Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Not Rated, but it the movie that established the American gory monster movie.  There's some gnarly scenes of zombies (ahem...ghouls) eating people.  Also, some of them zombies are straight up naked.  The higher the resolution, the more you see.  There's honestly a print of the movie where you probably didn't realize that there's full on nudity on screen.  But the Criterion edition...?

DIRECTOR: George A. Romero

​Fun story.  I went to a really conservative Catholic college.  We weren't allowed to watch R-rated movies in public places.  Heck, it was probably frowned on to watch R-rated movies privately.  We weren't even allowed to watch things based on the MPAA.  We had the Bishops' List, which rated things A-I, A-II, A-III, A-IV, or O.  "O" was "Offensive."  You couldn't watch an O movie publicly.  You also couldn't watch an A-IV.  That was just to salacious.  But A-I to A-III, that was fine.  The thing about the Bishops' List is that it was even more chaotic than the MPAA in terms of consistency.  It was really up to the whims of the individual bishops to rate these things.  While the bishops tended to lean towards conservatively rating these movies, somehow NIght of the Living Dead only got an A-III at the time.  Well, not only did I watch Night of the Living Dead in a common room.  That was too simple.  I held a fundraiser in the theater showing this movie at Halloween.

Man, people were really upset at the devouring of people scene with the naked people.

Anyway, Night of the Living Dead was one of my staple movies back in high school and college.  There's something so hip about being the guy who has that on his list. It's the movie that really got me into zombies.  (I mean, it is the movie that got anyone onto the zombie culture.  Sure, you could look at the Giallo zombi stuff, but I don't know if anyone made a bigger cultural impact on zombies than Romero.  Everything we absorb today with zombies is standing on the shoulder of that giant.)  Now, Romero's Dawn of the Dead will always be my favorite ...of the Dead movie.  It's just perfect.  But Night of the Living Dead is in my four.  That's right. Despite being kind of a zombie fan (okay, really only kinda), I only have four zombie movies that I love.  Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and Shaun of the Dead.  Besides setting the template for zombie movies to come, Night of the Living Dead is kind of a great story in itself.

Notice that I don't have Day of the Dead on the list?  It's because, the bigger that the world gets, the less effective the zombie story is.  Night of the Living Dead is as intimate as it gets.  People are stuck in a house.  It's almost arbitrary that the monsters out there are zombies / ghouls.  (Note: I am going to call them zombies because it's a Romero movie. He calls them "ghouls" and that's in-universe.  Either works for me.)  The great thing about a good zombie movie is that the threat outside is there.  But the problem shouldn't be coming from the monsters outside.  It's what Robert Kirkman made as the central concept of The Walking Dead.  The real problem should be coming from the survivors.  Barbra (whom I realize this viewing is a lot / Romero doesn't have a high respect for women during crisis moments apparently), even in her hysteria, outruns her pursuer pretty quickly.  Her entire conflict is almost internal.  Because of a mental break, she can't make good decisions.  Ben's problem is that he has to wrangle a lot of big / toxic personalities in a contained space.  For all of the threat of zombies, the bigger problem come from people not following the script.

Now, I hate the fact that I write so much based on hearsay.  I remember hearing that George Romero wasn't making this movie about race.  I almost can't believe that.  When I watch those Romero of the Dead movies, they all scream allegory, with different degrees of subtlety.  But the first movie deals with the central conceit, "What if a Black man was given control in a situation where white people always get their ways?"  Harry is as White America as you can get and Ben is a young Black man who has to smack around a white woman.  My goodness, Harry is my nightmare. This is a guy who is used to yelling his way into every situation and getting his way.  Now, let's talk about Harry and the weird plot dynamics of this movie.  

Harry's obsession is to get everyone in the basement.  Now, for years --and still kind of today --I was always gobsmacked that Harry is technically right.  Ben, by the end of the film, finds himself cornered in the basement. The ghouls keep pushing on the door and the door holds, unlike the door upstairs that Harry predicted.  Now, Romero defintely makes Harry the antagonist of the story.  But my frustration was that Harry ends up being right about almost all of the events of the story.  Harry doesn't want to go out to get gas.  He wants to hunker down right there and wait for rescue.  Sure enough, the car goes up in flames.  Tom and Judy die a horrible death.  The doors on the house eventually give to the onslaught and Ben is in the basement.  And to a certain extent, Harry still does have a point.  Eventually, rescue would have come.  In this case, they shoot Ben in the head.  But rescue would have come and freed him.  Heck, the ghouls eventually gave up on the basement door and Ben was able to leave of his own accord.  

The reason why I can live with it is because Harry basically made every bad thing in the movie come true. He's so obstinant and obsessed with being correct throughout the film that he stymies every plan along the way.  Harry should have been the one to go with Ben to get the gas.  Had Harry gone, Judy never would have run out after Tom.  (Admittedly, I don't know what Judy was thinking in that scene.  Again, Romero might not be writing his female characters as the most level-headed characters imaginable. Similarly, there would have been a reasonable chance that the ghouls might not have gotten into the house had Harry helped Ben shore up the house instead of going for the gun.  That fight directly led to the ghouls getting in the house.  Yeah, Harry was right that the door would have held.  But on the other hand, had Ben gone to the basement with Harry in the first instance, Karen would have turned on them and surprised them, leaving them locked in with a handful of ghouls.  (I now like writing "ghouls". Go figure.) 

Again, Romero stressed that this wasn't a movie about race.  I really can't wrap my head around that.  The movie ends with a cop (by proxy) shooting a Black man in the head before identifying him as a threat or not.  Maybe that's the read that all liberals like me see in that scene.  But it is also a scene that makes the movie.  It's not just tragic that Ben survives the night when no one else does.  The scene is tragic because they assume that he's a threat.  If the other movies are all allegory heavy, I can't imagine that Romero didn't imagine the social implications of that scene.  Maybe it's because of his later movies that he gains the reputation for being something heavier than disposable horror.  But the movie is made by that last shot.  The fact that his body is tossed unceremoniously on the bonfire.  No one questions the fact that Ben has a gun next to him.  The image of a firearm next to a Black man is also incredibly powerful in terms of how people perceive threats.  I don't know.  I'm a firm believer that everything should be political

But the big takeaway is that Night of the Living Dead holds up.  This movie is upsetting. Romero chose to make the movie black-and-white.  It was probably a budget thing, but this movie learns from the language of horror from the B-movies of the '40s and '50s.  But seeing the filmmaking techniques of those eras coupled with some visceral scary stuff is outstanding.  Some of the performances are all over the board.  Can I tell you one guy who needs MVP?  Ol' Sheriff McClelland.  That guy read as accurate.  Everything in this movie is just a little campy except for that dude, who really seemed to believe that he was hunting killers slaughtering the population.  I hope there's nothing gross about that guy or else there will be some mud on my face.

Totally worth a rewatch.