Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Night of the Living Dead (1968) is George A. Romero’s independent horror film about a handful of strangers boarded up in a Pennsylvania farmhouse while the recently dead walk. Romero directed and co-wrote it with John A. Russo. It premiered in Pittsburgh on October 1, 1968. Duane Jones and Judith O’Dea lead the cast. Shot for a little over $100,000, it redrew the zombie as a modern, contagious, flesh-eating corpse and became one of the most influential horror films ever made, in part because a copyright error dropped it into the public domain.

At a glance

Release date	October 1, 1968 (Pittsburgh premiere)
Director	George A. Romero
Writers	George A. Romero and John A. Russo
Starring	Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Keith Wayne, Judith Ridley
Runtime	96 minutes
Genre	Zombie horror
Budget	About $114,000 to $125,000
Box office	Estimates vary widely; often cited around $12 million to $30 million worldwide, hard to audit because of the public-domain status

Plot summary

Barbra and her brother Johnny drive to a cemetery to put flowers on their father’s grave. A shuffling man attacks them. Johnny is killed. Barbra runs to a farmhouse and finds a half-eaten corpse upstairs. Ben, a man who has already survived one encounter on the road, arrives and boards the windows. A radio and then a television explain that the murderers are the unburied dead, and that a Venus probe blowing up in the atmosphere is the theory officials are willing to say out loud.

More people have been hiding in the cellar: Harry Cooper, his wife Helen, their injured daughter Karen, and a young couple, Tom and Judy. Harry wants everyone below ground. Ben wants the doors barred and a way out. The argument is the movie. The dead are slow. The living are not on the same side. A plan to fuel a truck at a nearby pump goes wrong. The night gets into the house anyway.

Spoiler section: the ending

Karen dies of her bite and kills her mother. Harry is shot in the struggle with Ben and then finished by his daughter. Barbra is pulled into the swarm. Ben lasts until morning in the cellar. A posse of armed locals, clearing the fields, sees him at a window and shoots him. His body is dragged to the same bonfire as the corpses. The end credits run over still photographs of that cleanup.

Production and behind the scenes

Romero and a group of Pittsburgh commercial filmmakers formed Image Ten to make a feature. The budget was raised in small shares. They shot on black-and-white 35mm in and around Evans City, Pennsylvania, using a farmhouse slated for demolition and a cemetery the local association let them use. The cast and crew doubled as the ghouls. Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman, who play the Coopers, were also producers. Chocolate syrup stood in for blood. The meat the ghouls handle was donated butcher stock.

Jones, a Black stage actor, was cast as Ben because he was the best reader, not as a statement the producers had written into the script. In 1968 the choice changed the film. Ben is the most competent person in the house, and the ending does not reward him for it. Romero said later that he did not write the role for a Black actor and that he recognized what the casting had done only when the film was finished. The argument in the farmhouse, cooperation against a threat versus a man who would rather be in charge of the cellar, has been read as a Vietnam-era and civil-rights-era picture ever since. The film supports that reading without announcing it.

The original title was Night of the Flesh Eaters. The Walter Reade Organization, which distributed it, changed the title to Night of the Living Dead and did not put a copyright notice on the prints. Under the law at the time, that omission put the film in the public domain. Romero and his partners missed out on a fortune in later licensing. The upside for the culture was that the film could be shown everywhere, copied, and argued over. Romero’s later Dead films, beginning with Dawn of the Dead (1978), were copyrighted properly.

Cast

Duane Jones as Ben
Judith O’Dea as Barbra
Karl Hardman as Harry Cooper
Marilyn Eastman as Helen Cooper
Keith Wayne as Tom
Judith Ridley as Judy
Kyra Schon as Karen Cooper
Russell Streiner as Johnny

Trivia

Streiner, who plays Johnny, also delivered the line “They’re coming to get you, Barbra.” He was one of the producers.
The posse at the end includes real local hunters and news photographers. The stills under the credits are not production stills staged for a press kit. They are the scene.
Romero called the creatures ghouls. The film rarely uses the word zombie. Fans supplied it later.
A 1990 remake, directed by Tom Savini and written by Romero, recast Barbra as a capable survivor and was copyrighted.
Because the 1968 film is public domain, dozens of distributors have sold their own copies, some of them badly transferred. The Image Ten cut is the one to watch.
The Evans City cemetery scenes were shot with the cooperation of the cemetery association, which has traded on the location ever since.

Trailer

Go Behind the Screams

Check out these behind-the-scenes looks at how Night of the Living Dead (1968) was made: