War photojournalism.

Critics have compared the shooting of the film's black protagonist, to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. that occurred the same year the film was released. Stein explains, "In this first-ever subversive horror movie, the resourceful black hero survives the zombies only to be surprised by a redneck posse". In 2018, on the film's 50th anniversary, Mark Lager commented in '' CineAction'' that the "connection between Ben’s demise and the racial violence besetting the Civil Rights Movement was all too clear. ''Night of the Living Dead'' (a low budget horror film) had dissected American society in the 1960s more truthfully and unapologetically than any mainstream Hollywood movie."

Other prevalent themes included "the flaws inherent in the media, local and federal government agencies, and the entire mechanism of civil defense". Film historian Linda Badley explains that the film was so horrifying because the monsters were not creatures from outer space or some exotic environment, "They're us." In the 2009 documentary film ''Nightmares in Red, White and Blue'', the zombies in the film are compared to the "silent majority" of the U.S. in the late 1960s.

See also

* List of American films of 1968
* List of films in the public domain in the United States

Notes

Citations

References

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Further reading

* Becker, Matt. "A Point of Little Hope: Hippie Horror Films and the Politics of Ambivalence". ''The Velvet Light Trap'' (No. 57, Spring 2006): pp. 42–59.
* Carroll, Noël. "The Nature of Horror". ''The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism'' 46 (No. 1, Autumn 1987): pp. 51–59.
* Crane, Jonathan Lake. ''Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film''. Thousand Oaks, CA.: SAGE Publications, 1994. .
* Heffernan, Kevin. "Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing ''Night of the Living Dead'' (1968)". ''Cinema Journal'' 41 (No. 3, Spring 2002): pp. 59–77.
* Jancovich, Mark, Antonio Lazaro Reboll, Julian Stringer, and Andy Willis, eds. ''Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste''. Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 2003.
* Lowenstein, Adam. ''Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film''. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. .
* Maye, Harun. "Rewriting the Dead: The Tension between Nostalgia and Perversion in George A. Romero's ''Night of the Living Dead'' (1968)". In: ''Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century until the Present Day''. Ed. Isabella van Elferen. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007. .
* Moreman, Christopher M. "A Modern Meditation on Death: Identifying Buddhist Teachings in George A. Romero's ''Night of the Living Dead''". ''Contemporary Buddhism'' 9 (No. 2, 2008): pp. 151–165.
* Pharr, Mary. "Greek Gifts: Vision and Revision in Two Versions of ''Night of the Living Dead''". In ''Trajectories of the Fantastic''. Ed. Michael A. Morrison. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. .
* Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. ''Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing''. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997. .
* Russell, Jamie. ''Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema''. Surrey: Fab Press, 2005. .
* Shapiro, Jerome F. ''Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film''. London: Routledge, 2001. .
* Wood, Robin. ''Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan''. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. .
* Young, Lola. ''Fear of the Dark: 'Race', Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema''. London: Routledge, 1996. .

External links

''Night of the Living Dead'' essay
by Jim Trombetta on the National Film Registry website
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''Night of the Living Dead''
at the TCM Movie Database (''archived'')

''Night of the Living Dead: Mere Anarchy Is Loosed''
an essay by Stuart Klawans at the Criterion Collection
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''Night of the Living Dead'' (full film)
on Project Gutenberg
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Night of the Living Dead
1960s American films
1960s English-language films
1960s science fiction films
1968 directorial debut films
1968 films
1968 horror films
1968 independent films
African-American horror films
American black-and-white films
American exploitation films
American zombie films
American independent films
Articles containing video clips
Films about cannibalism
Films directed by George A. Romero
Films set in abandoned houses
Films set on farms
Films set in Pennsylvania
Films shot in Pittsburgh
Matricide in fiction
Night of the Living Dead (film series)
Obscenity controversies in film
Rating controversies in film
Siege films
United States National Film Registry films
Varèse Sarabande soundtracks