LITMIR.BIZ

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But, then as now, that’s not happening with Harry and his kind.

      In the basement, we meet the rest of our cast—Harry’s frustrated wife, Helen, and their sick, supine daughter, Karen. When Harry apprises Helen of his unilateral decision to defend their underground Alamo at all costs, Helen spits out, “That’s important, isn’t it? To be right and everybody else to be wrong?” The disenchanted spouses struck many younger viewers as the types who’d likely married for the wrong reasons (sex for Harry, security for Helen) and now, in early middle age, are in too deep to go their separate ways. As soon as Helen hears about the upstairs radio, the basement debate rages anew in what’s becoming one of the most fractious films to surface since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

      Tom calls down that they also found a television. Judy agrees to take Helen’s place in the cellar and look after Karen. Helen thanks her with a heartfelt, “She’s all I have.” (Harry, understandably, doesn’t fit into her equation.) When Harry announces his intention to take Barbara downstairs, Ben grows more fiercely protective: “If you stay up here, you take orders from me—and that includes leaving that girl alone.”

      TV reports, meanwhile, elaborate on the earlier radio bulletins about “creatures who feed on the flesh of their victims.” Viewers are strongly advised to burn their unburied dead—immediately: “The bereaved will have to forgo the dubious comforts a funeral service will give.” The locations of emergency rescue stations appear on screen, while speculation about a “Venus space vehicle” spreading radiation adds to the panic. We see a live remote from Washington, D.C., where waffling authorities can’t agree on the significance of those rumors while they’re trailed by a crew of desperate newsmen.

      Inside the farmhouse, everyone is in momentary agreement that they should hie to the nearest rescue station. To accomplish that goal, they need to unlock a gas pump to fill Ben’s borrowed truck. The plan calls for scattering the cannibals by tossing Molotov cocktails into their midst. Ben and Tom volunteer to undertake the risky mission.

      Before that happens, the film breaks for a rare mellow interlude, a sentimental dialogue between young lovers Tom and Judy. As their exchange unfolds, they calmly prepare the Molotov cocktails, not unlike contemporaneous real-life radicals, a parallel not lost on the movie’s midnight viewers.

      Harry throws a few flammable jars from an upstairs window. One zombie catches fire, while the rest scatter. Ben and Tom make their move, with Tom hustling to the truck. Judy impulsively decides to join him, running out of the house amid the predatory dead. Not a good idea.

      Ben attempts to hold the creatures off. When he shoots the lock off the pump, his torch is left burning on the ground. Tom clumsily swings the hose, spraying the torch and spreading the fire. Ben tries to tame the burgeoning blaze with a blanket as Tom and Judy scramble for the truck. Too late: The engine ignites. Tom manages to tumble out the door, but Judy’s jacket gets caught on the handle. When Tom dives back in to rescue her, the truck explodes and the lovers are consumed in an instant inferno.

      Ben then back-steps his way to the house, wielding his torch for protection. At first, Harry refuses to open the door, then relents and aids Ben in boarding it up. More transgressive moments for the times: Black Ben proceeds to beat the tar out of white Harry, while the flesh-famished zombies—former friends, neighbors and just plain folks—enjoy an alfresco Tom and Judy barbeque, visually conveyed via unprecedented gut-munching close-ups. (While Florida exploiteer and gore movie co-inventor [with partner David F. Friedman] Herschell Gordon Lewis had been splattering the screen with more explicit grue since his 1963 breakthrough Blood Feast, his campy, borderline amateur films furnished none of the impact of Night’s terrifying tableaux.) The feast, meantime, can be—and, in midnight circles, often was—interpreted as a destructive society literally devouring its young.

      Back in the house, order is temporarily restored. Ben, Helen, and Harry discuss the possibility of finding the Coopers’s abandoned car, a notion the battered Harry predictably dismisses out of hand. We also learn that little Karen has been bitten by one of the “things.” Further TV reports confirm Ben’s empirical findings that a “ghoul” can be destroyed by a bullet to the head (“Kill the brain and you kill the ghoul”). On screen, roving cops and posse members—who look like the types frequently seen beating up black and youthful protestors on nightly news segments—scour the countryside on a search-and-destroy mission.

      Inside the farmhouse, the electricity goes out; the zombies take advantage by launching a fresh offensive. Helen holds the door shut, while Harry again hangs back. When Ben drops his rifle to help Helen, Harry grabs the gun and orders his wife down into the basement. Ben tackles him. A fierce struggle ensues. Ben gains control of the weapon and, drained of patience, shoots Harry in cold blood. Harry staggers down the cellar steps. In his dying act, he tries to touch daughter Karen.

      Upstairs, Barbara snaps out of her trance and pushes herself against the door, enabling Helen to break free. Then we shock-cut to one of the reigning money shots in horror-film history: A zombified Karen chowing down on her dead dad’s severed arm. When Helen appears, Karen abruptly drops the hunk of raw father flesh and stalks mom, who falls during her disbelieving backward retreat. Karen retrieves a trowel and gets busy, stabbing mom to death as blood splashes the wall.

      Then we shock-cut to one of the reigning money shots in horror-film history: A zombified Karen chowing down on her dead dad’s severed arm.

      We’re down again to the original two, Ben and Barbara, trying to halt the zombie assault. Johnny makes his dramatic zombie entrance and reclaims sister Barbara, pulling her out the door into the cannibals’ midst; instinctively, she wraps her arms around her brother, half-resisting, half-succumbing.

      Now Ben is the last of the farmhouse Mohicans. As the zombie from the opening-scene cemetery climbs through a window, Ben belatedly follows the late, hated Harry’s advice and barricades himself in the basement, though not before tossing little zombie Karen across the room.

      Once downstairs, Ben wearily, warily surveys Harry and Helen’s bodies. Suddenly, Harry’s eyes pop open and Ben seizes the opportunity to kill him again, pumping three bullets into his brain. This time, the act carries no sense of triumph. Moments later, he’s forced to do the same for Helen. Upstairs, the thwarted dead mill aimlessly, sans purpose or direction.

      Outside, the scene resembles a post-combat Vietnam morning; as a helicopter buzzes overhead, we can almost smell the napalm. We see an aerial view of Sheriff McClelland’s posse crossing the field on foot, guns at the ready. A newsman intercepts the sheriff for an on-the-spot interview, leading to the following deathless exchange:

      NEWSMAN: Chief, if I were surrounded by six or eight of these things, would I stand a chance with them?

      SHERIFF: Well, there’s no problem. If you had a gun, shoot ’em in the head, that’s a sure way to kill ’em. If you don’t, get yourself a club or a torch. Beat ’em or burn ’em, they go up pretty easy.

      NEWSMAN: Are they slow-moving, Chief?

      SHERIFF: Yeah, they’re dead. They’re…all messed up.

      Cut briefly to Ben in the basement, then back to the posse and police systematically executing the retreating zombies, whose nocturnal uprising looks to have faded with the morning light as authorities easily quell the rebellion. Ben hears the activity and, with measured hope, climbs the stairs. When he peers out the window, a rifle shot from a posse member terminates his life. All that remains is the mop-up, as Ben is dragged, “another one for the fire,” to a mass funeral pyre in a crushing photo montage as the stark credits appear.

      The zeitgeist had been captured in a low-budget film can. In the parlance of the day, Night of the Living Dead had crawled out of nowhere to liberate the horror movie. That is indeed The End for the devastated viewer. But how did this dark cinematic miracle begin?

      SHERIFF: Well, there’s no problem. If you had a gun, shoot ’em in the head, that’s a sure way to kill ’em. If you don’t, get yourself a club or a torch. Beat ’em or burn ’em, they go up pretty easy.

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      BIRTH

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