Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968)

"They're coming to get you, Barbara!"

Night of the Living Dead is one of those classic monster movies that every self-respecting horror cinephile absolutely needs to watch.

Barbra (Judith O’Dea) and her brother Johnny visit their father’s grave at the worst possible time: right at the start of a zombie uprising. Only no-one knows what the hell is going on.

Johnny is killed and Barbra flees to a nearby farmhouse. She’s understandably panicked, confused, and distraught.

Fortunately, a stranger named Ben (Duane Jones) happens to arrive, also seeking refuge from the flesh-eating hoard. He keeps her safe and barricades the house to stop the living dead from getting inside.

But Ben and Barbra are not alone in the house. It turns out there’s already a group of survivors taking shelter in the basement. Conflict ensues as they all try to keep themselves safe.

Meanwhile, still no-one knows what’s going on.

Night of the Living Dead is in many ways an archetypical indie horror film. The genre has always been a popular one for low-budget movies, after all, but the film is also mostly set in a single location, and much of the conflict comes from the arguing humans trapped inside the house (though the monsters with an appetite for human flesh locked just outside remain a constant threat).

Another major source of horror in the film is just how little information there is on what’s actually happening. The radio offers some clues — this is a widespread incident, the dead are somehow coming back to life, they’ve got cannibalistic cravings — but overall the authorities are clueless. They can’t explain why this is happening or how to stop it.

For our protagonists, this means they’re up the river without a paddle. They’re stranded and no help is coming. It’s a pressure cooker of a film. As tensions rise within the house, the zombies outside grow more populous and get ever closer to breaking in.

Night of the Living Dead is an iconically famous horror film. Shot on a shoestring budget, it became one of the genre’s most widely-seen films (largely the result of a copyright error which prematurely caused the film to fall into the public domain), but it also codified and popularized the creatures we now call zombies. #themoreyouknow

The film refers to them as ghouls, but these reanimated humans that shuffle along in search of noggin noodles set the template for all zombie films that followed.

It’s somewhat shocking to realize that the film is not as old-fashioned as you perhaps misjudged it to be. Produced and released in the late sixties, it looks the way it does mostly for budgetary reasons, though as others have pointed out, this aesthetic provides the film with a sense of immediacy and the high-contrast black and white lends a heightened horror atmosphere.

There are some classic beats that in the years since have become tropes of the genre — but Night of the Living Dead did them first and did them very well. The kid in the basement scene is a classic horror movie moment.

Let's not forget either that the film has impressively progressive politics. The main hero of the film, after all, is the lone Black character. And the devastating final scene is one hell of a powerful statement.

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