Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane
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Boris Karloff,” he reveals. “It was the one where he got electrocuted and he came back to life [The Walking Dead]. He had one arm that was sort of dangling and he was dragging his leg. I think that’s where I got that from, subconsciously.” Marilyn Eastman’s adroit makeup reinforced that resemblance, as did Hinzman’s own hairstyle and coloring. Hinzman later recounted, “I sprayed my hair white and put some black on my cheeks. I was really surprised by how scary it turned out. I’ve been told several times how I scared the hell out of people as the lead ghoul.”
Hinzman had a major fan in Kyra Schon: “Bill Hinzman, the graveyard ghoul (or, as he prefers to be called, ‘#1 Zombie’), was, in my opinion, the scariest looking zombie and my personal favorite. He was my zombie role model. I compare all others to him, and everyone else pales (no pun intended) in comparison.”
That assessment passed a real-life test when Hinzman neglected to get out of character after leaving the set. “I remember coming home one night in makeup, returning to my little four-room hovel apartment, and I walked into the hall where the next-door neighbor was standing. Well, I damned near scared the shit outta her!”
Observant Deadheads have noted that Hinzman’s zombie exhibits a bit more pep than most of his living dead peers. Hinzman explains, “Russell (Streiner) comes to her (Barbara’s) rescue and attacks me. At that point George said, ‘Okay, he’s attacking you, you have to kill Russell.’ I said, ‘How am I supposed to kill this guy when throughout the film you were always telling us that we have no power except in tandem with each other and could only rely on each other for strength.’ And he thought about it for a while and the famous line, in my memory, is, ‘Oh fuck it, just kill him.’” Those were, in fact, the final scenes shot, so Romero might be forgiven for his zombie-empowering impatience.
Many of the volunteers went above and beyond the call of living-dead duty. Romero cites local TV personality Dave James’s drop-dead fall as one of the zombies popped by Sheriff McClelland’s posse as a prime example. “People get up in front of the camera,” he says with wonder, “and all of a sudden someone who’s never done anything like that before does something spectacular like that—that’s a stuntman fall!”
Assembling the zombie-hunting posse proved a relatively easy task. “We were able to drum up lots of cooperation,” says Russo. “David Craig, the actual Safety Director of the City of Pittsburgh, appeared in the film. So did four Pittsburgh policemen with their police dogs.” Adds Hinzman, “The scene with the dogs was a very scary scene for the number one zombie. Because the direction was, ‘Don’t turn around and look.’ And you knew those dogs were right on your butt. And you were hoping they wouldn’t get loose.” Russo also earns props for his participation in that particular sequence: “I was lying down with a 16mm camera right in front of them, with them barking in my face. I thought if they ever break the leash, I’m finished.”
Filling out the posse’s civilian ranks were Evans City citizens who supplied their own firepower. “They were all happy to have guns in their hands,” says Romero. “We had quite an arsenal.” It was George Kosana’s job to keep the posse in line, making sure those guns weren’t loaded. But the extras’ amateur status didn’t earn them any breaks from Romero. Judith O’Dea recalls, “I’ll never forget when George was filming, he had all those men a quarter of a mile, way out into the field, and he yelled, ‘Action!’ These guys, the first take, are intense, walking along there with their guns, and they get a quarter-mile in and George says, ‘Cut! Let’s do it again.’ They must have walked back and forth and back and forth I don’t know how many times—it was hysterical at the end. These guys were practically dragging their rifles, they were so tired.”
While the posse’s all-white, redneck makeup made the film more powerful, especially to midnight moviegoers and African-American audiences, the filmmakers did not go out of their way to achieve that ethnic composition. “We would probably have used anybody and everybody who showed up,” Russo states today, “because we had put out desperate calls for extras, many of whom were friends and friends of friends from Claireton, Pennsylvania, my old home town, where George Kosana and I were living at that time. American society was much more stratified at that time, and so most of the people we closely associated with happened to be white in that small town, although most of us who worked on Night of the Living Dead were not prejudiced in that regard.” Though they would have been accepted, no hippies applied for the gig either. Says Russo, “That fashion wasn’t so big right in the narrow spectrum of time in which Night of the Living Dead was filmed, so it is pure accident that no longhairs showed up.”
Not even the police—or their dogs—were immune to the zombies’ menace. “We were having lunch and it was a posse day,” Bill Hinzman looks back. “I was dressed in a zombie outfit, of course. I was having lunch with one of the girls at a picnic table. One of the cops was sitting there with a German shepherd police dog. And this cop was trying to impress the young lady sitting across the table, saying he was a great dog, he wasn’t scared of anything. One of the girls playing a zombie [Paula Richards] came around the corner; she had on a long white gown and black hair and zombie makeup on. That dog took one look at her and took off in the opposite direction!”
A Night to Remember: What the Living Dead Means to Me
by Allan Arkush
It always struck me as a movie that wasn’t made so much as found moldering in the cellar of an abandoned house. And I do mean that as a compliment. Yes, that’s how convincing I find the movie to be. It looks like it must have really happened!!!
In the early ’80s, when I was directing rock videos, I once met with Motley Crue and presented them with a concept for their next video. I wanted to recreate Night of the Living Dead with them playing the living dead. In the style of the movie, they would be chasing down hot video girls in scratchy 16mm black and white. Sadly, the only part they liked was chasing down hot video girls. Oh, well, a lost opportunity.
A graduate of the unofficial Roger Corman Filmmaking School, ALLAN ARKUSH earned his cult-movie stripes directing the 1979 fave Rock’n’Roll High School, which had its New York City premiere at Night ’s perennial venue, the Waverly Theater. He has since gone on to a prolific career in TV movies ( Elvis Meets Nixon ) and episodic television, executive producing and frequently directing the hit series Heroes.
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