It's Zombie Time! Part 3: Romero's Night of the Living Dead

           There were quite a few zombie movies in the 1950s, and several in the 1960s as well. But the most important one, both in terms of its innovation and its influence on later art, was George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The film opens with a pair of siblings who have traveled three hours outside of Pittsburgh to place a wreath on a dead man’s grave. The brother is annoyed; this is a favor they’re doing for their mother, who wants always to remember this dead man—presumably their father. Already, we have some intimation in the film that the dead aren’t allowed to stay fully dead: this mother wants to remember, wants to keep the memory, as it were, alive, by anointing the dead body once a year with floral wreaths.

         Once they place the wreath, a man (obvious to us, but not to them as a zombie) attacks them both. He wrestles the brother to the ground, knocking him unconscious, and follows the sister to the car. He’s extremely aggressive, quick-moving, dexterous, and clearly possessed of a will—he intends harm to the siblings. So, compared with the 1930s and 40s films we’ve discussed, this is new: zombies are quicker, smarter, and possessed of violent will. In all of these ways, Romero swerved sharply away from the vodou based tradition of the zombie: soulless, passive, lethargic, nonagential, and conjured by another person. Romero’s zombies were nothing like that.

         His most important change to the genre—which he didn’t technically invent, but which he certainly promoted and mainstreamed—was the idea that the zombies weren’t created by a sorcerer, but by some kind of external, sci-fi event. In 1959, the film Invisible Invaders spins a yarn about aliens possessing and reanimating the corpses of dead people. That film, as any afficionado of schlock horror will immediately recognize, was riffing on one of the best-beloved horrible films of all time, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957), in which aliens also reanimated human corpses. So by the 1960s, there was a clear cultural precedent for the idea that aliens—not practitioners of voodoo—could reanimate the human dead and create armies of zombies. In Night of the Living Dead, the triggering event for the zombie attacks isn’t an alien invasion, but rather a human outer-space invention gone wrong. Radiation, we eventually learn, from a space probe sent to Venus, somehow reanimated the deceased human corpses, equipping them with a taste for living human flesh.

         Now that, too, is a major, major innovation. Romero’s zombies are flesh-eaters. Or, well, technically, his ghouls are flesh-eaters—in the film, the “zombies” are actually referred to as ghouls. Rightly so: ghouls are well-attested and ancient monsters, possibly originating in the ancient Near East, who roam around graveyards and eat the bodies of the dead. These ghouls, in Romero’s film, are dead guys who want to eat the flesh of the living. Same, same, but different. So, really, Romero made a ghoul film, not a zombie film. And he made it loud and clear that he wanted his audience to fixate on that detail, as a central feature of what was horrific about the film. Midway through, Barbara is listening to a newscast, in which the newscaster repeats, again and again, that the entranced-seeming murderers are eating the flesh of the people they kill. The announcer can’t seem to say it enough times to convey his own horror and shock; as he puts it, “This incredible story becomes more ghastly with each report. It’s difficult to imagine such a thing actually happening.”

         But the film’s visual indebtedness to other prior zombie films was clear: they’re pale, somewhat awkward moving, and they are reanimated corpses. Ever since Romero’s film, “zombie” denotes a flesh-eating reanimated human corpse. He established a new norm, as well as popularized the norm of assigning the causation for the zombie attacks to a scientific and/or extraterrestrial origin, rather than to a voodoo origin. Romero, then, makes his zombie philosophy futuristic and space-agey, rather than ancient, primal, or theological.

         Correlative with that, he also takes out the zombie-maker character. There is no Legendre in this film, no Obeah, no voodoo practitioner of any kind. Nor is there—going back to the Greco-Roman tradition—a sorcerer, or witch, or any other kind of magic-worker. Zombogenesis lies in the realm of science and reason, not the realm of faith and magic. Romero, in effect, modernizes the zombie genre by adapting it to the particular concerns of life in the 1960s—one of which was the idea that the military-industrial complex was growing too big, bloated, and underregulated, and sending out some kind of space probe that has catastrophic consequences for humanity. This idea had been coined by Dwight Eisenhower’s famous 1961 farewell address, in which he warned Americans to be very wary of the alignment between big business and big military. The zombies in this film come to destroy humanity because of a military-industrial space experiment gone wrong.

         Very wrong indeed, because, unlike in the voodoo-inspired zombie genre, this space experiment appears to awaken many, many, many corpses and call them from the grave. Like Invisible Invaders and Plan 9, the film presents a zombie horde, not just a zombified one-off, like Jessica Holland or Madeline. Rather than being a deliberate targeting of one specific human to kill and resurrect as a zombie, these films of the 50s and 60s essentially create zombies as a new race, a new species, a new version of humanity—brought forth unnaturally in Romero’s film by the overreaching ambition of human industry.

         Back to the film. Barbara—the sister from the opening scene—makes her way to a farmhouse, where she finds a body that been cannibalized on the staircase. Terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought, she is found by Ben (Duane Jones), significantly, one of the first Black men cast in the leading, heroic role of a horror movie until this time. With his unflinching tactical savvy, bravery, and conscientiousness, Ben converts the farmhouse into a fortress. As more survivors appear in the house, Ben proves his chops as a leader time and time again—the other six survivors, all of whom are white, defer to his leadership, because he is manifestly good at it, able immediately to understand the situation and adapt to it.

         Released in 1968, in the heyday of the American Civil Rights movement, this was a big fucking deal. A bunch of white people comfortably and gratefully accepting the leadership of a total competent Black man? Not unthinkable in the universe of this film. Moreover, there’s a strong implication in the way Duane Jones masterfully handles his role that there is something about his blackness, something, more specifically, about his having grown up as a Black man in the deeply racially riven United States, that prepares him for the zombie apocalypse. Growing up Black and American was a good survival training ground, because, in reality, he could’ve been killed by anyone around him at any point in his regular life, before the zombie/ghoul takeover. This wasn’t new, this pervasive mortal danger, but rather a variation on a theme. The fact that all the zombies in the film aren’t just white, but lily white, pale as all hell, contributes to this sense. It’s almost as though the film conducts a thought experiment in which it allegorizes predatory white violence against Black Americans as zombie violence against all human beings.

         So yeah, Romero turned away from the voodoo origin story, but his film did not abandon the racial ideas and post-slavery ideologies that animated the voodoo films of the 1930s and 40s. Now, to be clear, George Romero has said that the role wasn’t originally written for a Black actor, but that Duane Jones rocked his audition. I believe that entirely. So I can’t say that Romero planned this powerful racial critique in the film. He didn’t. But I hope that by now we all know that sometimes artworks—and films in particular, with their large casts and vastly larger audiences—take on meanings that aren’t intended by their makers, but are nevertheless very, very real. And this film is offers up a dazzling demonstration of the survival and adaptation of Black people in situations of unthinkable danger and harm in the United States.

         My favorite scene that embodies this is when Ben asks Barbara to get her shit together and start boarding up the house. She’s in shock. He starts out by screaming at her, “Well, Goddamn it!” but he thinks better of it, approaches, her, gently puts his hands on her arms, and says, with a wealth of compassion, “Look, I know you’re afraid. I’m afraid, too. But we have to try to board up the house together.” She snaps out of her shock enough to help him. He understands what needs to be done; he has compassion for Barbara, but he also—and this is crucial—expects more of her than the typical white, male hero would expect. He’s not willing to let her stand idly by and rock herself catatonic while he does all the work. He expects more from her, because he refuses to see her as a lame-ass shrinking violet girl, incapable of protecting herself. When she starts to lose her cool again shortly thereafter, he urges her to “calm down.” He sees more in her than she thinks herself capable of. Ben isn’t just an iconic Black hero, he also insists on equal participation from women in this emerging crisis. Barbara, alas, disappoints: she’s “out of her head,” as another character puts it, so Ben has no choice but to knock her out for the time being.

         When we hear, on the news radio that still works in the farmhouse, that the spreading of the epidemic of mass murder seems to originate in the extreme Southeast of the United States, we are not surprised. Later, the news announcer says that “None of these this kind of mass murder has yet been reported West of the Mississippi River, except in parts of southeastern Texas.” You want to explain to me why these specific geographic markers matter—the Southeast, the Mississippi, southeastern Texas—without talking about the history of slavery?  I’m all ears. Whether Romero consciously meant this film to be about race and about the history of slavery in the United States or whether it’s just an emergent property of the historical contexts of the Civil Rights movement doesn’t really matter: what’s clear is that this film locates the origin of the zombification of the human species in the same place that history slavery had its epicenter. That’s surely no accident.

         In a sense, then, this film isn’t a huge departure from the voodoo zombie genre. There, zombification was an allegory for enslavement. Here, it appears almost to be a hangover from the history of slavery. Sure, it’s eventually revealed that the space probe caused the zombie plague. But the fact that the zombie plague roots in and grows from the deep South seems to say something about the unfinishedness, the undeadness of the history of race-based violence itself.

         The holed-up survivors find out that the assailants are undead when they watch a TV program that says that “recently dead” bodies are “returning to life” to commit “acts of murder.” The TV news also reports that the government is being tight-lipped about the origins of the problem, and that space experts have been brought in as consultants. It turns out, reveals the report, that a space probe carrying a mysterious form of high-level radiation was deliberately destroyed by NASA on its way back to earth. The scientists being interviewed assert that the radiation has caused the corpse reanimation; the military officials deny it. The problem is man-made—not naturally occurring, and not magically induced, and the US military is bending over backwards to keep that fact a secret. So, in addition to all the other ways Romero’s film reinvents the genre, it also introduces the conspiracist, or perhaps paranoid reading, in which the US government tries to skirt blame for its own misconduct.

(Perhaps needless to say, later sci-fi horror shows like The X-Files owe an immense amount to this film.)

         Next, the news reports that the recently killed bodies are “reactivated” in “only a matter of minutes,” so that anyone who dies of any cause should be burned immediately. (If you’re thinking of The Walking Dead now, good on you: the idea that something in the environment poses an ongoing zombification threat started in 1968, but was put to great use in the AMC series.) So everyone in the farmhouse now realizes that the number of zombies is going to be growing exponentially: everyone who gets eaten will soon, themselves, be a flesh-eating ghoul. Anyone who dies of natural causes will also become a ghoul. Why? Because the level of radiation from the exploded probe continues to rise.

         Eventually, everyone in the farmhouse dies—some of them resurrecting and being killed again—except for Ben. He alone survives to the end. But when the local militia arrives some time later to sweep the area for lingering ghouls, they mistakenly shoot Ben “right between the eyes,” killing him and tossing his body onto the fire with the other dead. When I have taught this film, students tend to find this ending extremely disappointing: the entire film had set them up to think that Ben would be, in effect, “the final girl”—the one who survives the entire film. In getting killed, Ben’s character does not offer a clear, optimistic vision of Black survival in the blasted military-industrial futurist nightmare of the film. The ending feels unfair. And it is unfair. But that’s what I like about it. The film doesn’t give us our happy ending for our Black hero, because that wasn’t how history worked in 1968. The all-white zombie-killing militia sees a Black man and doesn’t think twice: it assumes he is a threat. He must die. That is a horrific reality, but it is a representation of actual reality in the Civil War Era. Black men who behaved heroically to try to save themselves from violence, predation of any kind, murder, or attack were often killed for their resistance, for their attempts at self-preservation. So, is the ending disappointing? Definitely. But is it important to the film’s overall commentary on racial injustice in the 1960s United States? Equally yes. The white shooters don’t even blink before shooting Ben, let alone ask him if he’s human or not. Because the tragic truth is that they’ve already decided that he can’t be.  

         Night of the Living Dead is a massively important zombie film: it innovates the fast-moving, intentional, rapacious, flesh-eating zombie paradigm. It also theorizes zombiedom as something that will befall anyone who dies—it’s a pervasive threat. And that threat originates with the military-industrial complex: our government brings the plague of dehumanization right down upon all of our heads. These tropes all get recycled and reinvented time and again by later zombie films.

But for me, there are two moves the film makes that are more fascinating than all the others. First, Night of the Living Dead make the zombie genre capable of doing serious political work. This wasn’t a hokey colonial romance like White Zombie or I Walked with a Zombie. This was a movie about Ben as the best man for the job of survival, the best man who gets killed in the end by a militarized citizenry that, ultimately, makes no room for him. Second, Night of the Living Dead put news media—radio, TV—and the desperate search for information at the center of the action, at the center of the horror. As we move forward into later 20^th and 21^st century zombie horror, that idea that communications and media are absolutely critical both in identifying the nature of the zombie threat and in responding to it will be essential.