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company at that time, and we would each go to work at separate typewriters whenever we could make time; in other words, whenever we weren’t making TV spots about ketchup, pickles, or beer. I said to George that whatever kind of script we came up with ought to start in a cemetery, because people were scared of cemeteries and found them spooky. I started writing a screenplay about aliens who were prowling Earth in search of human flesh. Meantime, over a Christmas break in 1967, George came up with forty pages of a story that did actually start in a cemetery and in essence was the first half of what eventually became Night of the Living Dead, although we didn’t give it that title till after we were done shooting.

      I said to George that I really liked his story. It had the right pace and feel to it, and I was hooked by the action and suspense and the twists and turns. But I was also puzzled because “You have these people being attacked, but you never say who the attackers are, so who are they?” George said he didn’t know. I said, “Seems to me they could be dead people.”

      He said, “That’s good.” And then I said, “But you never say what they’re after. They attack, but they don’t bite, so why are they attacking?”

      He said he didn’t know, and I suggested, “Why don’t we use my flesh-eating idea?”

      So that’s how the attackers in our movie became flesh-eating zombies. In our persistent striving for a good, fresh premise, we succeeded in combining some of the best elements of the vampire, werewolf, and zombie myths into one hellacious ball of wax.

      Zombies weren’t heavyweight fright material until we made them into flesh-eaters. In all the zombie flicks I had seen up till then—most notably Val Lewton movies like I Walked with a Zombie—the “walking dead” would stumble around and occasionally choke somebody or throw somebody against a wall, or maybe, in the extreme, carry off a heroine to some sort of lurid fate—but they were never as awe-inspiring as vampires or werewolves. They were meant to be scary, but they were always a little disappointing.

      Night of the Living Dead struck an atavistic chord in people. It was the fear of death magnified exponentially. Not only were you afraid to die, you were afraid to become “undead.” Afraid to be attacked by a dead loved one. And afraid of what you might do to your loved one if you, by being bitten, became one of the flesh-hungry undead that you feared.

      Soon after our discussions, George Romero got tied up by an important commercial client and I took over screenwriting chores. That was the way we worked in those days. We spelled each other when necessary. And we all felt it was necessary to keep the ball rolling in these early stages so that our dream of making our first feature movie would not die.

      In refining our concept, ideas were bandied about by me, George Romero, Russ Streiner, and others in our immediate group. Then I rewrote George’s first forty pages, putting them into screenplay format, and went on to complete the second half of the script. I wanted our story to be honest, relentless, and uncompromising. I wanted to live up to the standard set by two of my favorite genre movies—the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Forbidden Planet (with its “monsters from the id”)—and I hoped we could cause audiences to walk out of the theater with the same stunned looks on their faces that had been produced by those two classics. That is why I suggested that our indomitable hero, Ben (played by Duane Jones), should be killed by the posse that should have saved him. I said, “Pennsylvania is a big deer-hunting state, and every year three or four hundred thousand deer are shot—and ten or twelve hunters. With all these posse guys running around in the woods, gunning down ghouls, somebody is gonna be shot by accident, and wouldn’t it be ironic if it’s our hero?”

      This idea got incorporated into the original screenplay as did other ideas, which were implemented during filming. For instance, the “Barbra” character, played by Judith O’Dea, survives in the screenplay as written—but we decided it would be better if her brother “Johnny” came back and dragged her out of the house to be devoured.

      It wasn’t until 1973, after the movie had enjoyed six-plus years of phenomenal success, that I wrote the novel that was initially published by Warner Books. In the intervening years, Russ Streiner, Rudy Ricci, and I developed a screenplay for a sequel, Return of the Living Dead, which I later novelized. You are right now holding both original novels in your hands, appearing together for the first time, in this beautiful trade paperback.

      I also wrote the novelization of Dan O’Bannon’s movie version of Return of the Living Dead, a hit in its own right. But the totally different novel you will read now is our very first conception—of stark horror. Not a horror comedy, but stark horror in the vein of Night of the Living Dead.

      If the dead really did arise, and if they became flesh-eaters, they might be temporarily vanquished—but like a disease that is hard to stamp out, the possibility of a renewed “plague” would always be with us. Religious cults would spring up in the wake of the undead. Maybe they would believe that the dead still needed to be burned or “spiked.” And then what would happen? Would the cult’s grisly expectations be realized? Would the flesh-eaters come back? This was the question that we sought to answer in a powerfully dramatic way in our follow-up story. Which is decidedly unfunny. In other words, unlike the movie, it is not a horror comedy.

      If you like good, strong horror—horror that you can believe in—I welcome you to the deliciously terrifying, no-holds-barred, gloves-off world of the original Night of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead.

      John Russo

       Pittsburgh, PA

       February 2010

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

      CHAPTER 1

      Think of all the people who have lived and died and will never see the trees or the grass or the sun any more.

      It all seems so brief, so worth…nothing. Doesn’t it? To live for a while and then die? It all seems to add up to so very little.

      Yet in a way, it is easy to envy the dead ones.

      They are beyond living, and beyond dying.

      They are lucky to be dead, to be done with dying and not have to live any more. To be under the ground, oblivious…oblivious of hurting, oblivious of the fear of dying.

      They do not have to live any more. Or die any more. Or feel pain. Or accomplish anything. Or wonder what to do next. Or wonder what it is going to be like to have to go through dying.

      Why does life seem so ugly and beautiful and sad and important while you are living it, and so trivial when it is over?

      Life smolders a while and then dies and the graves wait patiently to be filled, and the end of all life is death, and the new life sings happily in the breeze and neither knows nor cares anything about the old life, and then it in turn dies also.

      Life is a constant turning over into graves. Things live and then die, and sometimes they live well and sometimes poorly, but they always die, and death is the one thing that reduces all things to the least common denominator.

      What is it that makes people afraid of dying?

      Not the pain.

      Not always.

      Death can be instantaneous and almost painless.

      Death itself is an end to pain.

      Then why are people afraid to die?

      What things might we learn from those who are dead, if they find the means to return to us?

      If they come back from the dead?

      Will they be our friends? Or our enemies?

      Will we be able to deal with them? We…who have never conquered our fear of confronting death.

      At dusk, they finally spotted the tiny church. It was way back off the road, nearly hidden in a clump of maple trees, and if they had not found it before dark they probably would not have found it at all.

      It was the cemetery behind the church that was the objective of their journey. And they had hunted for it

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