“Romero conjures moments of eeriness and dread throughout, keeping the lighting low and the special effects to a minimum, though there will be blood, fire, cannibalism and a great deal of death...”
Nigel’s intro
Night of the Living Dead is an influential film for many reasons. Obviously it pretty much invented the modern horror film but it was also significant that it didn’t come out of Hollywood or New York.
George Romero was based in Pittsburgh and made a living making TV commercials and training films. Some of these ads are quite remarkable and have the same sort of hand-made spirit of Night of the Living Dead.
The film was shot at weekends on a total budget of around $100,000 with borrowed equipment and film and a cast of friends and colleagues.
That this rag-tag group of regional filmmakers made a successful independent film was an inspiration to many.
The film was released in 1968 and one of the ways it felt different from most horror films is that it’s set in the recognisable modern world. It’s not set in Transylvania or some Victorian gothic past.
The film was a modest success on its first release and met some quite hysterical critical responses. The rating system we have now didn’t exist in 1968 and this was Variety’s first review:
"Until the Supreme Court establishes clear-cut guidelines for the pornography of violence, Night of the Living Dead will serve nicely as an outer-limit definition by example. In [a] mere 90 minutes this horror film (pun intended) casts serious aspersions on the integrity and social responsibility of its Pittsburgh-based makers, distributor Walter Reade, the film industry as a whole and [exhibitors] who book [the picture], as well as raising doubts about the future of the regional cinema movement and about the moral health of filmgoers who cheerfully opt for this unrelieved orgy of sadism..."
However, on each re-release, its stature grew and it took on more of a tone of allegory, particularly as one of the main characters is black - and notably not at all stereotyped.
People viewed the film as being about Vietnam, about race relations, about political assassinations and so on. As Romero said later on: “All of my zombie films are just sort of snapshots of the time they were made.”
In 1999 by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry as a film deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Thanks to Walking Dead on TV we have probably reached ‘peak zombie’ and you can definitely see the origins of subsequent films and TV shows. Notably, the creatures in the film are never referred to as zombies.
Romero said: “I never thought of them as zombies… People started to write about Night of the Living Dead and called them zombies. I said, ‘Wow, maybe they are’. To me, they were dead neighbours.”
Finally one of the most curious aspects about the film is that it’s in the public domain - by accident. The Walter Reade Organization, which distributed the film, wanted to release it under the title Night of the Flesh Eaters, but lawyers representing the makers of 1964’s The Flesh Eaters threatened a lawsuit, so the title was changed to Night of the Living Dead.
When the title changed, though, copyright notices were not added to the opening titles or to the end credits. Though the filmmakers have fought it in federal court, the film is still in the public domain.
This means there are many terrible looking versions of the film. There are colourised versions. Some with different soundtracks. Some in the wrong aspect ratio. And even some re-edited with additional material not shot by Romero.
I’m pleased to say the version we are showing looks amazing. It’s the Criterion blu-ray which is a print from the Museum of Modern Art that was restored a few years before Romero’s death in 2017.
I’ll finish with Romero’s own words about the restoration.
“It looks like exactly the way we shot it. It looks like the very first print that we ever saw of it. When the world first learned it was public domain, they had prints, I think even some of the original prints that Walter Reade made, they printed them on toilet paper. They were grainy and dark, and now in this restoration you can appreciate maybe some of the photography and some of the things that were lost here and there. I kept arguing with the people restoring it. I said, ‘Is that charm or should we fix it?’ and they said, ‘No, it's charm. Leave it alone.’”
