Night of the Living Dead (1968)

directed by George A. Romero
USA
95 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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A special bonus Halloween review.

I can't believe it's taken me so long to finally watch this all the way through, but in my defense, have you ever tried to watch it when you're falling asleep? It's actually an extremely boring movie. I apologize for starting off what's going to become a positive review by saying that the film in question is boring, but it's true, and it doesn't detract from its quality (in my opinion) so I don't mind saying it.

So Night of the Living Dead is obviously the movie that, for most people save for pedants who know a lot about horror prior to the 1960s, introduced the world to zombies (though it doesn't use the term itself). It is 50 years old now, but it really does hold up. It gets called groundbreaking so much that you might expect some of its reputation to be hyperbole, but it's not. Watching this in 1968 must have felt the way it felt to see The Witch in theaters for the first time: like seeing something entirely new that hadn't been done ever before. The genre film world in 1968 seems to have mostly still been dominated by the shadow of Hammer horror and by cheesy crowdpleasers that laid the drama on too heavily for their own good, but Night of the Living Dead eclipsed them all.

The second factor that made it groundbreaking is that it explicitly addresses themes of civil rights that a lot of mainstream media was content to ignore. Black characters were still somewhat hard to come by in otherwise "white" films, especially ones written as competent and capable, the way Duane Jones' character was in this film. The fact that he took in a white woman and worked with her to get her out of the shock of witnessing shambling corpses and eventually to defend the house they holed up in together must have been entirely unexpected to conservative audiences. But George A. Romero gave no quarter to racism in this film, all without even directly addressing it, creating something where the plague of dull-eyed, unfeeling living dead reflected upon the overflowing hatred coming up through the cracks of society at the time.

The best thing about all this is that it is actually scary. It's set entirely in one farmhouse over the course of a night, and even in internal shots with no windows visible you can feel the oppressiveness of the night outside. The black-and-white is haunting. It's just such a genuinely eerie atmosphere, genuinely traumatic and real where most zombie movies overdose on blood and guts too much to feel real. The radio and television broadcasts of the wider world addressing what has quickly become the universal problem of the reanimated dead speak truly of panic and uncertainty. Night of the Living Dead cut right to the chase about topics both social and genre-related, and it set an example that so very many zombie films continue to fail to meet even today.