Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Directed by George A. Romero
A ragtag group barricade themselves in an old Pennsylvania farmhouse to remain safe from a horde of flesh-eating ghouls ravaging the Northeast.
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8 films that influenced Night of the Living Dead
What critics say influenced Night of the Living Dead
NotLD is also a history of American nightmares: The opening graveyard scene recalls Frankenstein (1930) and the Universal tradition.
~ ~ ~ murder victims … partially devoured ~ ~ ~ Like Hitchcock';s Lifeboat a collection of various humans are thrown together, and now they must survive.
Like Hitchcock';s Lifeboat a collection of various humans are thrown together, and now they must survive.
After the 1950s had turned horror into something of a joke via teen-cheapie drive-in staples and Abbott and Costello comedies, the 1960s was a decade of reinvention, starting with Psycho and culminating with Repulsion and George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), three psychologically dense, visually inventive, and thematically rich explorations of what scares us most, which always amounts to some drastic collapse of what we consider “normal.”
As long as Britain's Hammer Film had been in existence, one of its biggest calling cards was a level of gruesome content beyond anything the quivering Yanks were likely to produce, and five years before Romero and company hit the scene, Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast was sold on the promise of literally nothing but the bloodiness of its death scenes, and is usually cited as the first movie to so centrally fixate on depicting gore.
Recent 1960s films which paved the way for NotLD - Psycho, making the locale for the horror contemporary America; The Birds (1963), providing a model for the NotLD situation; H.G. Lewis's Blood Feast (1963), the original splatter/gore movie; and Henk Hervey's Carnival of Souls (1962), providing a model for the ghoul make up - are alluded to.
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Recent 1960s films which paved the way for NotLD - Psycho, making the locale for the horror contemporary America; The Birds (1963), providing a model for the NotLD situation; H.G. Lewis's Blood Feast (1963), the original splatter/gore movie; and Henk Hervey's Carnival of Souls (1962), providing a model for the ghoul make up - are alluded to.
I had seen it once before, on a laserdisc after the 1989 theatrical re-release, and thought it an amusing cult film not far away from Night of the Living Dead (1968).
Made for peanuts by director Herk Harvey and scripter John Clifford, two employees of the Kansas-based Centron Corporation (producer of industrial films), this is one of those unique movies, like 1968's Night of the Living Dead and 1974's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, where the low budget, gritty footage and rough performances combine to create not only an unsettling atmosphere of dread but also a study of existential angst in the face of unimaginable horror.
Its minimalist merits shouldn't be oversold, however: Though visually suggestive of the eeriness of the everyday (it is almost self-evident that David Lynch saw this movie before making "Eraserhead" and "Blue Velvet"; George Romero has confessed to being inspired by it for "Night of the Living Dead"), the 85-minute film is quite slight in the story department.
A moody, atmospheric combination of Alfred Hitchcock, Roger Corman and "The Twilight Zone" by one-shot filmmaker Herk Harvey, "Carnival" in many ways actually more resembles a movie that came along some years later George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead."
But whatever Night of the Living Dead gets somewhat wrong is negligible in the face of how much it gets right: inventing a new kind of horror movie and a new kind of monster - though Romero never uses the word "zombie" and probably wasn't even in those terms, the film's success buried the old White Zombie -style zombie picture beyond recovery, and even a transitional effort like the 1966 Hammer production The Plague of the Zombies looks woefully old-fashioned in comparison.
Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) comes to mind.
(And what does the highway represent to the car-crazed United States of the 1950s more than the promise of self-determination and freedom?) Norman is the guy we like to patronize--the sheep we want to shepherd, the pigeon we want to free; more than most of the astonishing films that share this year, Psycho predicts the end of the decade's horrors like 1968's Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary's Baby (the one with a baby eating her mother, the other with a baby (Rosemary) incubating the literal Anti-Christ), or Bergman's Hour of the Wolf, which contains elements of both.
Recent 1960s films which paved the way for NotLD - Psycho, making the locale for the horror contemporary America; The Birds (1963), providing a model for the NotLD situation; H.G. Lewis's Blood Feast (1963), the original splatter/gore movie; and Henk Hervey's Carnival of Souls (1962), providing a model for the ghoul make up - are alluded to.
They eventually lead Melanie, Mitch, Mitch's sister and his mother to isolate themselves inside their house in scenes that would be repeated in many future horror movies, particularly zombie films such as Night of the Living Dead.