Night of the Living Dead

Night of the Living Dead

George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) is not only the single most influential zombie movie of all time, it is also reputed to be one of the first movies to employee color-blind casting. This casting choice actually added an entire racial and historical impact to the film which dramatically strengthened its overall impact. Though the entire movie was revolutionary for its time and genre, the final sequence in which the final main character (the black lead, Ben) is mistaken for a zombie and killed by his long-awaited rescuers is shocking and challenging even to modern film-goers. This is the sequence which is herein analyzed for five characteristics: the plot significance of this segment, the implications of the sequence for the genre, the use of film technique to build and guide the horror, the use of coloration and lighting for narrative purposes, and the various additional methods of manipulating audience sympathies and responses.

The plot of Night of the Living Dead is relatively straightforward. For some unknown reason, perhaps due to radiation from space, the dead are coming back to life animated by the desire to devour flesh. There are six significant living characters trapped in a single house, which belongs to none of them. The lead female Barbara, has come there fleeing from the zombies who ate her brother in a cemetery -- in the end her brother is the one who eats her, as she hesitates to run from him. Ben, the lead male who survives to the end, has come there after a series of misadventures on the road, and has learned a great deal about dealing with the zombies. Hiding in the basement are two married couples (and the sick child of one of them). The first pair is a very young couple, Judy and Tom, who die early on when they are stupid enough to light their own truck on fire in a botched attempt to get gasoline and leave the house for a prearranged shelter. The second set is a scared middle-aged couple, Harry and Helen, both of whom are eventually killed by their daughter after she becomes a zombie.

Over the course of the film, however, one sees the de-evolution of those trapped in the house as stress and fear makes them all more catatonic and/or violent towards one another. As the characters become more zombie-like, it seems to become evident that they will eventually be taken and converted by the zombies. When Ben seemingly avoids this fate, and then in this analyzed sequence is nonetheless perceived as a zombie and thus killed, there is an important plot element which compares the audiences expected final result (the zombification of the characters) with the results the zombie hunters also expect -- and shows how this expectation leads to the death of the heroic lead. In this final sequence, the zombie threat is overcome and a shambling line of armed redneck hunters cross the land armed with rifles and supported by helicopters. They kill all the zombies they encounter. Ben, who hears this sound, emerges from hiding and goes to the window to see who has come. The snipers see him in the window, and despite the fact that he has a gun, they assume he is a zombie and shoot him in the head. He falls roughly dead, and the men come with meat hooks to drag his body off to be burned.

This sequence is vital to understanding the deeper meaning of the film. At the end of the remake of Night of the Living Dead (using a Ramero line borrowed from the sequel, Dawn of the Dead), Barbara cries out, "They're us. We're them and they're us." This is the real key to the meaning of this film -- that the zombies are being used as a commentary on the actual nature of humans when all their culture and restraint is stripped away. It is this final scene, where uninfected humans shoot down another uninfected human, with no more feeling than zombies kill one humans or humans kill zombies, that proves this point. Everything in the sequence contributes to that end.

In order to establish this idea that humans and zombies are essentially the same, this ending sequence subtly but dramatically shifts the genre of the film from fantastical, nightmarish horror into a graphically realistic and historical sort of horror. This film was obviously intended as part of the classic horror genre. Ramero had chosen to shoot in black and white, which linked the content with an era of older classic films (such as the Universal Dracula, or Frankenstein) and like these he used a great deal of ominous shadows and dramatic monsters. The basic plot of humans against supernatural foes, which had existed consistently in horror films up to this day is very nicely portrayed here with the monstrous, cannibalistic, shambling hordes. Ramero additionally brings in a somewhat modern element regarding the fears of radiation which had previously been seen in many B-style horror and science fiction films about atomic monsters. The horror genre has been clear throughout the film, in a variety of conventions that are dealt with and considered. The stereotype of the mindless bimbo who falls prey to the monster is there in Barbara. The brave hero is present in Ben. The hopeless common folk blinded by tradition or fear are adequately represented in Harry, who so frequently opposes Ben. Of course, the use of cemeteries, of taxidermic animals, of dramatic shadows and light, of creepy background music, and so forth, all add to the horror genre classification and are the standard fare of fantasy horror. Yet if this were all the movie had to offer it would be less than revolutionary. The final sequence subtly changes from this fantasy-horror genre and wrenches the moment into the present, bringing in imagery of racial riots and unrest, of man's inhumanity to man, and of historical horrors such as the holocaust.

This transition is developed in several ways. First, the historical feel is aided by the presence of strong reminders of the present, such as newsreel like style of the footage which shows arriving helicopters, or the vaguely "home video" feel that one has regarding the footage of hunters. This is aided as well by the sound effects such as constant radio reports, the static, canned sound of the dialogue in this section compared to the rest of the movie, and the loudness of the dogs and sirens. However, the majority of this historical feel is brought about immediately after the death of Ben. At this point, the film switches suddenly to being a series of black and white still images that have a grainy, pixelated feel as if they had been printed in an old half-tome newspaper style. These images show a sheriff and many white men with meat hooks and rifles standing around the body of this fallen black man. Another photo shows them hooking him and dragging him, and another of the men carrying him. There is a striking resemblance between these images and the surviving photographs of lynching parties that had been so frequent in the last thirty years before the making of this film. Many times blacks were lynched by large parties of white men, and mutilated, while their killers posed for proud photos. After a few beats of this, the pictures slowly shift to portraying the piled zombie corpses that are being prepared to be burned. These corpses all have sunken cheeks and darkened eyes, and the way the bodies lie upon one another is strikingly visually reminiscent of the way in which photographs of the Holocaust show bodies of Jewish victims in mass burials. Combining the way in which the live-action sequences of the hunters was shot (as if it were a news reel rather than a carefully planned art film) with the way these photographs suggest a hard reality, the sense of fantasy careful inculcated by the dramatic shadows and dialogue of the earlier segments is here shattered by a strange realism. By making this shift from fantasy to historical horror, the idea that humans are as bad as the zombies is clearly driven home.

The key to bringing this shift home and keeping the audience responsive is intrinsic in the film-making technique used throughout this sequence. Up until the point where it switches to stills, the cuts become increasingly rapid-fire and jagged, so that even in sustained actions scenes there begin to be frequent sudden disjointing cuts. This helps to increase a sense of fear and edginess among viewers who might otherwise be tempted to relax now that the "good guys" were winning. The rapidity of these cuts increases from a relatively steady pace at the beginning of the sequence until at the end there are cuts happening so quickly that four cuts will pass in the moment it takes a man to aim a gun, fire, hit his target, and pull his gun back. Nor are all these rapid cuts necessary to tell a simultaneously occurring story, though there is a degree to which the viewer is watching two locations at once. Even in shots that might be steady, such as the sheriff is standing and talking to his men, frequent cuts are used in place of slow zooms or pans to shift the eye's focus.

Ramero uses scale to great advantage in this sequence to help build a sense of detachment from all the humans character. This detachment of course feeds into the audience's ability to accept the lesson that "we're them." This sense of scale begins with the very distant helicopter, which is so small and isolated on the screen. This proceeds to showing the hunters as tiny, wrong-ways-up specks on the ground. It is impossible to tell from the air whether the hunters are men or zombies, because they are so distant. This distant scale cuts into a close shot of the hunters walking, with the helicopter in the background. At this point the shots begin to become more disjointed. There is a cut to a helicopter landing, with more hunters panning into the shot. Another cut shows a cop car coming across the bridge, and then there are very close, consecutive shots of the dogs getting out of the cars. From there the shots cut to a seated hunter, and pans to receive other hunters into its view. What is important here about scale is that none of the other characters every quite seem to fit into the shot. Whereas much of the film had careful framing, particularly in contemplative or humane moments (moments associated more with violence and zombies became less framed), this segment seems to disassociate people from their entire bodies. Sides, heads, torsos, and so forth will all be cut off in odd ways. This too, in addition to being an instance of framing, is an instance of scale -- humans are tiny in the world at large, but among themselves they are too big (perhaps too "full of themselves") to be able to be seen and understood completely by others. Ben in particular, when he is shown walking about the house, consistently has his head cut off in the shots, which may foreshadow his oncoming loss of his brain to a bullet. Of course, when Ben is not active, when he is contemplative and hiding, then the picture shows him to be central and carefully framed and scaled as a central figure. This reminds we, as an audience, emphasize with him, but (as the shift in his scale will show) he too is us and not us.

At the end of this sequence, the technique of panning around photographs is perhaps one of the most important of the technical choices made at that point. This break from traditional narrative film-making is excused by the fact that the credits are being (as unobtrusively as possible) displayed at this time, which relaxes some of the expectations of the audience regarding what "should be" happening at this time. Yet these images are in no way secondary to the rest of the sequence, for they fulfill its central purpose of creating horror at the meaninglessness and cruelty of Ben's death. The use of halftone photographs gets across a sense of history in the making and of historical and social importance which could hardly be achieved as successfully through a simple live-action ending.

Another important building block both in this shift from fantasy to social commentary and also in the force of that social comment, is Ramero's use of lighting and color as narrative choices. At the beginning of the end sequence, he uses very stark black and white tones to paint the trees against the sky, or the helicopter against the clouds. This serves to remind one of the dramatic nature of the horror and the story. Subsequently, however, the scenes with the police and the hunters are all very bright. Shadow, where used, is thin and gray. There is a very strong realism to the lighting as if it were indeed shot entirely with a hand-held camera in the daylight for archival purposes. This helps to create the historical feel. However, on the first shots which switch from this day lit scene into the house, one sees a very dramatically lit scene. Ben is still in the fantasy-horror world. Half his face and form is hidden in darkness, while the other side is brightly lit. The intense shadows and shapes recall to one many of the forms and lighting techniques which existed among the horrific zombies in the night that just passed. As long as Ben remains in these intense shadows, he is part of that world. Yet when he emerges from the basement and into the living room, he too takes on a bright realistic lighting. There is a sense of the docudrama in the lighting in which he dies, though the shadows emerge again in the use of still photography.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating uses of color in this sequence is the subtle way in which costume colors are used to identify Ben with the zombies. Throughout the final sequence, all of the zombies (and Ben) are primarily dressed in white or light gray colors, especially from the waste up. The women wear light colored dresses; the men wear white shirts, and Ben dresses in light colors on top and bottom. Nor is this just a function of the clothing styles of the era, for at the beginning of the film most of the zombies had been in dark colors, and even a few scenes before at least half the zombies had been dressed in dark or mixed colors. At the very end, the human hunters are dressed about equally in light and dark colors. The zombies, however, all have about them this almost otherworldly glow from the light colors with which they are associated. This glowing "whiteness" is a link between the zombies, and at this point Ben too is symbolically become white with them. There is a degree to which one could read racial motivation into this choice. Ben is the only non-white character in the film. The zombies are white, and the hunters are white. So there is some degree to which the white forces are attacking this black man -- and at the end, after he has compromised his ideals and hid in Harry's basement or allowed his companions to be killed, or killed them himself -- he too becomes symbolically white. Of course his clothes are light colored throughout, but there is a particular radiance to them in the sunlight which did not exist before. Of course, the use of white to characterize the zombies could also refer visually to the idea of ghosts, or even to the idea of purity which is being destroyed by the hunters who, in turn, have become the calloused predators.

As this brief discussion of possible racial readings in the color choice suggests, this sequence is one which depends strongly on audience perspective and can be considered as simply or as sociologically complex as one wishes. There is a very large degree to which this sequence seeks to manipulate audience perspective, emotion, and expectation. This is done both for artistic effect and, on assumes, to help make the social point regarding the zombie-self.

The audience's expectations are thwarted in numerous ways in this sequence. At the beginning, there are sounds of birds singing, and the light of sunrise and sound of birds seems to imply, quietly, that everything will now end well. The presence of a helicopter actually seems to encourage that thought, for all night Ben and the others have been waiting to be rescued, and it seems likely that a helicopter shows the presence of rescuers. When lines of slowly shambling hunters are seen, they may immediately appear to be zombies. When the next cut shows that they are human, a subtle connection between the humans and zombies is made -- but just as importantly, the audience is once more led to believe that things will now resolve well. The following shots both inside and outside the house indicate that the zombie mess is being quickly cleared up and that Ben has successfully weathered the storm. Then, as Ben goes to the window, with hardly any warning whatsoever, the hunters see him and abruptly take aim and shoot him. This is of course not what the audience was expecting, and that shock opens them up to a horror with the humans for their blindness and their conspicuous lack of reasonable precautions when shooting other human bodies. (if the sniper could see well enough to take a shot through Ben's brain, could he not also see well enough to tell that this man was holding a gun and was not a zombie?) it is precisely this outrage that opens the audience to the two guiding lessons -- that humans are no less brutal than zombies, and that this sort of thing is a historical/social reality.