Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero (1968)
12/18/2008
Significance Zombies Created By Means Other than the Supernatural The Ubiquity of Death Cold War Claustrophobia Gore Consumer Culture What Does It Mean to Be Human? The Apocalypse
Significance: Romero's low budget 1968 film is arguably one of the greatest influences on all subsequent zombie narratives. William Seabrook's 1929 travelogue The Magic Island is credited with putting the idea of the zombie into Western consciousness, but the zombie represented in Seabrook's book is the product of supernatural/superstition, deriving from a far away, exotic, Otherized place. Romero transforms the idea of the zombie, domesticating it. Zombies aren't the dead brought back to life by black magic in order to serve as dead labor, but instead, they are the reanimated newly dead who return from the grave to feast upon the living. He changes the focus of the creature’s horror from its resonances with slavery and its lack of free will to its very existence as something the opposite of human—a dead thing that cannot be erased from the consciousness since it will not completely die. The visibly decomposing bodies of Romero’s undead add yet another dimension to the meaning of the zombie: the horrors of death itself. Romero's zombies are particularly terrifying to look at since they are visibly decaying. However, Romero is not the first person to represent the zombie in a visual medium as visibly decaying. Zombies were also represented in this way in horror comics between the 1930s-1950s before the industry, under pressure from congress, created the Comics Code Authority which heavily censored most horror comics and effectively drove the zombie from the pages of most of these publications until the seventies.
Zombies Created By Means Other than the Supernatural: Typical of the zombie in previous science fiction films, Romero’s undead are created by a vague technology run amok, something about which the layperson knows so little that it too seems to have supernatural capabilities. In Night, it is not known with any certainty what has animated the recently deceased, but the precipitating cause is thought to be radiation leaking to Earth from a satellite. The dangers of radiation are an old familiar theme of science fiction films of the 1950s, causing men to shrink and women to grow into towering colossuses.
The Ubiquity of Death: One of the central horrors of Night is the ubiquity of death itself. The film begins with Johnny and Barbara, a brother and sister quarrelling during a visit to their father’s remotely located grave: Johnny bitterly laments their mother’s lack of consideration in burying their father in such an inconvenient location, thereby burdening her grown children with a lengthy an annual trip to place flowers on the final resting place of a man whose face Johnny can't even recall. Barbara chastises Johnny for his filial disrespect, which causes her brother to launch into an irreverent parody of all the dead interred within the cemetery, and of the events to come in the film. Johnny attempts to frighten his sister with his best Boris Karloff imitation, telling her in a deep voice that “they’re coming to get you, Barbara.” Perhaps it is his irreverence that raises the dead, who have now indeed come to get Johnny and Barbara, and anyone else with a pulse. His mock prophecy is fulfilled when one of the undead shambles up to the duo, killing Johnny. Night establishes the zombie as a fearsome creature because it is no longer living, with much screen time devoted to the decaying countenances of the undead.
Cold War Claustrophobia: After Johnny is killed brutally before Barbara’s eyes, she escapes to a local farmhouse where she tries to survive the night with a group of strangers. Soon all fight among themselves about the best place in the house for survival: the cellar or the attic. The discussion is reminiscent of the very real debate in Cold War America of the fifties and early sixties about how, and where, to hide for the few months thought necessary to survive a nuclear war, and it also introduces the theme of claustrophobic enclosure that runs through the Dead series. Of course, this infighting leads to the group’s doom. The end result of the Cold War is also visible in earlier texts such as Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, as well as later films such as 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. In Matheson's novella, Robert Neville struggles to keep from being taken over by the virus that has besieged the rest of the world in much the same way that the United States struggled to keep the rest of the world from being influenced by Communism. The 28 series explores the impossibility of containment, something that Fulci's film Zombie also explores.
Gore: Romero’s Dead series also establishes the zombie movie as a genre full of gore, something that will later particularly influence Italian filmmakers. Night of the Living Dead was released internationally under the title Zombi, which inspired Italian director Lucio Fulci’s 1979 graphic film Zombi II. Night shows the zombie consuming living flesh in graphic detail that was fairly disturbing, even given that the film was shot in black and white and its special effects were particularly low budget. Later installments in the series continue the tradition of extreme gore when zombies consume the living by tearing flesh and bone asunder amid jets of scarlet blood. A good deal of screen time is lavished on showing the red-mouthed leers of zombies with bad teeth, consuming bits of human flesh as if it were so much uncooked barbeque.
Consumer Culture: Romero’s zombies also critique consumer culture in that the undead are animated by a monomaniacal drive for mindless consumption. The spectacle of the zombie feasting without cessation on human flesh is a central image in all of his films. This idea of mindless consumption is particularly underscored in the second installment in the series. Dawn of the Dead (1978) is set in that cathedral of the modern world–the shopping mall–where spiritual hunger can be temporarily assuaged by the purchase of just the right accessories.
What Does It Mean to Be Human?: Still another innovation of Romero’s zombies is the establishment of “an indistinct boundary between monster and victim” (Gagne 26) causing the viewer to question the monster’s essential difference from humans. This theme is further explored in subsequent entries in the series. Dawn of the Dead ponders both human and zombie identity by juxtapositioning flesh eaters outside of the mall with those within whose habits of consumption of goods are so ingrained that they continue shopping in the face of annihilation.
The third in the series, Day of the Dead (1985), expands this analysis of what it means to be human. An undisclosed amount of time has passed since the conclusion of Dawn. It is now clear that the animation of the newly dead is not a localized phenomenon, but rather, a world-wide catastrophe. Because the undead now greatly outnumber the living, exterminating them is no longer a feasible solution for human survival. Thus, three research scientists are sheltering with military personnel in a Florida nuclear silo, engaged in experiments to reprogram zombies into complete docility much the same way parents trick their children into comporting themselves as civilized adults. And indeed the zombies do seem capable of learning. Dr. Logan, the head scientist, manages to teach the zombie Bub to suppress his desire to make his human captors into dinner and instead take pleasure in reading (or at least flipping through the pages of a book) and listening to classical music.
But the military personnel responsible for safeguarding everyone fail to see the merit in the experiments, and when several of their number die while procuring fresh zombies for science, Captain Rhodes, their sadistic commander, rebels. The soldiers themselves are mindless, valuing sex, alcohol and marijuana over all else, and are indeed difficult to tell apart from the actual zombies, particularly since they too have an insatiable blood lust. Dr. Logan attempts to convince the soldiers that they must be civil since civility allows for communication, and if civility breaks down, then civilization itself deteriorates. But his pleas fall upon deaf ears. Rhodes is not impressed with Logan’s teachable zombie Bub. Because the human Bub was in the military, he automatically salutes Rhodes, recognizing him as a superior officer. But when Rhodes flatly refuses to return the salute to what sees as subhuman, the captain’s lack of civility subsequently enrages Bub. Meanwhile, Dr. Logan embarks on an impromptu experiment—he empties a gun and gives it to Bub to see what he would do. Bub points the gun at Rhodes, who responds by pointing his own sidearm, further illustrating that there really isn’t that much difference between the two.
However, for all of Logan’s claims about how civility is what separates humans from other lower life forms, he is not a very good advertisement for civilization. Dr. Logan’s gory experiments on zombies have earned him the nickname of Dr. Frankenstein: his lab is full of vivisected undead, and he frequently appears among his colleagues without bothering to change his soiled clothing or even to wash the blood from his hands. If. Dr. Logan represents civilization, then it comes at a very terrible price to humans.
The Apocalypse: In Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth, Kim Paffenroth views Romero's entire Dead series as a vision of a post-rapture world, where the dead have been raised, and the living remaining on earth are those left behind and not taken into heaven. Indeed, the zombie apocalypse in Romero's oeuvre is a world where all human ties are broken. Family ties no longer mean anything, particularly from what we can see in Night. Moments before he becomes aware of the apocalypse, Johnny is making light of family ties and rituals of mourning, and later, in the farmhouse, the Coopers' rocky marriage is being dealt a death blow by the pressures of surviving the zombie attack. The only people who seem to have any ties to one another are the unmarried couple, Tom and Judy, and Ben and Barbara.