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Introduction to The Living Dead

      3. Birth of The Living Dead

       A Night to Remember: Frank Henenlotter

      4. Casting a Cult Classic

       A Night to Remember: Allan Arkush

      5. Shooting The Dead

       A Night to Remember: William Lustig

      6. March to Midnight

       A Night to Remember: Larry Fessenden

      7. Afterlife of The Living Dead

       A Night to Dismember: Lloyd Kaufman

      8. Going Crazies

       Fest of the Living Dead: Gary Streiner

      9. Dawn of the Dead

       Zombie Movie Milestones: Roy Frumkes, on Document of the Dead

      10. Duel of The Dead

       Zombie Movie Milestones: Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator

      11. Desecration of The Dead

       Zombie Movie Milestones: Peter Jackson, on Dead Alive

      12. Desecration of The Dead, Part 2: The Sequel

       Zombie Movie Milestones: Danny Boyle, on 28 Days Later

      13. Rebirth of The Living Dead: The Promised Land

      14. Dead Ahead

      Your Official “Z”wards

      Epilogue of The Living Dead: Where Are They Now?

      Night of the Digital Dead: Your Official Living Dead Film and DVD List

      Sources

      Screenplay of The Living Dead

      FOREWORD

      A Night to Remember:

      What the Living Dead Means to Me

      by Wes Craven

      Seeing George’s masterpiece for the first time is a vivid memory for me. I was just newly in New York, working at some lowly position, not yet having directed, when a friend of mine asked if I’d like to go see this film called Night of the Living Dead. “Sounds dumb,” I said, not knowing anything about it, and having never seen a horror film in my life. “But it’s supposed to be fun,” my friend said. “A happening.” So I said okay, and off we went to the Waverly in Greenwich Village. The theater was packed, even though the film had been out a long while already. Everybody was buzzing with excitement, running up and down the aisles for final Cokes and popcorn, leaning over the seats talking to each other. Then the lights went down. And that brother-sister duo started their scene, arguing over their dad’s grave, or whatever it was. So what’s the big deal, I thought. And then I saw that strange, lurching figure in the deep background appear. Coming toward these two rather annoying people, the first yells started—and then screams and nervous laughter. I realized I was scared already—something about that guy is not right!

      Well, you know the rest. He attacks, the annoying guy is toast, and as all hell breaks loose, the screaming girl begins running for her life. An hour and a half or so later, after countless yells, screams, and hoots—plus huge laughter—there comes the moment of realization that, hey, this movie is about something as well. And beyond all of that, there’s the fact that I’d never, ever been in a theater where that kind of energy, delight, and raw fear took over 300 people and welded them all into one big quaking blob of humanity in extremis and loving it.

      That movie, more than anything else I can think of, liberated me to make Last House on the Left, because I knew that after that there was a whole new kind of film blossoming in American cinema. It was something hybrid that mixed terror and laughter and social comment into one heady, totally unpredictable witches’ brew of entertainment unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.

      Unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.

      I was hooked, and it’s George’s fault.

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      Special thanks to (in alphabetical order) Tim Ferrante and Roy Frumkes, good friends and film scholars who went above and beyond the call in helping with the creation of this tome, and my editor Gary Goldstein.

      The entire Night of the Living Dead team, with super-loud shout-outs to Judith O’Dea, George Romero, John Russo, Kyra Schon and Gary Streiner.

      Also…filmmakers par excellence and fellow Night fans Allan Arkush, Danny Boyle, Max Allan Collins, Wes Craven, Larry Fessenden, Frank Henenlotter, Peter Jackson, Lloyd Kaufman, and William Lustig.

      Plus…Brian Boucher, Paul Bresnick, Jeff Carney, Jim Cirronella, Jeffrey Combs, Joe Dante, Eric Danville, Terry & Tiffany DuFoe, Rob Freese, Paul R. Gagne, Stuart Gordon, Kevin Hein, James Karen, Lynn Lowry, Joan Kane Nichols, Gil Reavill, Debbie Rochon, Tony Timpone, Tom Towles, Scott Voisin, Calum Waddell, Tom Weaver.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

      1

      ANCESTORS OF THE LIVING DEAD

      I didn’t mean to invent the new zombies. I never called them zombies. They were those big-eyed cats in the Caribbean.

      —George Romero, Zombie Mania

      Don’t say that living dead stuff, boss. I’m one of the living living. But you give me the feeling that if I stay around here, I’m gonna be one of the dead dead.

      —Nick O’Demus, Zombies on Broadway

      The living dead didn’t suddenly spring forth, fully formed and famished, in 1960s Pittsburgh. On the contrary, they have been with us, in one incarnation or another, nearly as long as life itself. Of Western Civ’s five cornerstone pop-culture creatures—Dracula and vampires, the Frankenstein Monster, the Mummy, zombies, and werewolves—all save the last mentioned, technically, fit into the living dead category. The concept of the zombie represents the newest of the group, initially popularized by sensationalist travel writer William Seabrook, the print equivalent of jungle explorers Martin and Osa Johnson, whose lurid, often casually racist and generally xenophobic celluloid safaris (e.g., Baboona, Congorilla) flourished on 1920s and ’30s screens. Seabrook’s influential 1929 book The Magic Island told of deceased Haitians, frequently victims of voodoo vengeance, taken from their graves and forced to toil as slaves for their rapacious re-animators.

      At the time, Universal Pictures ruled as Hollywood’s unchallenged fright-film frontrunner. The studio even surpassed Lon Chaney’s fabled silent reign as Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), among other fantastic characters, by bringing Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the sound screen in 1931, The Mummy the following year, and introducing two new terror titans to replace the by then late Lon—Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. But it was the independent Halperin brothers, director Victor and producer Edward, who surprisingly beat that mighty Tinseltown outfit to the zombie punch with their classic and trendsetting White Zombie in 1932.

      The film adheres fairly closely to the zombie rules set forth in Seabrook’s book. In this creepy shocker, Dracula alum Bela Lugosi cuts a memorably menacing figure as evil-eyed zombie master “Murder” Legendre. He employs a powerful powder to reduce the living to a catatonic state (a fate that befalls drugged ingénue Madge Bellamy) and keep revived corpses obediently working in his sugar mill: The sight of those eerie, dull-eyed drones endlessly pushing the creaking mill wheel remains one of the most indelible images in the whole of horror-film history. Unlike George Romero’s future living dead to come, these early zombies function with no will of their own, killing only on command from their human overseers.

      The Halperins struck out in their

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