Night of the Living Dead

Romero's film invented the modern zombie and then spent ninety minutes arguing that the zombies are the least of the problem.

The dead are slow, stupid and individually trivial. What kills almost everybody in the farmhouse is the argument about the cellar: Ben wants the ground floor and the doors, Harry Cooper wants the basement and a locked door, and both of them are partly right. The film's structure is a committee failing under pressure, and the siege is the room the committee is in. Nothing in sixty years of imitation has improved on it.

It was also made by a crew of industrial-film people in western Pennsylvania who had never made a feature, which shows in the best way. The 35mm black and white is harsh and newsreel-flat, the sound is location-recorded and thin, the gore is butcher's offcuts and chocolate syrup, and the whole thing looks like footage rather than a film.

Duane Jones is the point

Casting a Black lead in 1968 — competent, calm, the only person in the house making sound decisions — was Romero's choice and he always maintained it was because Jones gave the best audition rather than a statement. It does not matter. The film was released months after Martin Luther King's assassination, it ends with a Black man shot by a white posse and dragged with meat hooks, and no amount of authorial shrugging makes that read as an accident.

The copyright accident that made it

The distributor removed the original title card and failed to put a notice on the replacement, so the film entered the public domain immediately. Romero made almost nothing from it and it was consequently shown everywhere, forever, free. The most influential horror film of its decade is influential partly because nobody could stop anyone screening it.

Where it creaks

The performances outside Jones and Karl Hardman are uneven, the radio and television exposition runs long, and the middle act repeats its arguments. None of it matters much.

For the satire the sequel turned this into, Dawn of the Dead; for the same siege logic with a virus, 28 Days Later.

The short answer: Ben survives the night. In the morning a sheriff's posse sweeps the countryside shooting the dead, sees him through a window, and shoots him in the head. His body is dragged out with meat hooks and thrown onto a bonfire with the others, in grainy still photographs over the end credits. Nobody in the posse knows or asks who he was.

Does anyone survive Night of the Living Dead?

Nobody from the farmhouse. Barbra is dragged away by her reanimated brother, the Coopers and Tom and Judy all die, Karen kills her own mother with a trowel, and Ben — the last one alive and the only competent person in the film — is shot by the rescuers. The survival rate is zero.

Why is Ben killed by the posse?

Because they do not look. The posse is not evil and not presented as such; they are casual, chatty, efficient men doing a job, and one of them sees movement in a window and fires. The horror of the ending is its ordinariness — no malice is required for it to happen, only a system that has stopped checking.

What do the end credit photographs mean?

Romero shot the finale as grainy black and white stills, which makes it look like press photography rather than fiction. In 1968 that resembled one specific thing: the news. The choice converts a horror ending into documentation, and it is why the sequence still lands harder than anything in the preceding ninety minutes.

What caused the dead to rise?

The film offers a radio report blaming radiation from a returning Venus probe, and treats it as rumour rather than fact. Romero never confirms a cause in this film or the sequels. The absence is deliberate — an explanation would make the film about a problem that could be solved.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Era bias 004 is near the floor — only 3 works score lower. Harsh 35mm black and white, location sound, and an ending shot as newsprint.

Pace 064 is on the shock side — 87 works are slower. The film opens with an attack in a cemetery and the siege never fully releases.

Viscera 052 is just above the median film — 59 works score lower. There is on-screen eating of human remains, which in 1968 was unprecedented, and it is still effective because it is lit flatly and held.

The threat at 055 sits almost exactly in the middle, which is the correct score for a film where the supernatural element is a hazard and the people are the antagonists.

Tone 022 is bleak — 61 works score lower. Everyone dies, the competent man is shot by his rescuers, and the film ends on photographs of his body being burned.

Reality anchor 018 is grounded — only 5 works score lower. One farmhouse, one radio, one night.

On jump scares: a handful, mostly hands through boarded windows.