Night of the Living Dead

Romero embarked upon his career in the film industry while attending Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.[19] He directed and produced television commercials and industrial films for The Latent Image, in the 1960s, a company he co-founded with friends John Russo, and Russell Streiner. The trio grew bored making commercials and wanted to film a horror movie during this period. They wanted to capitalize on the film industry's "thirst for the bizarre", according to Romero.[20] He and Streiner contacted Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman, president and vice president respectively of a Pittsburgh-based industrial film firm called Hardman Associates, Inc. They pitched their idea for a then-untitled horror film.[20] A production company, conceived by Romero, called Image Ten, was formed which included Romero, Russo, Streiner, Hardman and Eastman. The initial budget was $6,000[21] with the ten members of the production company, investing $600 each for a share of the profits.[22] Another ten investors were found when it was found that another $6,000 was required but this was also soon found to be inadequate. Image Ten eventually raised approximately $114,000 for the budget ($838,000 today).[23]

Ghouls swarm around the house, searching for living human flesh.

Co-written as a horror comedy by John Russo and George A. Romero under the title Monster Flick,[24] an early screenplay draft concerned the exploits of adolescent aliens who visit Earth and befriend human teenagers. A second version of the script featured a young man who runs away from home and discovers rotting human corpses that aliens use for food scattered across a meadow. Russo came up with the concept that they would be the recently dead only, because they could not afford to bring long-dead people out of their graves. He also came up with the idea that they would be "flesh-eaters". The final draft, written mainly by Russo during three days in 1967, focused on reanimated human corpses – Romero refers to them as ghouls – that consume the flesh of the living.[25] In a 1997 interview with the BBC's Forbidden Weekend, Romero explained that the script developed into a three-part short story. Part one became Night of the Living Dead. Sequels Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985) were adapted from the two remaining parts.[26]

Romero drew inspiration from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), a horror novel about a plague that ravages a futuristic Los Angeles. The infected in I Am Legend become vampire-like creatures and prey on the uninfected.[23][27][28] Discussing the creation of Night of the Living Dead, Romero remarked, "I had written a short story, which I basically had ripped off from a Richard Matheson novel called I Am Legend."[29] Romero further explained:

I thought I Am Legend was about revolution. I said if you're going to do something about revolution, you should start at the beginning. I mean, Richard starts his book with one man left; everybody in the world has become a vampire. I said we got to start at the beginning and tweak it up a little bit. I couldn't use vampires because he did, so I wanted something that would be an earth-shaking change. Something that was forever, something that was really at the heart of it. I said, so what if the dead stop staying dead? ... And the stories are about how people respond or fail to respond to this. That's really all [the zombies] ever represented to me. In Richard's book, in the original I Am Legend, that's what I thought that book was about. There's this global change and there's one guy holding out saying, wait a minute, I'm still a human. He's wrong. Go ahead. Join them. You'll live forever! In a certain sense he's wrong but on the other hand, you've got to respect him for taking that position.[30]

Official film adaptations of Matheson's novel appeared in 1964 as The Last Man on Earth, in 1971 as The Omega Man, and the 2007 release I Am Legend. Matheson was not impressed by Romero's interpretation, feeling that "It was ... kind of cornball",[31] though he later said, "George Romero's a nice guy, though. I don't harbor any animosity toward him."[32]

Russo and Romero revised the screenplay while filming. Karl Hardman attributed the edits to lead actor Duane Jones:

The script had been written with the character Ben as a rather simple truck driver. His dialogue was that of a lower class / uneducated person. Duane Jones was a very well educated man [and he] simply refused to do the role as it was written. As I recall, I believe that Duane himself upgraded his own dialogue to reflect how he felt the character should present himself.[20]

Eastman modified cellar scenes featuring dialogue between Helen and Harry Cooper.[20] According to lead actress Judith O'Dea, much of the dialogue was improvised. She told an interviewer, "I don't know if there was an actual working script! We would go over what basically had to be done, then just did it the way we each felt it should be done".[33] One example offered by O'Dea concerns a scene where Barbra tells Ben about Johnny's death:

The sequence where Ben is breaking up the table to block the entrance and I'm on the couch and start telling him the story of what happened [to Johnny] it's all ad-libbed. This is what we want to get across ... tell the story about me and Johnny in the car and me being attacked. That was it ... all improv. We filmed it once. There was a concern we didn't get the sound right, but fortunately they were able to use it.[12]

Although the film is regarded as one of the launching pads for the modern zombie movie, the screenplay itself never uses the word.[34] In fact, Romero would later confess that he felt the film's antagonists were distinct enough from Haitian zombies that they were "something completely new" with Romero actively avoiding any similarities between the two creatures although he notes that he may have subtly been inspired by them.[34]

The lead role was originally written for someone of Caucasian descent, but upon casting African-American actor Duane Jones, Romero intentionally did not alter the script to reflect this.[34] Asked in 2013 if he took inspiration from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. that same year, Romero responded in the negative, noting that he only heard about the shooting when he was on his way to find distribution for the finished film.[34]

Evans City Cemetery in 2007

The small budget dictated much of the production process. According to Hardman, "We knew that we could not raise enough money to shoot a film on a par with the classic horror films with which we had all grown up. The best that we could do was to place our cast in a remote spot and then bring the horror to be visited on them in that spot".[20] Scenes were filmed near Evans City, Pennsylvania, 30 miles (48 km) north of Pittsburgh in rural Butler County;[35] the opening sequence was shot at the Evans City Cemetery on Franklin Road, south of the borough.[36] The cemetery chapel was under warrant for demolition; however, Gary R. Steiner led a successful effort to raise $50,000 to restore the building, and the chapel is currently undergoing renovations.[37][38]

The outdoor, indoor (downstairs) and basement scenes were filmed at a location northeast of Evans City, near a park. The basement door (external view) shown in the film was cut into a wall by the production team and led nowhere. As this house was scheduled for demolition, damage during filming was permitted. The site is now a turf farm.[39][lower-alpha 2]

Props and special effects were fairly simple and limited by the budget. The blood, for example, was Bosco Chocolate Syrup drizzled over cast members' bodies.[40] Consumed flesh consisted of roasted ham and entrails donated by one of the actors, who also owned a chain of butcher shops. Costumes consisted of second-hand clothing from cast members and Goodwill. Zombie makeup varied during the film. Initially, makeup was limited to white skin with blackened eyes; but as filming progressed, mortician's wax was used to simulate wounds and decaying flesh. As filming was not linear, the piebald faces appear sporadically. Eastman supervised the special effects, wardrobe and makeup.[20] Filming took place between June and December 1967 under the working title Night of Anubis and later Night of the Flesh Eaters.[41][42] The small budget led Romero to shoot on 35 mm black-and-white film. The completed film ultimately benefited from the decision, as film historian Joseph Maddrey describes the black-and-white filming as "guerrilla-style", resembling "the unflinching authority of a wartime newsreel". Maddrey adds, it "seem[s] as much like a documentary on the loss of social stability as an exploitation film".[43]

Night of the Living Dead was the first feature-length film directed by George A. Romero. His initial work involved filming shorts for Pittsburgh public broadcaster WQED's children's series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.[44][45] Romero's decision to direct Night of the Living Dead essentially launched his career as a horror director. He took the helm of the sequels as well as Season of the Witch (1972), The Crazies (1973), Martin (1978), Creepshow (1982) and The Dark Half (1993).[46] Critics saw the influence of the horror and science-fiction films of the 1950s in Romero's directorial style. Stephen Paul Miller, for instance, witnessed "a revival of fifties schlock shock ... and the army general's television discussion of military operations in the film echoes the often inevitable calling-in of the army in fifties horror films". Miller admits that "Night of the Living Dead takes greater relish in mocking these military operations through the general's pompous demeanor" and the government's inability to source the zombie epidemic or protect the citizenry.[47] Romero describes the mood he wished to establish: "The film opens with a situation that has already disintegrated to a point of little hope, and it moves progressively toward absolute despair and ultimate tragedy."[48] According to film historian Carl Royer, Romero "employs chiaroscuro (film noir style) lighting to emphasize humanity's nightmare alienation from itself."[48]

While some critics dismissed Romero's film because of the graphic scenes, writer R. H. W. Dillard claimed that the "open-eyed detailing" of taboo heightened the film's success. He asks, "What girl has not, at one time or another, wished to kill her mother? And Karen, in the film, offers a particularly vivid opportunity to commit the forbidden deed vicariously."[49] Romero featured social taboos as key themes, particularly cannibalism. Although zombie cannibals were inspired by Matheson's I Am Legend, film historian Robin Wood sees the flesh-eating scenes of Night of the Living Dead as a late-1960s critique of American capitalism. Wood asserts that the zombies represent capitalists, and "cannibalism represents the ultimate in possessiveness, hence the logical end of human relations under capitalism". He argues that the zombies' victims symbolized the repression of "the Other" in bourgeois American society, namely activists in the civil rights movement, feminists, homosexuals, and counterculturalists in general.[50]

Members of Image Ten were involved in filming and post-production, participating in loading camera magazines, gaffing, constructing props, recording sounds and editing.[51] Production stills were shot and printed by Karl Hardman, who stated in an interview that a "number of cast members formed a production line in the darkroom for developing, washing and drying of the prints as I made the exposures. As I recall, I shot over 1,250 pictures during the production".[20] Upon completion of post-production, Image Ten found it difficult to secure a distributor willing to show the film with the gruesome scenes intact. Columbia and American International Pictures declined after requests to soften it and re-shoot the final scene were rejected by producers.[33] Romero admitted that "none of us wanted to do that. We couldn't imagine a happy ending. . . . Everyone want[ed] a Hollywood ending, but we stuck to our guns".[44] The Manhattan-based Walter Reade Organization agreed to show the film uncensored, but changed the title from Night of the Flesh Eaters to Night of the Living Dead because a film had already been produced under a similar title to the former.[42] While changing the title, the copyright notice was accidentally deleted from the early releases of the film.[52]

The opening title music with the car on the road had been used in a 1961 episode of the TV series Ben Casey entitled "I Remember a Lemon Tree" and is also featured in an episode of Naked City entitled "Bullets Cost Too Much". Most of the music in the film had previously been used on the soundtrack for the science-fiction B-movie Teenagers from Outer Space (1959), as well as a number of pieces used in the classic Steve McQueen western series Wanted Dead or Alive (1958–61). The eerie musical piece during the tense scene in the film where Ben finds the rifle in the closet inside the farmhouse as the radio reports of mayhem play in the background, can be heard in longer and more complete form during the opening credits and the beginning of The Devil's Messenger (1961) starring Lon Chaney, Jr. Another piece, accompanying Barbra's flight from the cemetery zombie, was taken from the score for The Hideous Sun Demon (1959). According to WRS, "We chose a selection of music for each of the various scenes and then George made the final selections. We then took those selections and augmented them electronically". Sound tech R. Lococo's choices worked well, as film historian Sumiko Higashi believes that the music "signifies the nature of events that await".[53]

A soundtrack album featuring music and dialogue cues from the film was compiled and released on LP by Varèse Sarabande in 1982. In 2008, recording group 400 Lonely Things released the album Tonight of the Living Dead, "an instrumental album composed entirely of ambient music and sound effects sampled from Romero's 1968 horror classic".[54]

Night of the Living Dead premiered on October 1, 1968, at the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh.[55] Nationally, it was shown as a Saturday afternoon matinée – as was typical for horror films at the time – and attracted an audience consisting of pre-teens and adolescents.[56][57][58] The MPAA film rating system was not in place until November 1968, so even young children were able to purchase tickets. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times chided theater owners and parents who allowed children access to the film with such potent content for a horror film they were entirely unprepared for: "I don't think the younger kids really knew what hit them," he said. "They were used to going to movies, sure, and they'd seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else." According to Ebert, the film affected the audience immediately:[58]

The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying ... It's hard to remember what sort of effect this movie might have had on you when you were six or seven. But try to remember. At that age, kids take the events on the screen seriously, and they identify fiercely with the hero. When the hero is killed, that's not an unhappy ending but a tragic one: Nobody got out alive. It's just over, that's all.

Response from Variety after the initial release reflects the outrage generated by Romero's film: "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 film goers who cheerfully opt for this unrelieved orgy of sadism ..."[59]

One commentator asserts that the film garnered little attention from critics, "except to provoke argument about censoring its grisly scenes".[53]

Despite the controversy, five years after the premiere Paul McCullough of Take One observed that Night of the Living Dead was the "most profitable horror film ever ... produced outside the walls of a major studio".[60] The film had earned between $12 and $15 million at the U.S. box office after a decade. It was translated into more than 25 languages and released across Europe, Canada and Australia.[53] Night of the Living Dead grossed $30 million internationally, and the Wall Street Journal reported that it was the top-grossing film in Europe in 1969.[61][lower-alpha 3]

Fifty years after its release, the film enjoys a reputation as a classic and still receives positive reviews, being regarded by many as one of the best films of 1968.[62][63][64] In 2008, the film was ranked by Empire magazine No. 397 of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time.[65] The New York Times also placed the film on their Best 1000 Movies Ever list.[66] In January 2010, Total Film included the film on its list of The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time.[67] Rolling Stone named Night of the Living Dead one of The 100 Maverick Movies in the Last 100 Years.[68] Reader's Digest found it to be the 12th scariest movie of all time.[69]

The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives Night of the Living Dead a 97% approval rating based on 67 reviews, with an average rating of 8.94/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "George A. Romero's debut set the template for the zombie film, and features tight editing, realistic gore, and a sly political undercurrent."[70]

Night of the Living Dead was awarded two distinguished honors decades after its debut. The Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry in 1999 with other films deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".[4][16][71][72] In 2001, the film was ranked No. 93 by the American Film Institute on their AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Thrills list, a list of America's most heart-pounding movies.[73] The zombies in the picture were also a candidate for AFI's AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Heroes & Villains, in the villains category, but failed to make the official list.[74] The Chicago Film Critics Association named it the 5th scariest film ever made.[75] The film also ranked No. 9 on Bravo's The 100 Scariest Movie Moments.[76]

Some reviewers disliked the film's gory special effects. Variety labeled Night of the Living Dead an "unrelieved orgy of sadism" and questioned the "integrity and social responsibility of its Pittsburgh-based makers".[lower-alpha 4] The New York Times critic Vincent Canby referred to the film as a "junk movie" as well as "spare, uncluttered, but really silly".[77]

Some reviewers cited the film as groundbreaking. Pauline Kael called the film "one of the most gruesomely terrifying movies ever made – and when you leave the theatre you may wish you could forget the whole horrible experience. . . . The film's grainy, banal seriousness works for it – gives it a crude realism".[78] A Film Daily critic commented, "This is a pearl of a horror picture that exhibits all the earmarks of a sleeper."[lower-alpha 5] While Roger Ebert criticized the matinée screening, he admitted that he "admires the movie itself".[58] Critic Rex Reed wrote, "If you want to see what turns a B movie into a classic ... don't miss Night of the Living Dead. It is unthinkable for anyone seriously interested in horror movies not to see it."[79]

Night of the Living Dead entered the public domain in the United States because the original theatrical distributor, the Walter Reade Organization, failed to place a copyright indication on the prints,[80] and at that time, United States copyright law held that public dissemination required copyright notice to maintain a copyright.[81] Image Ten displayed such a notice on the title frames of the film beneath the original title, Night of the Flesh Eaters, but the distributor erroneously removed the statement when it changed the title.[52][82]

Because Night of the Living Dead was not copyrighted, it has received numerous home video releases on VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray.[83] As of 2019, Amazon.com lists editions of Night of the Living Dead numbering 13 on VHS, 130 on DVD, 12 on Blu-ray, 1 on Blu-ray 3D and 56 on Amazon Video.[84] The original film is available to view or download for free on various websites, such as the Internet Archive and YouTube.[85][86][87] As of March 2019, it is the Internet Archive's most-downloaded film, with over 3.1 million downloads.[88]

The film received a VHS release in 1993 through Tempe Video.[89] In 1998, Russo's revised version of the film, Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition, was released on VHS and DVD by Anchor Bay Entertainment.[89] In 2002, Elite Entertainment released a special edition DVD featuring the original cut.[89] Dimension Extreme released a restored print of the film on DVD.[89] On October 3, 2017, Mill Creek Entertainment released a standard 1080p version of the film on Blu-ray in the United States, however, this was a transfer of an existing release print, and not a restoration. This release was also not authorized or licensed by Image Ten.[90] This was followed by a 4K restoration Blu-ray released by The Criterion Collection on February 13, 2018, sourced from a print owned by the Museum of Modern Art and acquired by Janus Films.[91] This release also features a workprint edit of the film under the title of Night of Anubis, in addition to various bonus materials.[92]

Night of the Living Dead is the first of six ... of the Dead films directed by George Romero. Following the 1968 film, Romero released Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead. Each film traces the evolution of the living dead epidemic in the United States and humanity's desperate attempts to cope with it. As in Night of the Living Dead, Romero peppered the other films in the series with critiques specific to the periods in which they were released.

The same year Day of the Dead premiered, Night of the Living Dead co-writer John Russo released a film titled The Return of the Living Dead that offers an alternate continuity to the original film than Dawn of the Dead. Russo's film spawned four sequels. Return of the Living Dead sparked a legal battle with Romero, who believed Russo marketed his film in direct competition with Day of the Dead as a sequel to the original film. In the case Dawn Associates v. Links, Romero accused Russo of "appropriat[ing] part of the title of the prior work", plagiarizing Dawn of the Dead's advertising slogan ("When there is no more room in hell ... the dead will walk the earth"), and copying stills from the original 1968 film. Romero was ultimately granted a restraining order that forced Russo to cease his advertising campaign. Russo, however, was allowed to retain his title.[120]

George Cameron Romero, the son of director George A. Romero, has developed Rise of the Living Dead, a prelude to his father's classic pitched with the working title Origins.[121] The film tracks a six-year period leading up to the story told by his father. George Cameron Romero's script is intended to be an homage to his father's work, a glimpse into the political turmoil of the mid-to-late 1960s and a bookend piece to his father's original story. Despite raising funds for the film on Indiegogo in 2014, the film has yet to go into production as of May 2020.

The first remake, debuting in 1990, was directed by special effects artist Tom Savini. It was based on the original screenplay, but included more gore and a revised plot that portrayed Barbra (Patricia Tallman) as a capable and active heroine. Tony Todd played the role of Ben. Film historian Barry Grant saw the new Barbra as a corrective on the part of Romero. He suggests that the character was made stronger to rectify the depiction of female characters in the original film.[122]

The second remake was in 3-D and released in September 2006 under the title Night of the Living Dead 3D, directed by Jeff Broadstreet. Unlike Savini's 1990 film, Broadstreet's project was not affiliated with Romero.[123] Broadstreet's film was followed in 2012 by the prequel Night of the Living Dead 3D: Re-Animation.[124]

On September 15, 2009, it was announced that Simon West was producing a 3D animated retelling of the original movie, originally titled Night of the Living Dead: Origins 3D and later re-titled Night of the Living Dead: Darkest Dawn.[125][126] The movie is written and directed by Zebediah de Soto. The voice cast includes Tony Todd as Ben, Danielle Harris as Barbra, Joseph Pilato as Harry Cooper, Alona Tal as Helen Cooper, Bill Moseley as Johnny, Tom Sizemore as Chief McClellan and newcomers Erin Braswell as Judy and Michael Diskint as Tom.[127][128][129][130][131][132]

Director Doug Schulze's 2011 film Mimesis: Night of the Living Dead relates the story of a group of horror film fans who become involved in a "real-life" version of the 1968 film.[133][134]

Due to the film's public domain status, several independent film companies have also done remakes of the film.

• Night of the Living Dead: Resurrection (2012): British director James Plumb made this remake set in Wales.[135]
• A Night of the Living Dead (2014): Shattered Images Films and Cullen Park Productions released a remake with new twists and characters, written and directed by Chad Zuver.[136]
• Rebirth (formerly Night of the Living Dead: Rebirth) (2020): Rising Pulse Productions planned an updated take on the classic film that brings to light present issues that impact modern society such as religious bigotry, homophobia, and the influence of social media.[137]
• Night of the Living Dead: Genesis (TBD): Director Matt Cloude initially announced this remake project in 2011.[138] The film has undergone several transitions in the ensuing years. It brings back several alumni of Romero's initial trilogy, including Judith O'Dea as the Barbra character.

At the suggestion of Bill Hinzman (the actor who played the zombie which first attacks Barbra in the graveyard and kills her brother Johnny at the beginning of the original film), composers Todd Goodman and Stephen Catanzarite composed an opera Night of the Living Dead based on the film.[139] The Microscopic Opera Company produced its world premiere, which was performed at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, in October 2013.[140] The opera was awarded the American Prize for Theater Composition in 2014.

Barbra and Ben after their first meeting

Since its release, some critics and film historians have interpreted Night of the Living Dead as a subversive film that critiques 1960s American society, international Cold War politics and domestic racism. Elliot Stein of The Village Voice saw the film as an ardent critique of American involvement in the Vietnam War, arguing that it "was not set in Transylvania, but Pennsylvania – this was Middle America at war, and the zombie carnage seemed a grotesque echo of the conflict then raging in Vietnam."[147] Film historian Sumiko Higashi concurs, arguing that Night of the Living Dead was a film about the horrors of the Vietnam era. While she admits that "there are no Vietnamese in Night of the Living Dead, ... they constitute an absent presence whose significance can be understood if narrative is construed". She points to aspects of the Vietnam War paralleled in the film: grainy black-and-white newsreels, search and destroy operations, helicopters, and graphic carnage.[148] In the 2009 documentary film Nightmares in Red, White and Blue, the zombies in the film are compared to the "silent majority" of the U.S. in the late 1960s.[149]

While George Romero denied he considered race when casting Duane Jones, reviewer Mark Deming notes that "the grim fate of Duane Jones, the sole heroic figure and only African-American, had added resonance with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X fresh in the minds of most Americans".[9][150] Stein adds, "In this first-ever subversive horror movie, the resourceful black hero survives the zombies only to be surprised by a redneck posse".[147] The deaths of Ben, Barbra and the supporting cast offered audiences an uncomfortable, nihilistic glimpse unusual for the genre.[151]

Other prevalent themes included "the flaws inherent in the media, local and federal government agencies, and the entire mechanism of civil defense".[152] Film historian Linda Badley explains that the film was so horrifying because the monsters were not creatures from outer space or some exotic environment, "They're us."[153] Romero confessed that the film was designed to reflect the tensions of the time: "It was 1968, man. Everybody had a 'message'. The anger and attitude and all that's there is just because it was the Sixties. We lived at the farmhouse, so we were always into raps about the implication and the meaning, so some of that crept in."[9]