It's zombie time! Another double feature, this time original vs. remake. In advance of the Spooky Picture Show's screening of the director's cut of the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead at Cinema Salem this past Saturday night, I went back and watched the 1968 original to both see how it holds up and have something to compare the remake to. Given that the original is a stone-cold classic, I think this competition is a foregone conclusion... or is it?
First, the original...
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Rated R
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Score: 4 out of 5
Having rewatched all three films in George A. Romero's original Living Dead trilogy, I can now make a statement that I'm pretty sure may be controversial: Night of the Living Dead is not his best film, nor is it a perfect film. Yes, it's a very good movie that still mostly holds up over half a century later, one that more than deserves its continued status as a classic and stands as a landmark of both independent cinema and zombie movies, a status that it would likely still have even if it hadn't been accidentally released into the public domain and spread far and wide through perfectly legal bootleg copies (seriously, you can watch it right now for free on YouTube, the Internet Archive, Wikipedia, and any number of other websites) thanks to a copyright mishap. It is, however, a flawed film, and I maintain that Dawn of the Dead is still not just Romero's best film but the Citizen Kane of zombie movies. There are a ton of great moments here that add up to a phenomenal movie, but there's also a lot of exposition that drags the film to a halt and a central character who often frustrated me with her uselessness. And, on, some level, I get the sense that Romero himself felt the same way about this movie, as when he wrote the official remake two decades later, that film fixed many of the problems I had with this one.
That being said, there's a reason why Night left the mark it did, establishing an entire genre of horror movies and inaugurating a new kind of horror monster, while wearing the mark of the heady, raucous era it came out in on its sleeve even if, unlike Romero's later films, it largely kept the satire and political subtext in the background. This is a movie about society turning against and consuming itself in an orgy of violence and destruction, the focus placed as much on the meltdown of its protagonists in the face of the monsters they may yet become as it is on the actual monsters themselves. Characters make mistakes and often do stupid things that get them killed, but in many ways, it feels like that's the entire point: that, even in the face of the apocalypse, we might sooner tear each other apart than come together to face the threat, a message that still unfortunately feels as relevant in 2026 as it must have in 1968. Its tone, style, and mood often feel like a B-grade '50s monster movie dragged kicking and screaming into the late '60s, the era of Altamont, the Manson Family, and riots in the street over the Vietnam War and civil rights, making for an experience that's at once deeply rooted in the time of its creation and yet timeless all the same, one that few other zombie films have ever managed to replicate. Even with its flaws, this is still a must-watch for any zombie fan.
The story is one that you've seen riffed on by countless zombie movies. A pair of siblings, Johnny and Barbra, travel to a cemetery in rural Pennsylvania to visit their father's grave, where they are attacked by a strange, hostile man. Johnny is killed in the ensuing scuffle, while Barbra flees to a nearby farmhouse and soon encounters an assortment of other survivors: Ben, who escaped a diner that was attacked by a similar bunch of "ghouls," the Cooper family, comprised of the parents Harry and Helen and their sick daughter Karen whose car was attacked, and Tom and Judy, a teenage couple who were canoodling at a nearby lake and fled to the nearest house they could reach after hearing a radio broadcast warning of similar attacks. What happened at the cemetery is not an isolated incident, as it turns out that a radioactive space probe returning from a flyover of Venus has caused recently deceased corpses across the eastern United States to rise from their graves and attack the living.
What follows set the template for generations of zombie movies, as most of the drama concerns not the zombies themselves, but the people trapped in the farmhouse whose personalities immediately start clashing with one another. The Coopers, especially Harry, wish to hide in the basement until help arrives, while Ben, Tom, and Judy want to first board up the windows and later get the hell out of there once they see a gas pump on the farm that they can use to refuel Ben's truck, and amidst the spiraling situation, what should be a reasonable dispute turns into a life-or-death struggle between the two sides of the group as Ben and Harry become each other's worst enemies. As the film goes on, it becomes clear that, while Ben seems like the more level-headed one at first glance, it may very well be Harry's plan that has the best chance of success, even if he is an asshole when it comes to presenting it. A lot of things have been read into what this film was saying about society at the time (unintentionally, given that Romero said that his goal was to make a simple monster movie), especially given that the film's colorblind casting meant that Ben is the lone Black person in the house and added a dose of racial subtext in the midst of the civil rights movement, but one thing that I took away from Ben and Harry's dispute that I haven't seen discussed much is how the right emotion and presentation can lend credibility to even bad arguments while good ones can be poorly presented and dismissed. Ben, who for all intents and purposes fits the mold of the classic hero, supports a plan to survive that, as the film goes on, is increasingly exposed as untenable, while Harry's plan to wait it out in the basement ultimately turns out to be the smartest course of action (at least, until an unforeseen spanner is thrown into the works), but was rejected by everybody outside his family because he was such an asshole to everyone around him, especially Ben. It felt like watching any number of frustrating policy debates where the smoothest and most charismatic speakers inevitably get ahead even when their ideas are flawed, while people who actually know their stuff but don't have nearly as much media training get trounced.
Behind the camera, meanwhile, Romero's greatest skill as a filmmaker was always his ability to depict the comfortable society we knew breaking down, and here, that skill is already apparent. Johnny doing a Boris Karloff impression ("they're coming to get you, Barbra!") before becoming the first person ever to get killed in a zombie movie was almost poetic, as does the fact that a lot of the radio and TV broadcasts feel like something out of a '50s sci-fi B-movie in which the reporters are describing the radioactive mutants assailing the world. It felt like this movie was closing the book on an older, tamer, safer era of horror, the postwar era of the '50s and early '60s where the Universal monsters had become cool mascots while newer horror movies were mostly made for teenagers making out at drive-in theaters. Even after decades of advances in gore effects, many of them brought about by this film's own sequels, the violence here still felt shocking, the way the violence in Gremlins did after its first act set up a much more family-friendly sort of monster movie, or how Psycho spent its first act as a noir thriller that wouldn't really kill off its heroine like that. "Subverting expectations" may be a cliché today, but even decades past the '60s, setting this movie up to be like the kind of movie you see on Mystery Science Theater 3000 only to pull the rug right out from under you with some seriously messed-up shit still hits hard. By the end, the farmhouse well and truly felt like a madhouse as zombies were banging on every door and window while I wondered which of the survivors was gonna snap and lose their shit first.
This is not a perfect movie, though. While Romero had some experience in television beforehand, this is still clearly the work of a first-time feature filmmaker, warts and all. The news bulletins take up long stretches of the film and feel like they're there simply to provide the requisite explanation for the zombies, not even really showing much of the chaos outside the farmhouse walls as opposed to merely describing it (something that Dawn of the Dead, both the original and the remake, did far better), and while I liked how the first radio broadcast was handled, playing in the background as Ben scrambles through the house searching for supplies and things to board up the windows with, the TV broadcasts brought the film to a complete halt and felt lifted from an entirely different movie. It's telling that Romero never bothered to explain in later films where the zombies came from, instead leaving it up to the characters to speculate on. The single biggest hole in the story and the character lineup, however, was Barbra. This is no shade on Judith O'Dea, who did exactly what the part required of her and did it well. She does a great job of playing somebody who absolutely crumbles from the shock and horror of her first experience with the undead, is never able to pull herself back together, and proves to be useless in a crisis, a harrowingly realistic portrait of how many of us would probably react if we got dropped into a real zombie apocalypse. This would have been fine...
...if the first act didn't set her up as the protagonist and main focal point of the film, only to go catatonic shortly after reaching the farmhouse and spend much of the film lying on the couch while the rest of the cast gets all the action. She felt like she was written as a child, and honestly, I believe that most of the problems I had with her character would've been fixed had they simply cast a child to play her. A little girl thrust into a survival situation like this and acting like she did would've not only been realistic, it would've been shocking, and given the presence of little Karen, it's not like this movie was averse to putting children in peril. But a grown woman in that same part feels like a walking stereotype of one of the most obnoxious character types in vintage horror: the screaming woman who does nothing but cower in fear and cause problems for the rest of the cast. Again, somebody completely losing it in a zombie apocalypse and falling apart like that makes sense, and I can understand a lot of the defenses I've seen of Barbra as a character and what Romero was going for with her, but the way her breakdown is handled in the movie was a drag. Even Romero seemed to agree given how she was heavily rewritten in the remake. Beyond my earlier suggestion of just making her a kid, I would've either had Barbra trying to pull her weight for much of the film but slowly cracking under pressure before finally snapping (and indeed, there is a perfect moment later on for it to happen), which would've at least given her an actual story arc and something to do while still keeping a similar tone to her character, or I would've had her as merely a supporting player from the start, with the first act focusing on either Ben, the Coopers, or Tom and Judy and only later introducing a shaken, traumatized Barbra when they reach the farmhouse. To go back to what I was saying earlier about this feeling like a subverted '50s monster movie, Tom and Judy in particular would've been great protagonists for really selling that feeling, the chaste, conventionally attractive teen heroes out of an American International Pictures creature feature who suddenly find that they're in a very different sort of movie.
The Bottom Line
Even today, Night of the Living Dead has lost little of its power to shock and terrify. It has its share of problems keeping it from perfection, but they don't keep it from greatness. This is still a must-watch for horror fans, especially zombie fans.
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And now, for the remake...
Night of the Living Dead (1990)
Rated R (unrated director's cut reviewed)
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Score: 4 out of 5
Tackling a remake of a classic like Night of the Living Dead is a tall order, but if there was anybody qualified for the task, it was George A. Romero himself. Upon finding out that somebody was planning on remaking his movie, Romero, his co-writer John Russo, and producer (and Johnny's actor) Russell Streiner, understandably still bitter over how their distributor accidentally put the original Night in the public domain (which led Romero to outright sue them for it), called up the producers of the remake and asked to get involved with it. Thus, we got Romero writing the screenplay, Russo and Streiner producing it, and special effects artist and longtime Romero collaborator Tom Savini making his feature directorial debut, and if I do say so myself, while the original just has a certain timeless quality to it that puts it over the top, from a standpoint of pure enjoyment this movie comes damn close to matching it and does quite a few things better. It boasts meatier special effects, a bigger cast led by Tony Todd, and a script that does more to flesh out the characters and smooth out the rougher edges of the original, and while some of the changes made to the story do take away some of its bite and turn it into a pretty conventional zombie movie, it's still a very well-made example of a conventional zombie movie, one that kicks ass, takes names, and delivers an intense ride from start to finish.
The film is more or less a beat-for-beat remake of the original that hews to about 90% of the same story, with the changes mostly coming in the characters. Tom is now the nephew of the farmhouse's now-zombified owner, Harry's asshole demeanor now comes with a side of domestic abuse towards his wife Helen, Ben and Harry's increasingly fraught relationship is emphasized (especially after Ben finds out that Harry's daughter was bitten), and most importantly, Barbara quickly snaps out of her funk and learns to pull her own weight in the house. Giving Barbara a rather conventional final girl arc may not be the most original course of action, but given that her character was one of my biggest faults with the '68 version, it felt like a welcome improvement here, especially with how Patricia Tallman's performance still managed to convey that she was getting rather unhinged over the course of the film. Instead of just going catatonic, Barbara here gets just a bit too into killing zombies, to the point that even the other characters start to get freaked out by her. I'm not surprised that Tallman, at the time best known as a stunt performer, went on to become a fixture of '90s TV sci-fi, nor am I surprised that Tony Todd, playing this film's version of Ben, went on to become a horror icon after this. Whereas Duane Jones played the original version of Ben as the suave, handsome leading man of a '50s creature feature, Todd's Ben is closer to an action hero, a far more take-charge character who's willing to fight the undead with his bare hands if that's what it takes, as well as make some of the hard decisions that the others can't or won't.
These changes are in line with Tom Savini's more "modern," action-packed vision for the film, where he gets to show off the sort of gore effects that the original couldn't, especially in the unrated cut I saw that the MPAA didn't butcher. Many scenes happen more or less as they did in the original, but are remixed and moved around in the story such that they give the movie a rather different flow, for better and for worse. Much of the exposition with the radio and TV news broadcasts, which took up large chunks of the original, is wisely shortened to just a couple of minutes here, with the exact cause of the zombie outbreak left a mystery (in line with how Romero's other Living Dead movies treated it). More scenes are given over to both zombie mayhem and character development. Perhaps most critically, the original's tone is softened, particularly its famously dark ending, with the finale homaging the original but otherwise ending in a slightly happier place. It's a more conventionally "Hollywood" ending for a zombie movie, and I do think it loses something in the translation, especially with the particularly on-the-nose satirical point at the end that felt far more heavy-handed than Romero's best work and came at the end of a movie that otherwise didn't really focus on such. Savini apparently had a lot of difficulties with the producers, saying that only about 40% of his ideas made it into the final product, and while the end result still turned out to be a very enjoyable movie, it still felt like it could've been something more.
The Bottom Line
The "Hollywood" version of Night of the Living Dead is a great way to describe this movie in general, and fortunately, it's quite possibly the best possible version of that movie. It drops the original's dark tone in favor of more action and characterization, and while I still think the original is the better movie, the competition between that and the remake was a lot closer than I expected it to be, with this version still being one I could throw on at any time if I wanna just sit back and have a good time watching a zombie movie.
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