BONUS BLOG -- 1968: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

What’s it about?

While on a visit to their father’s grave, a brother and sister are suddenly attacked by a lurching but persistent assailant. The sister manages to escape, but after encountering several other seemingly crazed people, she seeks refuge in an empty farmhouse. Deep in shock and unable to defend herself, she’s saved by the arrival of a survival-minded stranger who immediately starts boarding up the house while more of the monsters congregate in the yard outside.

After the house is secured, the basement door opens and reveals two more couples and a child who have been hiding down there the entire time. Disagreements about the best way to survive the situation lead to several heated arguments among the men. Meanwhile, a steady trickle of information from the radio and television paint an increasingly grim picture of what is happening. Eventually it becomes clear that the recently deceased are returning to life with the apparently single-minded purpose of eating the living. When the location of a local disaster shelter is revealed, the people must decide whether to make a break for it through the hordes of living dead, or to wait out the attack and hope their defenses hold.




Is it any good?

I’ve seen NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD a couple times before, but this was the first time I noticed how much like a western it really is. Replace the living dead with cowboys or Apaches, and you’ve got a new version of STAGECOACH or RIO BRAVO. Westerns have always been about tiny flickering flames of civilization struggling to stay alight in vast dark wildernesses. And they’ve always been about stubborn, bull-headed people unwilling to compromise, even when it threatens their lives. Those are exactly two of the things that NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is about too.

The two original people in the house -- the sister, Barbra, and the stranger, Ben -- are more or less the main characters of the movie. The other folks who show up later mostly serve to add some uncertainty and danger to what might happen inside the house to complement the obvious dangers outside. But Barbra and Ben aren’t perfect heroes themselves. Barbra spends most of the movie completely useless -- sitting around in shock and probably guilt after watching her brother’s death. Ben alternates between trying to slap some sense back into her (another very western touch) and defending her from the criticism of the newcomers. Besides thinking nothing of slapping Barbra, Ben is also a quick-tempered hothead who feels entitled to be “the boss” because he’s the one who did most of the work securing the house. Eventually his desire for control leads him even as far as murder. And ironically, it’s the very survival plan that he was so strenuously rejecting (hiding in the cellar) that ends up saving his life from the living dead.

Now after having done my best to make in the interpersonal dynamics sound as interesting as possible, I should admit that in practice they are probably the least interesting part of the movie. The characters are all one-dimensional and they are sometimes given to irrational behavior. Most of the actors are also not nearly good enough to make even flat characters convincing, but what saves NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is that as long as something is happening, it’s always interesting -- and something is almost always happening.




For the first half hour or so, that something is Ben boarding up the house. The movie approaches this with admirable realism -- whatever little budget the movie had must have been largely spent in getting a house and furnishings that could be convincingly ripped apart. But even more interesting is what happens after the defenses are in place. First a radio and then a television set are discovered, and until the power goes out late in the movie one or the other is practically always playing in the background. Those broadcasts turn out to be the most relentlessly gripping part of the movie. Part of this is just that it’s easy to identify with frightened people trying to glean information from TV news broadcasts after a disaster, and part of it is the masterful way it’s handled. It’s telling that during the frequent moments when characters argue or talk over the broadcasts, I found myself always straining to tune out the people so I could hear what the TV was saying.

Just as the television is something that we all like to despise until a disaster reminds us how necessary it is, so too does the end of the movie make a similar case for rednecks and hicks. When the eastern third of the United States is overrun by flesh-eating living dead who can only be stopped by a bullet to the brain, who’s finally able to clean up the mess? Why, it’s the gun-loving, simple-living country folk who think nothing of some casual killing if it’s for a good cause. Honestly, I think this part of the movie gives me more of a surge of pride and appreciation than George Romero intended. After all, the very ending of the movie is bleak and depressing (and its all the fault of the rednecks). But ultimately I suppose I figure they’re no worse than our heroes in the house -- especially Ben who, when the chips were down, killed another human so he could keep being “the boss”. In any event, the continued possibility of zombie apocalypse is reason enough for me to agree that the right to bear arms is worth defending.




Note: I know I promised to do seven entries this week, but sadly I am not going to be able to get to anymore. So this will be the last one for a little while, since I am going on a pseudo-hiatus. I will keep updating, but probably not every week anymore. Anyway, thanks to everybody who has been reading so far. There is a lot more to come yet!

What else happened this year?

-- Daniel Keyes's novel FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON was adapted into the award-winning sci-fi drama CHARLY.
-- Charlton Heston and Roddy MacDowell starred in the truly awesome PLANET OF THE APES, which is the year's grungy, cynical counterpoint to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.
-- Godzilla and all of his friends returned for DESTROY ALL MONSTERS.
-- Robert Altman made one of his first features (and one of his few sci-fi movies) with COUNTDOWN, the story of an American moonshot rushed into a dangerous launch to beat the Soviets.
-- And I can't quite tell whether Ingmar Bergman's SHAME counts as sci-fi. I've never seen it and every description makes it sound like an ordinary wartime drama, and yet there are hints that it might be post-apocalyptic somehow.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1968...

Oh man it has to be PLANET OF THE APES.