Night of the Living Dead – Review

There are films that belong to a genre, and films that end up rewriting its rules. George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead belongs firmly to the second category.

Released in 1968, made on a limited budget and shot in black and white, the film transformed the living dead into something very different from the creatures associated with voodoo that had populated horror cinema in previous decades. From that point on, the zombie would become a reanimated corpse, hungry for human flesh and destined to move in increasingly large groups.

Romero laid the foundations of the modern zombie and, almost without realising it, gave birth to one of the longest-lasting strands of horror cinema.

A Simple Story, an Enormous Revolution

The story begins in a cemetery in Pennsylvania, where Barbara and her brother Johnny have come to place flowers on their father’s grave when they are attacked by a stranger. Johnny is killed during the struggle, while Barbara manages to escape and finds shelter in an isolated farmhouse.

There she meets Ben, a determined and pragmatic man who immediately understands the seriousness of the situation. Human-looking figures with uncertain movements and empty expressions begin gathering around the house, which soon becomes an improvised fortress.

Harry and Helen Cooper are also hiding in the basement with their daughter Karen, together with the young couple Tom and Judy, so the external threat soon becomes intertwined with the conflicts developing inside the group.

Romero starts from an essential premise and builds a siege around confined spaces, doors to barricade, windows to protect and fragments of information arriving through radio and television.

Simplicity becomes the story’s greatest strength.

Ben and a New Kind of Protagonist

Ben is one of the film’s most important elements: intelligent, clear-headed and practical, he acts while the others argue, looks for solutions and tries to organise the defence of the house. Duane Jones gives him authority without turning him into a conventional hero.

The presence of a Black protagonist in 1968 gave the film a political force that went beyond the production’s original intentions. Romero later explained that Jones had been chosen because he was considered the best actor available for the role, yet the American historical context inevitably gave many of the film’s images a significance that reached far beyond the story itself.

Ben spends the entire night fighting both the dead and the stubbornness of the people sharing the refuge with him, which gradually makes him the moral centre of the story, while the ending pushes that dimension towards even harsher consequences.

The Real Danger Is Inside the House

The threat posed by the living dead grows from scene to scene, but the heart of the film lies in the relationships between the survivors.

Ben and Harry Cooper represent two opposing ideas of survival: Ben wants to remain upstairs, control the entrances and preserve a possible escape route, while Harry sees the basement as the only safe place and tries to impose his authority.

Their conflict consumes energy, creates divisions and prevents the group from developing a shared strategy, giving shape to a mechanism that would later become central to much of zombie cinema: catastrophe creates the danger, human beings amplify it.

Decades before The Walking Dead, Romero had already identified one of the themes that would come to define the genre: when society collapses, fear, selfishness and the struggle for control can become as dangerous as the monsters surrounding the survivors.

The Living Dead Change Forever

Romero’s creatures seem familiar today because hundreds of films, television series, novels and video games have adopted that model, but in 1968 they represented something new.

They move slowly, driven by a primitive impulse and a hunger for human flesh. They can be stopped by destroying the brain or severely damaging the head, while their appearance soon takes on the scale of a collective crisis involving communities, authorities and the media.

Romero avoids constructing an elaborate mythology, so the explanations remain fragmentary and are delivered mainly through television reports and theories proposed by experts.

The origin of the threat matters less than its consequences, a choice that allows the film to concentrate on the survivors and on the transformation of a world that, within a matter of hours, ceases to follow familiar rules.

A Raw, Almost Documentary-Like Horror Film

The black-and-white photography, partly dictated by production constraints, ultimately becomes part of the film’s identity. The images have a rough quality reminiscent of television news and contemporary reportage, while the sequences showing armed groups moving through the countryside in search of the living dead often look as though they have been taken from a news documentary.

This quality strengthens the sense of reality, because Romero places horror within ordinary surroundings: a farmhouse, a road, a cemetery, a field. The familiar world remains recognisable even as everything that once provided a sense of security begins to collapse.

The violence also possesses a harshness that was unusual for the period: the sight of the dead eating human remains in front of the camera marks a clear break with much of earlier American horror. The monster loses any trace of Gothic elegance and becomes flesh, decomposition and hunger.

The Ending That Changes Everything

Ben’s fate remains one of the most powerful endings in horror history because, after surviving the night and the destruction of the group, he emerges from the basement just as the arrival of armed posses appears to signal the end of the nightmare.

A rifle shot kills him.

To the men hunting the dead, Ben becomes just another figure to be eliminated, and his body is dragged outside and thrown onto the pile with the other corpses.

Romero closes the film with a series of still images resembling news photographs, and the effect is devastating.

Salvation arrives when it has already lost all meaning, while the death of the character who had shown the greatest clarity of mind transforms the ending into something that goes far beyond a conventional horror conclusion.

Romero’s Legacy

The historical importance of Night of the Living Dead can be measured above all through what came after it.

Without this film, it would be difficult to imagine Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Zombi 2, The Return of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, The Walking Dead and a large part of contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction.

Romero defined a language that other filmmakers and writers would expand, modify and contaminate, because his living dead could become a social metaphor, a political instrument, a horror creature or simply a narrative engine. That flexibility allowed the zombie to move through different eras without losing its power.

Every generation would find something of its own fears in the living dead.

A Film That Remains Essential

More than half a century after its release, some technical aspects may inevitably reflect the period and the limited budget, yet the film’s strength lies elsewhere.

Romero builds a claustrophobic story, introduces a new kind of monster, depicts the collapse of human relationships and brings everything to a close with one of the bleakest endings in horror cinema.

Night of the Living Dead represents the point from which the contemporary zombie was born, because before 1968 the living dead belonged to a different imaginary. After Romero, it would become epidemic, apocalypse, social criticism and a symbol of the collapse of civilisation.

For anyone who loves zombie cinema, then, this film goes beyond the idea of a classic: it is the origin of almost everything that came after.