NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, psychological*

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George Romero's original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD deserves all the praise it's been given for its revolutionary effect on horror movies. I'm not talking so much about the gore factor. Gore had started to appear with greater frequency throughout the sixties, and had NIGHT never existed, horror-films of the seventies probably would have pursued trails of, well, entrails with no less enthusiasm. The uniqueness of Romero's creation is that gory goings-on are used with considerable intelligence, giving the viewer something that's less than a morality-play but more than an allegory.

There had been many films before NIGHT in which a motley crew of largely unrelated characters are forced to band together against a particular threat. Indeed, the entire "old dark house" subgenre usually depends on stranding an ensemble of characters in some remote mansion while a killer picks them off one by one. In place of an old mansion, Romero gives us a remote house in the country, and the adversary is not one killer, but a horde of "ghouls," dead bodies given life by outer space radiation. Though the creatures were later termed "zombies," the original term is more accurate, since the distinguishing characteristic of ghouls is that they unearth and devour dead bodies.

Does NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD have a message as such? I would say yes only in the sense that its message is no message: that the whole work is fucked up and perhaps beyond redemption, even though the ghoul-threat seems to be on the wane by picture's end. That's one reason I term the film an "irony," a literary mythos indicating that things are so corrupt that there's no real possibility for right action.

Most "trapped ensemble" films feature a hero who's basically right about everything the group needs to do to survive. But although the character of Ben (Duane Jones) attempts to fill the post of nascent leader, his efforts are as doomed as those of anyone else. There's also usually an opponent to the leader, a stumbling-block if not an outright villain. But although the Romero-Russo script makes Harry, one of the people fleeing the ghouls, into a loud, unlikable fellow, he's not seen as being unquestionably wrong regarding the strategy the group should pursue to ward off the attacking ghouls.

The nub of the disagreement between Harry and Ben is that Harry wants everyone in the house-- that is, Ben and three other survivors, in addition to Harry's wife and ghoul-bitten young daughter-- to take refuge in the cellar, which can be boarded securely and has no windows that the ghouls can penetrate. Ben wants to rely on boarding up all doors and windows on the ground floor so as to retain the possibility of getting away if they can find an opening. Though Ben is presented as the more reasonable of the two, neither's idea is without problems. Harry's own wife points out that if they hide in the cellar, they won't know whether or not rescue forces show up. Yet by film's end, everyone's agreed to follow Ben's strategy, and everyone but Ben ends up dead-- and he escapes only because he barricades himself in the cellar, as Harry wanted to do. (That said, if Harry and his wife had taken refuge in the cellar, they would've found themselves trapped with their ghoul-infected daughter, who does indeed end up taking her mother's life.)

On a related matter, though many critics have treated Ben as the voice of reason-- not least because he's portrayed by a black actor at a time when black actors didn't usually play the lead role-- he shares a lot of Harry's faults. Desperation moves Ben to insist on the group trying to reach a car outside the house and gassing it up. Thus he underestimates the group's ability to fend off the ghouls long enough to accomplish this-- with the result that two of the survivors die. Harry, who went along with the plan, fearfully shuts the door in Ben's face when Ben tries to get in. Ben bursts in, and after securing the door, gratuitously punches Harry a rather excessive four times, which suggests that he's taking out his frustrations on the older man. Later, just prior to the climax, Harry's resentment of the beating causes him to draw a rifle on Ben, though his overt motive is to keep Ben away while Harry and his wife flee to the cellar. But Harry isn't actively trying to kill Ben when Ben wrests away the gun and shoots Harry dead, despite the more pressing matter of numerous ghouls breaking into the house.

As mentioned earlier, the struggles of this little group of survivors becomes somewhat problematic as Romero shifts his focus to the retaliation of gun-toting humans, who find it relatively easy to shoot down the slow-moving ghouls. (This leads to one of the script's funniest lines: "They're dead-- they're all messed up.") Some critics have made much of the dismal ending, when Ben encounters some of the hunters and they shoot him dead before he can identify himself. While it's impossible for modern audiences to see this scene without thinking, "white guys pot-shooting black guy," Ben's death would have been the same in the script had he been played by a white actor. Indeed, Romero had commented that he had intended to use a white actor until Duane Jones gave the best audition.

I don't know if Romero's film, with its unsettling vision of a literally dog-eat-dog world, sparked something in the makers of seventies horror films, though it's not impossible to imagine NIGHT encouraging such works as THE HILLS HAVE EYES and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. But I know that I'd like to think it had such an effect, on some subconscious level at least.