Night of the Living Dead

1968's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is inarguably the template for zombie sagas, though that word is never once used in director/co-writer George A. Romero's movie.  It is also the best sort of horror - terrifying on the surface and in its many subterranean layers.  Layers that may not have originally been intended, but that's the beauty of art; it detaches from its progenitors and lives and breathes in fashions as numerous as those who experience it.  

An example - the protagonist was not originally intended to be portrayed by a black man.  That Duane Jones would be cast as Ben is largely why this film has so much social relevance.  NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD would be released during a particularly volatile year for the U.S., one which saw the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.  You can run with that idea, seeing this entire film as a parallel to the black experience, the plight of a minority figure who battles not only hordes of the undead but his Caucasian co-horts, ostensibly banding as a team to ward off re-animated corpses that mindlessly prowl and seek human flesh.  Why is this happening? The news reports that scientists believe the cause to be radiation from a damaged space probe that returned from Venus.

Romero doesn't play up the sci-fi angle.  Wisely.  That would likely have led to another drive-in programmer, quickly forgotten.  For all the relentless onscreen terror, which becomes almost unbearable in the last twenty minutes or so, this is a social drama to its core, right to its devastating, even breathtaking finale.  It succeeds as one despite  the amateurish acting of its cast, non-professionals who were friends and family of the filmmakers.  To me, the rough performances are as organic as the location shooting (in black and white) in rural Pennsylvania and the crude but highly disturbing gore effects.

We grow to care about these poor souls who find themselves barricaded in an old farmhouse.   Along with Ben is Barbra (Judith O'Dea), who lost her brother to an undead as they were visiting a relative's grave.  Harry (Karl Hardman), a stubborn, possibly racist man found to have retreated in the cellar with his wife Helen (Marilyn Eastman) and young daughter Karen (Kyra Schon), the latter bitten in the arm by one of the ghouls.  Also, young couple Tom (Keith Wayne) and Judy (Judith Ridley).  The scepter of doom looms large, and despite our feelings for each we root for them.  Consideration of the social pecking order and eventual battle for leadership among the group has invited lots of analysis, some far more thoughtful than I can provide.

But even a single viewing of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD chills a viewer enough both viscerally and intellectually.  This is a bona-fide, ground breaking classic, as unnerving as any horror film I've seen.   Stories of the undead would become more than plentiful in film and on television in the late twentieth and well into the twenty-first century.  Some existed mainly for the gross out effects.  A lot of them, actually.  Romero himself would continue his series a decade later with DAWN OF THE DEAD, which is a very eye-opening expansion of his original ideas, likewise inspired in part by Richard Matheson's I Am Legend.  For me, these first two films are all that are necessary in this genre.