Shot in 1968 on a shoestring budget in cheap black-and-white by a small collective of independent filmmakers from Pittsburgh, ‘Night of the Living Dead’ was to set new standards for what can be done in the horror genre. It introduced realistic gore to the mainstream, showed that an ordinary farmhouse can be a far more claustrophobic and frightening setting than a castle or mansion, demonstrated the devastating dramatic potential of an unhappy ending, and completely reinvented the cinematic concept of the zombie (without once using the term) to the blank, flesh-hungry undead still recognisable in the most recent rash of zombie films (28 Days Later…, Resident Evil, the Dawn of the Dead remake, Shaun of the Dead). In short, NOTLD breathed new life into the long dead corpse of horror, ushering in the Golden Age of the 1970s – and its influence on horror is still being felt today.
In the interests of unnerving the viewer, Romero broke all manner of cinematic conventions in NOTLD. Following a cue from Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’, the platinum blonde Barbra (Judith O’Dea) is introduced as the film’s apparent focus, only to be reduced to a state of catatonia (from which she never recovers) within minutes of the opening. Ben (Duane Jones), who eventually turns out to be the lead character, is a black man – something virtually without parallel for the time. Sympathetic characters – in fact, almost all the characters – are killed suddenly and violently.
NOTLD was revolutionary in other respects too, tapping into contemporary racial and social anxieties to add to its uneasy sense of dread. Ben is first seen in various postures – rushing suddenly out of the dark at Barbra, standing over her unconscious body – that pander to fear-mongering racist stereotypes of the time, but these stereotypes are subverted when he proves to be not the object of terror, but in fact the hero. On the other hand, the posse of rednecks who shoot and burn the ‘ghouls’ have been made to look and sound like the Southern lynch mobs that were so often seen on the TV news of the 1960s. Meanwhile back at the farm, the vicious attack on a mother (Marilyn Eastman) by her own daughter (Kyra Schon) reflects the vast rift emerging in the sixties between the values of older and younger generations. Even in the absence of its original social context, however, NOTLD still remains frightening and powerful, and its ending is just as harrowing as it was three and a h alf decades ago.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the ’30th Anniversary Edition’. Written and directed by John A. Russo, co-writer of the original, it comprises an extra fifteen minutes of newly filmed material, but Russo’s intention that this should merge seamlessly with the old is sorely misguided, both because black-and-white processing is not enough in itself to capture the look of the original (especially when the cemetery ghoul Bill Hinzman visibly changes age from one scene to the next), and because the new content is at best unnecessary (extra zombie sequences) and at worst unwelcome. In particular, a whole subplot involving a fire-and-brimstone priest (played gratingly by Scott Vladmir Licina, who also rescored the soundtrack to no obvious purpose) imports an overstated religious subtext that strips the original of all its subtlety – and the ill-judged reappearance of the priest in a semi-comic epilogue serves only to neuter the staggering impact of the original’s ending. Adding insult to injury, to make room for his revisions, Russo has shamelessly cut fifteen minutes from the original. Granted, the older material has been painstakingly restored, but why bother if it is only for Russo to go mindlessly stumbling about tearing its guts out? “Hit him in the head”, I say, “right between the eyes”.