To be born, to die, to be born again
and constantly progress, that is the Law.
Allan Kardec
A more palpable fear for the majority of Americans was that of social breakdown. The civil rights movements of the 1960s and the Vietnam war threatened to tear American society apart. Commentators who perceieved the shadow of social equality in the identity of the living dead lauded zombies as ‘blue collar heroes’. (Others would later denigrate the same as mindless consumers in Romero’s 1978 sequel, Dawn of the Dead.) Among the human characters in the film, the striking image of a black hero whose corpse is dragged out and burned by a group of white rural marksmen, seemed to affirm the validity of the film as a commentary on race. This has been lent support by the story that news of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death came through on the car radio as George Romero was driving to New York to sell Night of the Living Dead to a distribution company. To his credit, Romero has deftly evaded all critical objectification of his work. The casting of Duane Jones in the leading role is, he claims, owing to the simple fact that he gave the best audition. Therefore, no underlying message about the politics of colour is revealed.
On the other hand, there are fairly direct references within the film to events that were happening at the time. For example, Tom Savini, director of the 1990 re-make of the film, claims that the hooks used in the original Night of the Living Dead to carry dead bodies to the fire were similar to the wires used to lift up the bodies of dead Viet Cong guerrilla fighters to be thrown into graves. Such matters of detail do not actually reveal anything, however; they merely draw a connection between things that inspires thinking. Commentaries on Night of the Living Dead that attempt to situate it in a temporal framework become exhausted with the labour of trying to represent the film within that framework.
Perhaps the most powerful example of this is the idea that Night of the Living Dead is the expression of its creators’ growing hopelessness and despair at the failure of the various experiments in utopian living of the 1960s. This is a reading that has been underscored by Romero’s own comment that, ‘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.’ Like all good horror movies, Night of the Living Dead exists in a state of catastrophe, forcing the hand of every character to participate or be destroyed. The desparate choice often expresses the hope of the film. Night of the Living Dead may well have been motivated by nihilistic thoughts, but it is difficult to prove this considering that it has spawned three sequels, with the possibility of more to come.
The film does, however, put forward the idea that there are two forms of nihilism at work within its various characterizations: the active and the passive. The active form is expressed by the character of Ben, who appears to be motivated into making key decisions at precisely the moments in which hope has dwindled to nothing. The passive form is expressed in the despairing tone of several of the characters, particularly Barbara and Harry, who represent either inadequate or flawed behaviour in the midst of the crisis. Their decision-making powers are limited by their inability to acknowledge what is happening to their world.
Ben is unambiguously the hero of the film. He is always thinking of ways in which to help himself and the other survivors in the house. When he sees that one of the ‘ghouls’ has put out the lights of his car with a couple of rocks, he takes the hint and sets fire to another one to keep the others away from the house for a while. Furthermore, Ben’s nihilism is crucial to the understanding of the film. Even in this hopeless situation, or especially so, he shows that it is possible to make important decisions about his survival and that of others around him. Judith O’Dea’s performance as Barbara is sometimes criticized, but it must be understood that she has the most difficult part to play: that of a person who encounters the living dead for the first time and cannot accept what she has witnessed. When she recollects her experiences to Ben later in the film, it is as if she is remembering a fairy tale (‘And then, Johnny ran away.’) In contrast to Ben’s destructive fortitude, her confidence in the essence of things collapses into fantasy.
Every criticism of a work of art, whether knowingly or not, participates in a representation of that work. In a film as thoroughly dissected as Night of the Living Dead this has not failed to be the case, and it is hard to be objective about the claims that it is supposed to be making. But something might still be said for the uniqueness of the film in the context of a recently flourishing sub-genre of the horror movie. The Dead quadrilogy has helped to establish the ‘zombie’ film as a genre within the category of horror, in a similar way to the establishment of the noir within the category of the thriller during the postwar years in Hollywood. In their different ways it could be argued that Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead (1985), and Land of the Dead (2005) have all contributed to the themes and possibilities of the genre. To this list we could easily add several others that also have given something back to the zombie horror film: Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later are among the more celebrated examples, although connoisseurs deny the latter the status of a zombie film. Nevertheless, the work of referencing and establishing cinematic debts would no doubt add to the cultural wealth of Night of the Living Dead, firmly establishing it within the canon of seminal works of the American film industry.
No one is saying that it doesn’t deserve the accolades, but the film is not justified by critical success; for something continues to live in Night of the Living Dead. The modern zombie movie – stylish and preoccupied with standing out from the crowd – is a victim of orthodoxy in a way that Night of the Living Dead never could have been. The later Dead films, as well as other derivative works, tend toward the familiarization of their subject. In the service of a social meaning, the zombies in those films are given various human touches and mannerisms. The originality of Night of the Living Dead rests on its untroubled sense of finality.
The film is also unique as a work of horror cinema in that it never succumbs to the temptation to reveal what it is about. Not once in Night of the Living Dead is the term ‘zombie’ used. The identity of the human devourers is left unsolved except for some hints relating to extraterrestrial radiation. That enigmatic term – ‘living dead’ – dominates the title of the film as an irresolvable contradiction, a pathway that leads nowhere. George Romero claimed that he offered no ‘new thoughts, certainly no solutions, and not even any new questions, in my films’. In which case, we must assume that the questions at the heart of his films are timeless.
Diseases are new ways of life.
Georges Canguilhem
Within the scenario of Night of the Living Dead, a scenario that is played out across the three sequels, the living dead gain a numerical advantage over the living, so that the living finally become a terrified and self-enclosed minority in the land of the dead. How do the living dead achieve their numerical superiority when the living – as the more social beings – have the possibility of coming together to defeat them? First of all, this is because of the inability of the living to mobilise themselves against the dead (for reasons of power and self-interest). The breakdown of all forms of human social action is unfolded through the narratives of the sequels. Even from the first film, however, we gain an understanding that the dead are more single-minded in their pursuit of the living than the living are in pursuit of the dead. The reason for this is the insatiable hunger of the dead, which means that they will never become complacent. This distinguishes them decisively from the living, who are capable of rest.
Romero summarised the story of the film with the words: ‘A new society devouring the old.’ Perhaps meant to be taken in a literal sense, the closest human analogy to the living dead is not to be found in the largely symbolic and culturally diverse practice of cannibalism but in those terrible historical moments in which famine and starvation push people into consuming the rotting, meagre flesh of their recently deceased neighbours. For example, the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine, estimated to have taken the lives of between six and seven million people, is accompanied by stories of such cases. A historian of this event has described how ‘before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings.’ In Night of the Living Dead there are many images that portray similar experiences of desperation amid suffering. In one scene a woman eats an insect that she finds crawling along the bark of a tree. This is incredible, unimaginable hunger, which makes it remarkable that the dead are able to move at all. When they walk in the direction of their prey, one arm is almost always stretched out and away from the head, as if pleading for help. The expressions on the faces of the dead are extraordinary, some of them close to tears, others so pure of motive that they seem beatific. These are not ‘zombies’ in the now conventional sense of banal and brainless lifeforms, but quite the reverse: beings in whom extreme hunger has whittled their existence down to the barest essentials of movement and co-ordination. The living dead live a more intense existence than the living, stalking them to their places of sanctuary and waiting impatiently for an opening through which they may enter and feed upon them.
The famous feeding scene in the film is accompanied by a low drone. The dead eat heartily in a moment that is both appalling and fascinating; they eat with the ferocity of those who have been without food for a long time. The importance of the scene is that it shows, emphatically, that the dead are not intent on killing the living: they desire only to eat them, and in so doing they display the hurried pleasure which follows a long fast. Again, the impression received is of their having overcome a period of great suffering.
All of this suggests a logic and an imperative within the film that discovers unconventional means to portray the conditions of human life. In the scene in which Ben recollects his personal experience of the crisis with Barbara, he tells her of how, ‘A big gasoline truck came screaming down the road…I could just see that the truck was moving in a funny way…it went right through the guardrail [and] ripped through the gas station…I could still hear the man, screaming.’ Anyone who has seen Dawn of the Dead will know that George Romero’s enchantment of things that move ‘in a funny way’ also takes place in the sequels. Each time there is the uncanny feeling of objects moving in an out-of-balance way, as if controlled by a different kind of force with a different motional logic to that which is normally observable.
Given the emphasis on uncanny resemblances, we should not be surprised to discover that there is little to distinguish the living dead from the living. The dead can move their limbs, albeit in a more restricted way, and they also have desires – primarily hunger – around which all of their other needs cluster. The dead have no language and they have no need for it. Their aims are communicated through action alone. By contrast, the living actively seek communication: the radio in the farmhouse is decisive in bringing the Cooper family out of hiding in the cellar and up the stairs into the living room with the other survivors.
The living dead can also be killed; they are mortal. The fact that only a shot in the head will kill them means that they are individuated and capable, to a degree, of self control. There is no central power guiding their actions. Indeed, the dead are more independent of each other and therefore less social beings than their counterparts among the living. The living dead are very much alive but, precisely by dint of their similarity to the living, it is difficult to accept that they are not dead.
The troubling sense of the unknown in the living dead (they are inadequately described as ‘ghouls’ throughout the film) disrupts the familiarity of the living. As a horror film Night of the Living Dead is daunting not because the monsters are ‘us’, but rather because the identity of the monsters as ‘monsters’ gradually becomes confused. The living, when scratched or bitten by the living dead, become themselves the living dead. There is a moment of silence, or stillness, during their transformation that appears to us as death. But since it is only for a moment, and considering the nature of the transformation that follows, we cannot assume that it is a death and then a re-birth that has taken place. There is a calculated refusal in this film to mark boundaries and clarify differences.
Importantly, the media is portrayed as the main source of representations of the dead. The first radio broadcast that we hear in the film describes ‘an epidemic of mass murder being carried out by a mass of unidentified assailants.’ References are made to people walking around in a ‘trance’ and to ‘misshapen monsters’. The radio broadcast continues to describe a state of ‘mayhem’, which it asks people to help to control by staying in their homes. The radio and later the television, constantly in the background during some crucial minutes of the film in which the characters begin to resolve the situation in their minds, announces that the dead may be ‘creatures from outer space’. Later, the TV programme reports that ‘persons who have recently died’ are returning to life, therefore discounting the earlier reports of mass hysteria. An explorer satellite from Venus, carrying ‘mysterious radiation’, is speculated as the cause of the ‘mutations’. But scientists and military men are shown disagreeing about the causes, and the various representations finally offer no solutions to the question of what these beings are.
Night of the Living Dead therefore leaves us with no answers and indeed, no new questions. The living dead are a representation of something that remains difficult and therefore necessary to explain. Their condition suggests a pathology, at the heart of which lies a struggle to define life itself; that this opposition between life and death is never expressed in a harmonious way tells us something about the philosophy of the film.
REFERENCES
‘The American Nightmare’ (Minerva Pictures, 2003)
Matt Becker, ‘A Point of Little Hope: Hippie Horror Films and the Politics of Ambivalence’, The Velvet Light Trap 57 (Spring 2006): 42-59.
Paul Gagne, The Zombies that Ate Pittsburgh: the Films of George A Romero (1987)
Robert Newman, ‘The Haunting of 1968’, South Central Review 16, 4 (Winter 1999): 53-61.
http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/soviet.exhibit/famine.html
and constantly progress, that is the Law.
Allan Kardec
When Night of the Living Dead was first shown to the American public in 1968, it received some favourable reviews and did moderately well at the box office. During the following decade it continued to play in limited runs at selected cinemas across the country and in the wider world. The reputation of the film has dined out on its early success. It is as admired for the economy of its production as for the achievement of its intentions. Indeed, the film gives the effect at times of being composed entirely of props: American flags fluttering in the wind, hammers, doors, bits of wood, gas pumps, fruit jars for Molotov cocktails, bullets, keys; its materials appear to have been slammed together with dirt and nails. For a work that has been lauded for its subversion of life in 1960s America, the technical aspects of its production affirm the merits of the society that it is held to subvert. A less flexible country and period would most likely not have permitted the creation of Night of the Living Dead.
As with the composition of the film, the plot is also direct: a brother and sister arrive at a secluded cemetery somewhere in the countryside to lay a wreath beside the grave of their father. As they are doing so, a figure approaches and attacks them, killing the brother. The girl then runs in terror to a nearby farmhouse, where she meets some people who we discover to be survivors of an unexplained outbreak of killings. As night falls, more and more figures encircle the farmhouse in search of people to kill and, as we learn, to devour. A failed attempt to escape leaves only one remaining survivor by the following morning. He is mistakenly killed by marksmen sent out by the authorities to exterminate the human devourers.
Anyone that has seen the film will be able to recognise these basic elements, but they will also note that the plot summary does not begin to tell the story. The narrative power of Night of the Living Dead rests on its ability to sustain multiple interpretations. One of the earliest and most dominant of these was the notion that the film is an allegory about the fantasies of apocalypse that were projected on to the Cold War. The first radio broadcast listened to by the survivors in the farmhouse, gives a sense of the climate of paranoia that pervades the entire film. During the broadcast, a reporter states unequivocally that, ‘there seems to be a sudden, general explosion of mass homicide.’ Subsequent news stories about US satellites carrying radiation from outer space add to the fear of the great dark unknown that is supposed to have terrified American people during this era.
A more palpable fear for the majority of Americans was that of social breakdown. The civil rights movements of the 1960s and the Vietnam war threatened to tear American society apart. Commentators who perceieved the shadow of social equality in the identity of the living dead lauded zombies as ‘blue collar heroes’. (Others would later denigrate the same as mindless consumers in Romero’s 1978 sequel, Dawn of the Dead.) Among the human characters in the film, the striking image of a black hero whose corpse is dragged out and burned by a group of white rural marksmen, seemed to affirm the validity of the film as a commentary on race. This has been lent support by the story that news of Dr. Martin Luther King’s death came through on the car radio as George Romero was driving to New York to sell Night of the Living Dead to a distribution company. To his credit, Romero has deftly evaded all critical objectification of his work. The casting of Duane Jones in the leading role is, he claims, owing to the simple fact that he gave the best audition. Therefore, no underlying message about the politics of colour is revealed.
On the other hand, there are fairly direct references within the film to events that were happening at the time. For example, Tom Savini, director of the 1990 re-make of the film, claims that the hooks used in the original Night of the Living Dead to carry dead bodies to the fire were similar to the wires used to lift up the bodies of dead Viet Cong guerrilla fighters to be thrown into graves. Such matters of detail do not actually reveal anything, however; they merely draw a connection between things that inspires thinking. Commentaries on Night of the Living Dead that attempt to situate it in a temporal framework become exhausted with the labour of trying to represent the film within that framework.
Perhaps the most powerful example of this is the idea that Night of the Living Dead is the expression of its creators’ growing hopelessness and despair at the failure of the various experiments in utopian living of the 1960s. This is a reading that has been underscored by Romero’s own comment that, ‘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.’ Like all good horror movies, Night of the Living Dead exists in a state of catastrophe, forcing the hand of every character to participate or be destroyed. The desparate choice often expresses the hope of the film. Night of the Living Dead may well have been motivated by nihilistic thoughts, but it is difficult to prove this considering that it has spawned three sequels, with the possibility of more to come.
The film does, however, put forward the idea that there are two forms of nihilism at work within its various characterizations: the active and the passive. The active form is expressed by the character of Ben, who appears to be motivated into making key decisions at precisely the moments in which hope has dwindled to nothing. The passive form is expressed in the despairing tone of several of the characters, particularly Barbara and Harry, who represent either inadequate or flawed behaviour in the midst of the crisis. Their decision-making powers are limited by their inability to acknowledge what is happening to their world.
Ben is unambiguously the hero of the film. He is always thinking of ways in which to help himself and the other survivors in the house. When he sees that one of the ‘ghouls’ has put out the lights of his car with a couple of rocks, he takes the hint and sets fire to another one to keep the others away from the house for a while. Furthermore, Ben’s nihilism is crucial to the understanding of the film. Even in this hopeless situation, or especially so, he shows that it is possible to make important decisions about his survival and that of others around him. Judith O’Dea’s performance as Barbara is sometimes criticized, but it must be understood that she has the most difficult part to play: that of a person who encounters the living dead for the first time and cannot accept what she has witnessed. When she recollects her experiences to Ben later in the film, it is as if she is remembering a fairy tale (‘And then, Johnny ran away.’) In contrast to Ben’s destructive fortitude, her confidence in the essence of things collapses into fantasy.
Every criticism of a work of art, whether knowingly or not, participates in a representation of that work. In a film as thoroughly dissected as Night of the Living Dead this has not failed to be the case, and it is hard to be objective about the claims that it is supposed to be making. But something might still be said for the uniqueness of the film in the context of a recently flourishing sub-genre of the horror movie. The Dead quadrilogy has helped to establish the ‘zombie’ film as a genre within the category of horror, in a similar way to the establishment of the noir within the category of the thriller during the postwar years in Hollywood. In their different ways it could be argued that Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead (1985), and Land of the Dead (2005) have all contributed to the themes and possibilities of the genre. To this list we could easily add several others that also have given something back to the zombie horror film: Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later are among the more celebrated examples, although connoisseurs deny the latter the status of a zombie film. Nevertheless, the work of referencing and establishing cinematic debts would no doubt add to the cultural wealth of Night of the Living Dead, firmly establishing it within the canon of seminal works of the American film industry.
No one is saying that it doesn’t deserve the accolades, but the film is not justified by critical success; for something continues to live in Night of the Living Dead. The modern zombie movie – stylish and preoccupied with standing out from the crowd – is a victim of orthodoxy in a way that Night of the Living Dead never could have been. The later Dead films, as well as other derivative works, tend toward the familiarization of their subject. In the service of a social meaning, the zombies in those films are given various human touches and mannerisms. The originality of Night of the Living Dead rests on its untroubled sense of finality.
The film is also unique as a work of horror cinema in that it never succumbs to the temptation to reveal what it is about. Not once in Night of the Living Dead is the term ‘zombie’ used. The identity of the human devourers is left unsolved except for some hints relating to extraterrestrial radiation. That enigmatic term – ‘living dead’ – dominates the title of the film as an irresolvable contradiction, a pathway that leads nowhere. George Romero claimed that he offered no ‘new thoughts, certainly no solutions, and not even any new questions, in my films’. In which case, we must assume that the questions at the heart of his films are timeless.
Diseases are new ways of life.
Georges Canguilhem
Within the scenario of Night of the Living Dead, a scenario that is played out across the three sequels, the living dead gain a numerical advantage over the living, so that the living finally become a terrified and self-enclosed minority in the land of the dead. How do the living dead achieve their numerical superiority when the living – as the more social beings – have the possibility of coming together to defeat them? First of all, this is because of the inability of the living to mobilise themselves against the dead (for reasons of power and self-interest). The breakdown of all forms of human social action is unfolded through the narratives of the sequels. Even from the first film, however, we gain an understanding that the dead are more single-minded in their pursuit of the living than the living are in pursuit of the dead. The reason for this is the insatiable hunger of the dead, which means that they will never become complacent. This distinguishes them decisively from the living, who are capable of rest.
Romero summarised the story of the film with the words: ‘A new society devouring the old.’ Perhaps meant to be taken in a literal sense, the closest human analogy to the living dead is not to be found in the largely symbolic and culturally diverse practice of cannibalism but in those terrible historical moments in which famine and starvation push people into consuming the rotting, meagre flesh of their recently deceased neighbours. For example, the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine, estimated to have taken the lives of between six and seven million people, is accompanied by stories of such cases. A historian of this event has described how ‘before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings.’ In Night of the Living Dead there are many images that portray similar experiences of desperation amid suffering. In one scene a woman eats an insect that she finds crawling along the bark of a tree. This is incredible, unimaginable hunger, which makes it remarkable that the dead are able to move at all. When they walk in the direction of their prey, one arm is almost always stretched out and away from the head, as if pleading for help. The expressions on the faces of the dead are extraordinary, some of them close to tears, others so pure of motive that they seem beatific. These are not ‘zombies’ in the now conventional sense of banal and brainless lifeforms, but quite the reverse: beings in whom extreme hunger has whittled their existence down to the barest essentials of movement and co-ordination. The living dead live a more intense existence than the living, stalking them to their places of sanctuary and waiting impatiently for an opening through which they may enter and feed upon them.
The famous feeding scene in the film is accompanied by a low drone. The dead eat heartily in a moment that is both appalling and fascinating; they eat with the ferocity of those who have been without food for a long time. The importance of the scene is that it shows, emphatically, that the dead are not intent on killing the living: they desire only to eat them, and in so doing they display the hurried pleasure which follows a long fast. Again, the impression received is of their having overcome a period of great suffering.
All of this suggests a logic and an imperative within the film that discovers unconventional means to portray the conditions of human life. In the scene in which Ben recollects his personal experience of the crisis with Barbara, he tells her of how, ‘A big gasoline truck came screaming down the road…I could just see that the truck was moving in a funny way…it went right through the guardrail [and] ripped through the gas station…I could still hear the man, screaming.’ Anyone who has seen Dawn of the Dead will know that George Romero’s enchantment of things that move ‘in a funny way’ also takes place in the sequels. Each time there is the uncanny feeling of objects moving in an out-of-balance way, as if controlled by a different kind of force with a different motional logic to that which is normally observable.
Given the emphasis on uncanny resemblances, we should not be surprised to discover that there is little to distinguish the living dead from the living. The dead can move their limbs, albeit in a more restricted way, and they also have desires – primarily hunger – around which all of their other needs cluster. The dead have no language and they have no need for it. Their aims are communicated through action alone. By contrast, the living actively seek communication: the radio in the farmhouse is decisive in bringing the Cooper family out of hiding in the cellar and up the stairs into the living room with the other survivors.
The living dead can also be killed; they are mortal. The fact that only a shot in the head will kill them means that they are individuated and capable, to a degree, of self control. There is no central power guiding their actions. Indeed, the dead are more independent of each other and therefore less social beings than their counterparts among the living. The living dead are very much alive but, precisely by dint of their similarity to the living, it is difficult to accept that they are not dead.
The troubling sense of the unknown in the living dead (they are inadequately described as ‘ghouls’ throughout the film) disrupts the familiarity of the living. As a horror film Night of the Living Dead is daunting not because the monsters are ‘us’, but rather because the identity of the monsters as ‘monsters’ gradually becomes confused. The living, when scratched or bitten by the living dead, become themselves the living dead. There is a moment of silence, or stillness, during their transformation that appears to us as death. But since it is only for a moment, and considering the nature of the transformation that follows, we cannot assume that it is a death and then a re-birth that has taken place. There is a calculated refusal in this film to mark boundaries and clarify differences.
Importantly, the media is portrayed as the main source of representations of the dead. The first radio broadcast that we hear in the film describes ‘an epidemic of mass murder being carried out by a mass of unidentified assailants.’ References are made to people walking around in a ‘trance’ and to ‘misshapen monsters’. The radio broadcast continues to describe a state of ‘mayhem’, which it asks people to help to control by staying in their homes. The radio and later the television, constantly in the background during some crucial minutes of the film in which the characters begin to resolve the situation in their minds, announces that the dead may be ‘creatures from outer space’. Later, the TV programme reports that ‘persons who have recently died’ are returning to life, therefore discounting the earlier reports of mass hysteria. An explorer satellite from Venus, carrying ‘mysterious radiation’, is speculated as the cause of the ‘mutations’. But scientists and military men are shown disagreeing about the causes, and the various representations finally offer no solutions to the question of what these beings are.
Night of the Living Dead therefore leaves us with no answers and indeed, no new questions. The living dead are a representation of something that remains difficult and therefore necessary to explain. Their condition suggests a pathology, at the heart of which lies a struggle to define life itself; that this opposition between life and death is never expressed in a harmonious way tells us something about the philosophy of the film.
REFERENCES
‘The American Nightmare’ (Minerva Pictures, 2003)
Matt Becker, ‘A Point of Little Hope: Hippie Horror Films and the Politics of Ambivalence’, The Velvet Light Trap 57 (Spring 2006): 42-59.
Paul Gagne, The Zombies that Ate Pittsburgh: the Films of George A Romero (1987)
Robert Newman, ‘The Haunting of 1968’, South Central Review 16, 4 (Winter 1999): 53-61.
http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/soviet.exhibit/famine.html
