Beginning Halloween 2024, I decided to start a new tradition of watching a horror movie during the holiday. I was 17 that year and definitively too old to be trick-or-treating, and I thought it would be a good way to knock out two birds with one stone, both replacing the old tradition with a new one and forcing me out of my comfort zone at least one day out of the year, since I usually hate horror movies. I ended up enjoying my time with The Exorcist more than I expected, and I chose to continue the tradition this year by watching Night of the Living Dead (I originally planned on watching The Shining, but I couldn’t find an easy way to access it)
The film centers on a group of 6 people: Ben, Barbara, Tom, Judy, Helen, and Harry, who are trying to survive a horde of zombies while boarded up in a small farmhouse. My expectations were honestly pretty low heading in due to its age, but it does an excellent job of building / maintaining tension. Things start slow, with just a single zombie killing Johnny (Barbara’s brother) and forcing her to flee into the farmhouse where the rest of the plot takes place. To be blunt, the special effects on the zombies are terrible, but it manages to side-step the issue by instead focusing on the sheer number of them and the isolated environment of the farmhouse. Even when Ben and co show up later, you get a visceral sense of how vulnerable the home is against the hordes of zombies that are continually appearing, that no matter how secure the doors and windows are, they’ll eventually be able to push through by sheer mass.
That tension plays a major role in the arguments the group has, which were also well executed. I liked that they didn’t just turn on or irrationally hate each other for melodrama, instead the two major “camps” (Ben / Tom who want to stay upstairs to maintain access to the radio, and Harry who wants to go into the cellar for maximum safety) both have understandable arguments, which keeps the focus on the threat the zombies pose rather than the group’s bickering. The actual scariness factor is pretty limited for most of the runtime, but it ramps up near the end when the group’s plan to escape via truck fails and Helen / Harry are killed by their own daughter who was bitten by a zombie earlier on. The final scene where Ben is boarded up in the cellar alone genuinely terrified me, which is impressive for a movie that came out in the 60s.
There is some Hays Code energy with how reluctant the film is to show or directly address death, as well as with how little agency the female characters exercise, but the film has really stood the test of time. I can see why it had such an impact on the popular conception of zombies. I’ll probably go for a more modern, intensely scary movie next Halloween, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.