Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane
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As people were wont to do concerning the ubiquitous, nerve-numbing news accounts of the latest Vietnam casualty stats, political assassinations, civil unrest, and other routine outrages of the era, Ben only half listens as he dutifully pursues more practical matters. Having discovered the fiends’ fear of fire, he pushes a chair out the door and sets it aflame; the zombies stiffly retreat.
In a hall closet, Ben finds a rifle—and a pair of women’s shoes. He bends down to put the shoes on an awake but frozen Barbara, a gesture that hints of both intimacy and servility; to Ben, the act is purely pragmatic, though we do sense his growing empathy for the terrified girl. The radio reveals that the hordes of unknown slayers are “eating the flesh of the people they kill.” Ben goes upstairs and drags the female corpse down the hallway.
Suddenly, the cellar door swings open. Two men burst forth. Barbara screams. Having assumed the job of Barbara’s protector, Ben rushes downstairs, ready to do battle. He angrily asks the men why they didn’t help them if they knew the two were on the floor above.
The older man, excitable, middle-aged Harry Cooper, responds with equal rancor. Their argument escalates immediately, reflecting the toxic generational discord of the 1960s (where families argued over issues ranging from racism to Vietnam politics to basic life values). Many viewers instantly peg quintessential square Harry, with his bulldozer approach to dissenting opinions, as a petty, bullying know-it-all dad and authority figure. Ben, on the other hand, is a defiant black man, standing in and up for the country’s alienated youth, segregated minorities, disenfranchised poor, and all the oppressed.
Then the Great Basement Debate commences. Should the survivors hole up in the cellar, isolated and blind, as Harry insists, or remain on the first floor, where the enemy’s movements can be monitored and dealt with directly? With Harry representing the Old Right and Ben the New Left, the argument flares with the same intensity that fueled the repetitive political arguments that marked those confrontational times.
The divisive squabble seems to drag on interminably, with each side loudly reiterating its position with no signs of compromise or progress, each more interested in proving its point than coping with a common problem. Tom, meanwhile, plays the role of the undecided youth who listens to both sides and gradually leans toward Ben. That heated discussion is abruptly interrupted by a classic jump scare when, as Ben brushes by, clutching zombie arms suddenly thrust through the boarded window gaps.
Ben and Tom hurriedly beat them back, and then Ben grabs his gun and fires through the window. Bullets, we see, are ineffective against a persistent zombie until Ben drills him through the head. Buoyed by his kill, Ben informs an unhelpful Harry: “You can be the boss down there. I’m boss up here.” Midnight-movie audiences often cheered that moment of underdog defiance.
When her beau summons her from the basement we next meet Tom’s fetching squeeze, Judy. (Like the late Johnny, the two have been lightly touched by slowly spreading ’60s styles, with Tom sporting modest sideburns and Judy bedecked in hip denim jacket and jeans.) As Harry prepares to descend the stairs of ignorance, Tom pleads: “If we work together, man, we can fix it up real good.” 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