“Now get the hell down in the cellar. You can be the boss down there, but I’m the boss up here!”
The horror genre has always been my favorite. As any student of mine will tell you, my syllabus always includes a handful of scary movies. When you think about it, all the great film directors have tackled the genre. Hitchcock, Polanski, Kubrick, Bigelow among others. The great ones forego gore for psychological explorations and suspense – and/or exploit the circumstances for social and moral commentary. I love the fact that most of them do not believe in the supernatural, but tap into our fears and our fragile psyche. George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) remains a terrifying experience. The macabre and gruesome aspects of the film don’t seem as a big deal for we have grown accustomed to zombie movies and the idea of the dead coming back and feeding on human flesh. What hasn’t diminished with time is its social and political commentary. As a metaphor for the deterioration of society – the loss of civility and values. On a recent visit, I was stunned by all the different ideas it raises. In particular how it exposes that the evil is not within the ghouls that relentlessly attack, but in the divisiveness and ugly behavior of the living – and the way they turn against each other – in particular against the hero – who happens to be an African American. The film was made and released when it was rare for a black man to be seen as the main protagonist.
The film is so well made. Because of budgetary constrictions, Romero’s story takes place in one location – an isolated farm in Pennsylvania where the characters take shelter. The first one to arrive is Barbara – who was with her brother at a cemetery when they were viciously attacked by a stranger. She finds the house abandoned and a half-eaten body up the stairs. The camera zeroes in on her shock, and she plummets to the front door where she encounters a black man – Ben. The camera registers similar astonishment. Ben takes control over the situation – he goes about bordering up the windows and doors. Barbara gets hysterical and violently slaps Ben. He slaps her back.
Because of the single location, Romero is able to exploit the off-frame areas of the viewing experience. What is behind the confines of the house – what we cannot see – what we can only hear becomes more threatening that what is actually visible. There’s a door that leads to the basement. We soon find out that there are five people hiding below, who all happen to be white. They question Ben’s authority and his rationale that being holed up in the cellar is not the smartest idea. “We’re not going to take that kind of chance when we’ve got a safe place,” says Harry. “And you’re telling us we gotta risk our lives just because somebody might need help, huh? “
Shot in black and white, the lighting and composition of the first half of the film is terrific. As Barbara first walks in the place there’s usage of low-key lighting (or chiaroscuro) emphasizing the darkness. The camera is primarily in an oblique angle – and Romero emphasizes deep jagged shadows on every frame – that further confine the characters. It’s very expressive – and symbolic – and yes, creepy.
The radio gives us information and perspective on what is happening in the outside world. “The only advice our reporters have been able to get from official sources is for private citizens to stay in their homes behind closed doors,” says the broadcast ominously. Later we get a TV transmission that says that there’s a mysterious high-level radiation involving the explosion of a satellite on its way to Venus. A scientist says there’s a definite connection between the dead rising and the radiation. In an exchange that eerily reminded me of our embattled Dr. Fauci, the military tells the scientist to keep quiet. They control the narrative.
The ghouls overtake the farm. There’s a shocking moment where a young daughter who has transformed – goes after her father and mother.
Keep in mind that the film was released in October 1968. The country was in an upheaval with the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. The murder of Martin Luther Jr. was fresh on everybody’s minds. During the credits, there are photographs of a posse of white men with guns and hooks on their hands. It conveys a deeper horror than anything preternatural.
Barbara: “What’s happening?”
Ben: “Everything’s happened.”
Love,
Roger
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Written by George Romero and John Russo
Directed by George Romero
Starring Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Marilyn Eastman, Karl Hardman, Judith Ridley and Keith Wayne
96 minutes
Director George Romero on Bringing “Night of the Living Dead” to the Screen
“We had $6,000 and a loose idea based on a short story I’d written which was in fact an allegorical thing. We decided to take that and turn it into a real blood and guts film, and that’s how it started. The six originally in our group came from different fields. One was an attorney because we needed to incorporate. Two of the people were from a recording studio in town because at that time we didn’t have our own as we now do downstairs. One of the investors later on was a butcher, and that’s where we got the intestines. He brought them out to the set and we said, “That’s great.” A friend and I began writing a script, but we didn’t have it nearly completed when we started shooting. We cast around for people. That was kind of a random experience too: there wasn’t much to draw on in Pittsburgh except a friend of ours, Duane Jones, who is the black actor who plays Ben in the picture. We had no preconceived notion as to the role being a black role, Duane came in, he looked right, he read well, so we used him. We never took any further note of it. It’s not mentioned in the script at all, although I know we’re getting a lot of press comment over that fact. Somebody, I forget who, mentioned that when he dies you can hear the strain of “Old Man River” on the soundtrack, but it’s just not there at all. The blond girl, Barbara, is a Pittsburgh girl who was on the West Coast and happened to come back into town about then, so we used her. And the younger girl was a secretary here and her boyfriend was a guy who was doing nightclub gigs so we used him too. Harry Cooper and his wife were the two investors from the recording studio, and their little girl is Harry’s girl in real life. So that was the group. Then for the ghouls: whenever we needed people, we just recruited people. It was mostly our clients and friends. We just said, “C’mon out, we’ll have a ball.” And we always had kegs of beer and a lot of food and got as many as we needed every time [chuckles remembering]. We wound up paying them all SAG wages as the money came in later, but nobody was paid on the spot.
No one knew whether the film would be distributed or what; but once we started we had to keep rolling because we had commercials to shoot, so we started before everything was complete. We shot in several lumps of time, and I had an idea where we were going with the thing. I had in the back of my mind the whole time the old DC comic books-you know, ‘Tales From the Crypt’ and stuff like that. I used to be a big comic fan, although I don’t think I am now except maybe in a nostalgic way. Most of the lines were written, some the night before. We’d sit around knowing the direction the thing had to go and write dialogue. Some of it, out of frustration, we just went flat out with, doing the obvious like, “We may not enjoy living together, but dying together won’t solve anything.”…The story was an allegory written to draw a parallel between what people are becoming and the idea that people are operating on many levels of insanity that are only clear to themselves. But we didn’t really try to write that stuff in and we didn’t shoot it for the pat explanations or anything. We shot it just the way things would be if the dead returned to life. For instance, we let the news commentator write his own copy. We gave him the germ of the idea and he was a newsman and wrote his copy; and the sheriff and the posse, we didn’t try to gloss them up at all-we just shot a bunch of people. We gave them guns and they kind of just went ahead. The sheriff wasn’t actually a sheriff or an actor. He was just a mill hand. Just a beautiful guy. One of those guys you can put in front of a camera or in front of ten thousand people and he’ll just be himself.” (variety.com)
Romero on Filming “Night of The Living Dead”
We shot entirely in 35mm. We used two Arriflex thirty-fives, one in a blimp. We used all quartz lights. It was all the stuff we had. We used one Nagra for sound, with one microphone, although we used lavalieres in a couple of sequences. Although we used two cameras we never had both rolling simultaneously on any of the sync sound foot-age. We had the blimp housing for one camera, and all the sound is the location sound. We didn’t dub anything, except for one or two words during the escape sequence because we were shooting wild. But the rest of it was the actual sound in the house, and in most cases you can hear it. I mean, it has kind of a hollow sound, but I thought it was pretty successful for being purely location stuff, and some of it was pretty difficult to stage. The make-up was done by Harry and Helen Cooper, the people that played Harry and Helen in the film, that is. We didn’t really need very much. None of the effects make-up was very heavy. For costuming we just went around and picked things out-old clothes lying in people’s attics, etc.” (variety.com)
Casting Duane Jones as Ben
Before filming could begin, Image Ten looked to cast the core characters caught up in the zombie menace. Most crucial was the lead, Ben, who would have to carry much of the movie on his shoulders. As originally written, Ben was a resourceful but rough and crude-talking trucker, a role initially envisioned for Rudy Ricci. Those plans changed when a 31-year-old African-American actor named Duane Jones competed for the part. “A mutual friend of George’s and mine was a woman by the name of Betty Ellen Haughey,” producer Russ Streiner relates. “She grew up in Pittsburgh, but at that time she was living in New York and she knew of Duane Jones. He’d started off in a suburb just outside of Pittsburgh, yet he was off in New York making a living as a teacher and an actor. Duane happened to be in Pittsburgh visiting his family, and we auditioned him. And immediately everyone, including Rudy Ricci, said, ‘Hey, this is the guy that should be Ben.’” Director George Romero agrees with that recollection. “Duane Jones was the best actor we met to play Ben. If there was a film with a black actor in it, it usually had a racial theme, like ‘The Defiant Ones.’ Consciously I resisted writing new dialogue ‘cause he happens to be black. We just shot the script. Perhaps ‘Night of the Living Dead’ is the first film to have a black man playing the lead role regardless of, rather than because of, his race.”
(Contrary to that opinion, oft-expressed by Romero and others, Jones was not the first black actor to be cast in a non-ethnic-specific starring role; Sidney Poitier earned that distinction in 1965 playing a reporter in James B. Harris’ nuclear sub suspenser “The Bedford Incident” and, the following year, portraying an ex-military man turned horse-breaker in Ralph Nelson’s western “Duel at Diablo,” doubly ironic given “Duel’s” racial theme, albeit one centering on Native Americans.) At that, black actors were no strangers to Latent Image ads. “In looking at some of those old [mid-‘60s] commercials,” says co-writer John Russo, “we always had black actors and we always gave a lot of work to people who had a tough time getting it. That was our nature, so we didn’t blink at casting a black actor in that role.” The slim, handsome Jones was himself was quite familiar with aspects of the ad world, having earlier posed as an Ebony magazine model in layouts selling everything from liquor to Listerine. While still earthy and capable, Ben acquired an at once intense and understated quality that Jones brought to the role. According to the late Karl Hardman: “His [Ben’s] dialogue was that of a lower class/uneducated person. Duane Jones was a very well-educated man. He was fluent in a number of languages.” A B.A. graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, Jones had dabbled in writing, painting and music, studied in Norway and Paris, and was completing an M.A. in Communications at NYU between “Night” shoots. “Duane simply refused to do the role as it was written. As I recall, I believe that Duane himself upgraded his own dialogue to reflect how he felt the character should present himself.” (thewrap.com)
About Director and Co-Writer George Romero
George A. Romero was born on February 4, 1940, in Bronx, New York…After graduating in 1960 from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, Romero filmed short segments for Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, a popular children’s television series produced in Pittsburgh. In 1968 Romero and several friends pooled their money to finance Romero’s first feature, the low-budget zombie film “Night of the Living Dead.” The movie was not a commercial success at the time of its release, but it was eventually recognized as a horror masterpiece, and it served as the foundation for a unique mythos. The Romero zombie was unrelated to the Vodou zombie that had influenced most zombie lore until that point. Instead, it was a shambling corpse that fed upon the living, and it became a mainstay in film and fiction. Romero co-wrote (with John Russo) the screenplay for “Night of the Living Dead,” and he went on to write and direct several related films, starting with the popular “Dawn of the Dead” (1978) and continuing with “Day of the Dead” (1985), “Land of the Dead” (2005), “Diary of the Dead” (2007), and “Survival of the Dead” (2009). The Dead series was rife with social commentary, with allusions to the Cold War, consumerism, and class conflict. In addition to zombies, Romero’s films have explored other horror movie staples, including witchcraft in “Hungry Wives” (1972; re-released as “Season of the Witch”), biological weapons run amok in “The Crazies” (1973); vampires in “Martin” (1977), and animals wreaking havoc in “Monkey Shines” (1988), a film about a homicidal helper monkey. In 1981 Romero began a long-term collaboration with noted American horror novelist Stephen King, with King making a brief onscreen appearance in Romero’s film “Knightriders.” The following year Romero directed King’s screenplay for “Creepshow” (1982). They worked together again on “Creepshow 2” (1987), with Romero writing the screenplay based on King’s stories. Romero was executive producer of the television series “Tales from the Darkside” (1984–88), and King and Romero collaborated as writers on the movie of the same name, released in 1990. The two continued their professional relationship when Romero directed and wrote the film adaptation of King’s novel “The Dark Half” (1993). (britannica.com)