NIGHT OF THE LIVING
DEAD
GEORGE ROMERO 1968
Meaning
• Text: the meaning created by either written
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word, images or moving images
Does the Canon matter?
“What was the film about?”
“What does the film say?”
Does the author ultimately matter? The
original intent?
Latent Image
• After graduating Carnegie Mellon University
George Romero formed a film company
(Latent Image)
• In 1967 after having a successful business
Romero along with his partners came up
with the idea for Night of the Living Dead
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• Romero’s company contacted Pittsburgh-
based industrial film firm called Hardman
Associates, Inc., and pitched their idea for a
then-untitled horror film
• Romero’s Company joined with them and
formed
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• They raised 114,000 for Night of the Living
Dead
Low Budget Film
• Black and White Film Stock
• A “Cheap Monster Movie”
• Shot north of Pittsburgh in rural
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Butler County
Concept with minimal special
effects
Blood is chocolate syrup and the
entrails/flesh came from an actor
who owned a chain of butcher
shops
$114,000
After a decade of re-releases it
made 30 million internationally
Historical Context
• Vietnam era United States
• Race Relations (Casting Duane Jones
as the hero was in 1968, potentially
controversial)
• In 1964,[2] Poitier became the first
black person to win an Academy Award
for Best Actor,[3] for his role in Lilies of
the Field.[Guess Who's Coming to
Dinner 1967—top box office star
• Assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr.
and Malcolm X
• Counterculture
Premiered on October 1, 1968 at the Fulton
Theater in Pittsburgh as a Saturday afternoon
matinee—preteens and adolescents were there.
The rating system wasn’t present until
November of 1968, so children were present.
"They were used to going to movies, sure, and
they'd seen some horror movies before, sure,
but this was something else." According to
Roger Ebert(who was present), the film affected
the audience immediately.
Themes
• Like Franz Kafka's (1992)
classic story of 1914,
"Metamorphosis” it
dramatizes the bewildering
and uncanny
transformation of human
beings into non-human
forms. --Bright Lights Film
Journal
Genre Elements
• Science Fiction:
Macrocosmic
• Horror: Microcosmic
Plausibility
• Zombie Outbreak (fantastical)
• Documentary like feel
• Still photographs
• Audience is asked to believe
that the horrific events
depicted could be happening
(now.)
• Asks us to believe that there
are rational explanations for
the zombie's existence
Taboo
Taboo: is a strong social
prohibition (or ban)
relating to any area of
human activity or social
custom that is sacred
and forbidden
Cannibalism
Matricide
Structure
• beginning (the
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graveyard scene),
a middle (the defense of
the farmhouse)
end (conclusion)
there are no forward
jumps or flashbacks
(seemingly real time)
the film's uncomplicated
narrative structure
produces a
concentrated, taut
drama, uncompromised
by digressions or
subplots.
Order/Disorder
• Does the possibility not exist of narrative moving toward
the establishment of a different order, or, quite simply,
toward irreparable and irreversible breakdown (which
would leave the reader/viewer the options of despair or
the task of imagining alternatives)? (Wood, 2003: 220)
• Raymond Williams' argument, in his Modern Tragedy
(1966), that tragedy consists not simply in the deaths of
great leaders, but in the heroic and pointless destruction
of "ordinary" people in their struggles for democracy.
Obsession with Apocalypse
• America is about radical social change and indicates, he
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argues, just how concerned America is to preserve the
status quo.
Romero's film emerged at a time of strong public
disapproval of the American military involvement in
Vietnam, during which criticisms of patriotism — while
deeply offensive to the American establishment — were
becoming commonplace.
nuclear holocaust
(Christian) resurrected on Judgment Day: indeed, like
their biblical counterparts, they are mute.
Freudian terms, the "return of the repressed"
Communication, Alienation, and Isolation
• interpersonal communication through
dialogue
• focusing on the ways in which our
preconceptions of others make us
suspicious and even hostile towards
them, and the lies we tell to ourselves
and to others.
• The media is omnipresent. Early in the
film, there is a lengthy scene in which
Ben and Barbra don't speak, but listen
to the radio
• who is the enemy? At first it seems
obvious that it is the zombies; later,
however, as the paranoid human
beings fight among themselves, the
distinction between human beings and
zombies becomes blurred.
• Human failure of cooperation
• Cooper locking himself up in basement
• restoration of family values is seen as the answer to
social problems in many other films—(denied in this film)
• Night of the Living Dead is set at a time of racial upheaval
and protest in America.
• At the time, to many people, it seemed as though there
might be a race war in America. Conservative, reactionary
discussions of this possibility often focused — as they
sometimes do today — on the possibility that "we" might
soon be outnumbered by "them.”
Hegemony
• Domination of a diverse culture by a ruling class
• Beliefs, explanations, perceptions and values
• Perpetuates universally dominant ideology that
justifies the social, political and economic status
quo as natural, inevitable perpetual and beneficial
for everyone
• The absence of the identity of the ruling class
(they are invisible while all others have an
identity)
• “I don’t see race”
Gender
• Women are
represented as
weak, hysterical
and infantilized
• What emotions are you feeling at the end of this film?
• How does your experience of this film differ from other
horror films that you have seen?
• If the social upheaval of the late 60’s made the zombie
apocalypse resonate then, what makes it resonate today?
Where do we see dominance play out?
• Race
• Gender
• Religion
• What else?