The best way to understand what makes this movie great is by looking at the characters, so without further ado –
Barbra is a tragic case of a person who was once simply helping her brother complete an annual chore of driving three hours away to place a commemorative wreath on their father’s grave, and then suddenly wound up in a bleak, isolated farmhouse with a stranger barking orders at her after a maniac in the cemetery killed her brother. Just let that sink in. Here’s a person who has made this long trip with her brother to carry out a tedious task at the behest of their mother year after year, yet on this particular year, the results aren’t so routine. Johnny, her brother, teases her of a past time when they were kids when she was creeped out by the cemetery, and he realized that she’s still kind of scared of the place. “They’re coming to get you, Barbra,” he menacingly teases. We learn right away that she’s a scaredy-cat. Soon afterwards, she’s attacked, and as Johnny is trying to protect her, Barbra witnesses her brother’s murder. Boy, that six-hour, round-trip drive that they complained about sure seems pretty great now, huh?
After Barbra races for her life to the first house she sees, she discovers more death inside. Soon after a stranger shows up demanding to know if there is a phone, and in a panic asking her if she lives there. She watches this man kill three other “humans”, and he starts warning her that there will be others and that they need to barricade themselves. Barbra screams, “What’s happening?! I don’t know what’s happening?!” This poor girl’s mind is faltering underneath all the terror and confusion of the reality she was just thrusted into only mere minutes after joking around with her brother. She’s a long way from home trapped inside a house with a stranger who is demanding her to help nail boards to the doors and windows so that they aren’t killed by the demented mob gathering outside. What indeed is happening?
Usually when we start with a character at the beginning of the film, it’s their story whose is the focus. We’ll see them adapt to the conflicts presented to them, and how they overcome them. However, with Barbra, she slips into a catatonic state when faced with her horrible reality. We’ve become so accustomed to the idea of this character being able to overcome the grief of their situation and fight their way to safety. Most other movies follow this traditional route.
Night of the Living Dead shows this character succumb to the horror. When you think about it, isn’t this how it would really go? The convention of the cowardly character finding the courage to prevail isn’t a convenience to be discovered here. Barbra’s character stays consistent throughout. When Johnny realizes she’s uncomfortable with being in the cemetery, she’s easily creeped out and made upset by his bullying. When she’s faced with real terror later on, her mind and emotional state completely shatter. It’s brought on further when the stranger, Ben, refuses to help her go find her brother, and decks her with a knockout punch. She’s now lost complete control of the situation. She’s unable to leave this dreadful house of angry people shouting, while ghouls linger outside wanting to kill them. All she’s able to do now is react incoherently to stimuli such as when she hears words like “car” (“Johnny has the keys.”) or “leaving” (“Oh, I’d like to leave, yes!”).
Towards the end when the flesh-eaters are breaking down the doors, Barbra springs into action to hold back the intruders. Her mind can’t handle the distress anymore. Desperately she screams at them to stop and go away. All she wants is for this nightmare to be over. She wants to be back in that graveyard carrying out a dull chore with her brother as if none of this ever happened. Her brother. She wants to be back with her…
Uh oh. Here’s Johnny.
He was right though. He was coming to get her.
We meet Ben 15 minutes into the movie after Barbra is attacked and escapes to the farmhouse. We learn he was at a diner in the nearby town when he was first attacked by the creatures. He commandeered a truck and stopped at the farmhouse when he saw the gas pumps. We learn that Ben is a survivor. He reacts quickly to the challenges presented to him, and he is steadfast in following his plans. He doesn’t care for dawdling, and he’s bossy and short tempered. He’s forceful and straightforward with the others, and he’s particularly unwavering to Mr. Cooper since Cooper is the only other one butting heads with him and second-guessing all of his decisions.
Right off the bat, Ben is annoyed with Cooper for not helping him fortify the first floor while he was hiding in the cellar. Ben finds Cooper to be mistrusting since Cooper isn’t clear about whether or not he heard them upstairs, or what he understood the commotion to be. Cooper tells Ben that fortifying the first floor is useless since he believes the ghouls will easily break in. He says the cellar is the safest and most secure area of the house. However, Ben contends with him and says it’s a death trap with no way out. Cooper warns that if they don’t get into the cellar now, then he’s going to go down there and lock the door and not let anybody in because his primary goal is to protect his wife and injured daughter. Ben lets him know that if Cooper follows through with that threat, then everything on the first floor – the radio, tv, food – is all his since it’s part of the reason he wants to safeguard the area. “I’m boss up here. You can be boss down there,” Ben barks. Already the lines in the sands have been drawn and cooperation is a failure.
Luckily, a young couple, Tom and Judy, are there to play peacekeepers between the clashing hardheaded men. Tom sees both points of views between Ben and Cooper, but ultimately, he decides to help Ben with a plan to escape rather than just hiding in the cellar with Cooper. Ben devises a plan in order to get the truck to the pumps while Cooper provides distraction with Molotov cocktails. Cooper reluctantly agrees to go along with the plan, even though he believes all it will do is attract more of the living dead to the house. Tom botches the mission by dumping gasoline all over the truck and accidently igniting it with the torch lying on the ground. When Judy’s jacket is stuck in the car, Tom and her are killed when the truck explodes. Ben’s surefire plan went up in flames due to human error.
As Ben flees back to the house, Cooper doesn’t unlock the door for him, which results in Ben punching Cooper out. These two already didn’t trust one another, but now they’re against one another. “It’s me or him” is the mentality now. Cooper wants Ben’s rifle and to lock him out of the cellar. Cooper makes a grab for the gun, but loses the skirmish. Ben shows how cold-blooded he can be, and he shoots and mortally wounds an unarmed Cooper.
Let’s look at Ben’s track record here:
- He says he wants to protect Barbra, however Barbra is carried away by a mob of ghouls and killed.
- His plan to get gas from the pump ends with the death of Tom and Judy. Not exactly his fault, but it was still his idea to drag Tom with him into the danger zone after he was warned it was a risky plan.
- His fortifications end up failing after more creatures show up because of the truck explosion.
- Because the house is being overridden, Helen, Mr. Cooper’s wife, runs to hide in the cellar where she meets the most brutal on-screen matricide at the hands of her daughter. Had Ben not shot Cooper and they all had taken refuge in the cellar then, Helen could have possibly lived.
Ben is placed as the film’s main protagonist, but when you look a little closer, you begin to see that even though Ben possesses the qualities of the strong leading man, his decisions don’t actually yield good results for the supporting characters. You could argue because of his unwavering, domineering demeanor, everyone dies as a result. Had clearer heads just prevailed, they all might have had a chance. But in his defense, Ben is portrayed more as a common man rather than the typical silver-screen hero. He was only doing the best he could in this horrible predicament, but sadly, sometimes a person's best just isn't good enough.
As the flesh-eaters break in and take over the house, and everyone is left dead besides Ben, he takes refuge in the cellar and survives the night, which was Cooper’s plan from the beginning. Ben may have survived the living dead, but another foe has come calling. That being trigger-happy riflemen. After a quick assessment by the Chief, he believes Ben is another ghoul from a distance, and he orders his man to shoot him in the head. “Good shot. Okay, he’s dead. Let’s go get him. That’s another one for the fire!”
Human error caught up to Ben once again.
We meet Mr. Cooper and the others in the cellar around 45 minutes into the movie, which is roughly halfway through the runtime. We learn Cooper and his family were staying at a nearby hotel when the ghouls attacked and flipped their car. They came across the farmhouse for shelter where they met Tom and Judy. It’s apparent that Cooper came up with a plan to fortify the cellar and wait for a rescue team. That was all well and good until Barbra and Ben showed up and put a kink in that plan. Cooper tries to convince Ben that the best plan is to wait it out in the cellar, but Ben wants nothing of it. The two clash over all decision making. Ben wants to go to one of the safe zones that they see on the television broadcast, and Cooper thinks it’s crazy and best to just stay put. But nobody wants to listen to Cooper. As Tom says, “The television said it’s the right thing to do.”
Cooper frustratingly complains to his wife that they’re all wrong, and that they’ll see that he was right. “Being right is important to you, isn’t it?” his wife shoots back. She insinuates that it’s more important to him to be right about the situation rather than try to help the situation. It’s clear that Cooper and Helen are in a rough patch in their marriage as the outbreak hit. We see that Cooper is a survivor and a hardnosed man like Ben. However, Ben actually wants to save the others, while Cooper’s priority is to keep himself and his family safe, and he’s not going to jeopardize that by sticking his neck out to help others.
Cooper is set up to be the antagonist of the film. However, here’s the thing…Cooper wasn’t entirely wrong. I know, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth to think this little turd was right, but even if he was an a-hole, he was correct about the cellar being the safest place in the house, and he was correct about waiting for a search and rescue team.
How do I know this? Because after all of Ben’s best efforts fail, his last resort is to do what Cooper’s plan was from the beginning – hide in the cellar. And you know what? It works. Because Ben survives until morning, and all of the ghouls are gone. Also, a search team shows up just as Cooper speculated. Realizing this makes you think that perhaps Cooper wasn’t the biggest a-hole in the film. Maybe it was Ben.
The creatures in this creature film are the recently and unburied dead returning to life. They seem to only want to feed on the flesh of the living. They’re slow-moving, mute, and unintelligent. They look just like us, but more in a rotting, braindead sort of way. It’s not exactly clear why the dead are rising, but from brief bits on the television, it’s surmised that a space probe that circled Venus was carrying a strange, high-form of radiation, and when it entered into the Earth’s atmosphere, this woke the dead. However, the pundits on the television argue that this is what caused the outbreak. A professor claims it definitely is linked, while a military officer says it has nothing to do with it. We never know exactly the truth because it appears the truth is being suppressed by the government. I always thought this was a brilliant touch by George Romero by leaving us in the dark as to why the dead are alive, while at the same time giving us
the reason as to why we’re being left in the dark as to why the dead are alive. It adds a harrowing nuanced layer that even in the face of apocalypse, the government is trying to lie to the public and cover things up.
With all the key players introduced…
“What’s happening?!”
So, what’s this story trying to tell us? We have a small group of strangers holed up in a rural farmhouse trying to outlive the dead. Instead of working together as a team, differences cause rifts among the group, and divided they fall. Had Ben not been so suspicious of Cooper immediately, perhaps he would have been more agreeable with going into the cellar. Had Cooper not come off as so overbearing and self-righteous and wouldn’t have threatened to abandoned them all so quickly for not listening to him, then perhaps he could have been more persuasive and trusting. If anything, they could have compromised to see how long they could stay on the first floor, and if that plan was going to Hell, then they all could have hid in the cellar. Instead tensions flared, and it became, “My way or the highway!” Even in the face of death, and I mean literal death because the living dead were coming to kill them, these living souls couldn’t put differences aside to band together and survive. The ghouls have two strengths at their disposal. 1) Strength in numbers. 2) The incompetently prideful and erroneous nature of humans. Heck, the ghouls didn’t even have to do much to win. The humans’ actions were their own undoing.
Let’s say they had listened to Cooper from the beginning, and all hid in the cellar. What then happens when the injured daughter, Karen, dies and returns to kill them? Would Cooper have been so willing to allow Ben to bash her head in? Most likely not. This might have still caused a rift where Cooper demands Ben to leave, or he attempts to kill him. At any rate, a personality like Cooper’s and a personality like Ben’s were never going to survive together.
But it’s one of the things that I really love about this film. The good/bad dynamic between Ben and Cooper is so muddled that you really are left determining who was more in the right. I love that the film had the guts to have a protagonist, Ben, not exactly be the clear-cut righteous do-gooder who saves the day. I love that you’re left thinking, “Wow, was Cooper right the whole time?” The movie gives no easy answers, which is unsettling. But that’s to our benefit because this is a horror movie, and horror movies are supposed to be unsettling.
Night of the Living Dead is effective in that regard head and shoulders above most.
Which brings us to the closing of the film. We learn on the television that a search and destroy team is banded by a local sheriff, and they are seeking out to kill every flesh-eater they see. By the way, the Chief in this movie is very much a local of Pittsburgh, known as a Yinzer. The term yinzer comes from the use of the word yinz, such as instead of saying, “Hey, what are you guys going to do downtown today?” It’s, “Hey, what’re yinz doin’ dahn tahn today?” Therefor, “yinzer” refers to a local with the Pittsburgher dialect. The way the chief says “fire” as “fahr” is very yinzer. Also, all the Chief’s lines were adlibbed, and are some of the most quotable. “Yeah, they’re dead. They’re…all messed up.”
The sheriff leads the group to the farmhouse where we see them kill some stragglers, and then they see Ben inside the house from a distance. Without hesitation, it’s concluded that Ben is one of them, and they kill him. Damn. He actually managed to survive the dead, but it was the living that got him. Now, before we get into racial undertones of this final scene, we need to keep in mind that when Romero was casting the film, he did not specifically write Ben as a black character. He just liked Duane Jones’ audition so much that he wanted him as Ben. So either way, Ben was fated to die the way he did. However, since Ben was then a black man, his death at the hands of white, rural Pennsylvanians in the late 60’s definitely raises eyebrows. You’re left to contemplate, did they shoot him because they thought he was a ghoul, or because he was black? I tend to believe because he was black, because it adds another nuanced layer of how the humans are fighting among themselves instead of working together to beat their common enemy. We find that the true horror has come within ourselves, and that even the creatures look like a grotesque version of us. We see humanity work against itself, and it literally tries to eat itself alive. This is a bleak, chilling film, but that’s okay because it’s a horror movie, and it’s supposed to make you feel uneasy.
So yeah, I love this movie. I honestly could say a lot more, but I’m simply just running out of time. I’m curious to see what you all have to say. I’d also like to talk about the differences between the 1990 remake, which I also enjoy. However, the original is superior because it has more edge. The remake takes the Barbra character down the more traditional route you would expect, and the ending is a little softer. But maybe I can get into this some other time.
Stay scared,
Muntjac
