NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) Four stars
The other day on Facebook, I thought I saw a fan ask others not to bring politics into their appreciation of a classic on the NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD page.

Are you kidding?

As many fans would be quick to point out, George Romero’s films often have political themes and some of us fools love them even more for it.

I once wrote a review of the 2010 remake of Romero’s THE CRAZIES and lamented the fact the remake traded Romero’s sharp-edged content in for cheap trick, conventional jump scares.

That review included a mention of the scene in Romero’s original where a priest (infected by the virus) self-immolates because of soldiers rousing his flock, a harrowing moment that calls to mind Norman Morrison, the 31-year-old Baltimore Quaker pacifist who carried self-immolation out below Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s Pentagon office to protest American involvement in the Vietnam War, and the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc at a busy Saigon intersection to protest the corrupt South Vietnamese government’s persecution of Buddhist monks.

THE CRAZIES remake did not include such a scene, and that epitomized its lack of balls. (By the way, the references to the priest’s self-immolation in the movie, Morrison, and the Buddhist monk were all excised from the review that printed in the college paper, most likely for space considerations.)

Just thought it was strange that a Romero fan bitched about political conversation, because politics are part and parcel of each and every DEAD movie.

For example, it’s hard not to consider NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in the broader context of 1968 (or any year) America.

The radio and TV news reports about flesh-eating ghouls in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD would have been natural alongside such watershed events as the Tet Offensive, the My Lai Massacre, Lyndon B. Johnson’s announcement that he will not seek or accept presidential renomination, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the riots riots riots all through a turbulent 1968.

(NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was filmed in 1967 and officially released on October 1, 1968.)

When the black protagonist Ben (Duane Jones) gets mistaken for a ghoul, shot in the head and killed by a member of a white mob looking for ghouls, and thrown in a burn pile with the other ghouls at the end of the movie, of course viewers can draw parallels with MLK, Emmett Till, and numerous other horrifying incidents over the years. Or you can just take the scene at face value. Any way you read it, it’s a shocker of an ending.

Casting Jones as Ben changed the dynamic of the movie. Originally, this character was scripted as a white man (according to a 2010 article by Joe Kane that appeared in “The Wrap”), a resourceful but rough and crude-talking trucker. Jones brought a strong presence, an obvious intelligence, and an unmistakable rage to the part that would have been lacking with the original casting plan. The interactions between Ben and Harry Cooper (Karl Hardman) take on another dimension with the racial tension palpable between both men.

I’ll just go ahead and say it: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD would have been a lesser movie without a black male in the lead.

At one point, again from the Kane article, the filmmakers thought about changing the ending to allow Ben to survive. Jones was not having any. “I convinced George that the black community would rather see me dead than saved, after all that had gone on, in a corny and symbolically confusing way,” he said. “The heroes never die in American movies. The jolt of that and the double jolt of the hero figure being black seemed like a double-barreled whammy.”

There’s a multitude of whammies in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

Consider the plight of Mr. Cooper, his wife Helen (Marilyn Eastman), and their 11-year-old daughter Karen (Kyra Schon), who’s seriously ill after being bitten by one of the ghouls. Karen’s in the cellar for the duration of the movie.

Mr. and Mrs. Cooper, why you can just tell they do not get along very well. Understatement of the year. Nearly every word they say to each other, especially from her to him, carries an undercurrent of hostility. We feel there’s no love between the two.

Eventually, Karen dies and becomes one of the flesh-eating ghouls. She first eats her father and then bludgeons her mother with a trowel. The latter sequence calls to mind Detective Arbogast’s encounter with Mother in PSYCHO (1960).

You probably have noticed this sentence is the first mention of Barbra (Judith O’Dea), another main protagonist. She’s definitely the weak link in the movie, the epitome of the helpless female who spends nearly all her screen time in either panic mode or in a catatonic state. She’s not much of a help to anybody, and we delight in her fate near the end of the movie. (In the 1990 remake, Barbra’s more along the lines of Ellen Ripley in the ALIEN movies.)

Russell Streiner, one of the producers of the movie along with Hardman, plays Johnny and he’s absolutely fantastic during his screentime (just a few minutes) in the classic opening cemetery scene. He complains about virtually everything, he gives his uptight sister Barbra a hard time, and he delivers one of the great lines in horror movie history doing the latter, “They’re coming to get you, Barbra.”