Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane
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shatters the window with a heavy rock.
Alas, Barbara’s escape attempt lasts but a few yards as she plows the car into a tree. There follows a frenzied flight, shown in a blur of multi-angle images further spiked by a panicky soundtrack, as Barbara zigzags down the graveyard road. She never pauses, not even once she’s outdistanced her erratically loping pursuer. In a standard horror film, her nearly three-minute sprint might well tax audience patience. But Night ingeniously ups the terror ante with each frantic footfall, hitting such a hyper pace that the opposite effect takes hold, forcing jangled viewers to share Barbara’s suffocating fear.
When she escapes into an appararently empty farmhouse, Barbara keeps cool enough to lock the door, dial the phone (it’s dead), and snatch a protective knife from a kitchen drawer. A frightened peek outside reveals that two additional fearful figures have joined her brother’s attacker. Shell shocked, Barbara decides to explore upstairs, only to be stopped dead in her tracks by the grotesquely grinning skull of a rotting corpse.
Draped over the banister, Barabara half-slips, half-slides down the stairs. Now she’s freaking out in earnest. She staggers to the front porch, where headlights freeze her, fawnlike, in their blinding glare. Without warning, a face pops up out of nowhere and into frame—a black face. Help or another threat? For the moment, Barbara doesn’t know—and neither do we. When the intruder hustles her back into the house, we realize he’s on her (and our) side. Still, trapped in the imperiled farmhouse with a black stranger while killers mill outside, Barbara’s mental meltdown accelerates.
The man identifies himself as Ben, but there’s no time for personal details or pleasantries. Ben quickly sizes up the situation and takes control, questioning, with little success, the now silent and useless Barbara. He also tries the phone, which emits a weird, faint electronic hum. He, too, discovers the corpse at the top of the stairs and mutters a stunned, “Jesus.” When he stumbles downstairs, Barbara briefly assumes a prayerful position as if responding to Ben’s religious “plea.” But it doesn’t look like any deus ex machina’s on the way to save these souls caught in a sudden living hell.
As Ben moves about the house, we also imbue him with a sketchy backstory never spelled out in the film. We can tell by his speech and comportment that he’s intelligent and highly competent, but his casual clothes suggest that, as a black man in 1968 America, he probably works a job that’s somewhat beneath his abilities. We also suspect, from the otherwise white (and, in the case of the attackers, downright pale) characters we’ve encountered thus far, he’s probably not native to the immediate area but just “passing through.”
While Ben scours the house for food, blood from the ceiling drips on Barbara’s hand. Seeking Ben’s solace, she locates him in the kitchen and absently fondles his tire iron. Her hysterical query—“What’s happening?”—could have gotten a laugh, given the jargon of the time, but it never did at any screening we attended. Ben doesn’t know the answer.
Outside, the zombie ranks continue to swell. The walking dead seem more focused now, hefting stones and systematically smashing Ben’s headlights. He takes his trusty tire iron to one of the creatures, then another, crushing their skulls (at this point, they’re out of frame, though the scene is accompanied by emphatic soundtrack thumps).
One zombie enters the house via the back door and creeps up on Barbara, but Ben swiftly intervenes, wrestling the crippled-looking fiend to the floor. This time the camera doesn’t cut away, and we see the gruesome results of Ben’s handiwork—a large, lethal hole in the zombie’s forehead. Ben dispatches another deader in the doorway. The first zombie’s eyes fly open. Ben commands Barbara, “Don’t look at it!” He drags the body outside and sets it on fire as the other zombies back away.
Stifling his impatience, Ben exhorts Barbara to help him find boards to block the windows and reinforce the doors, vulnerable points of entry the zombies appear determined to penetrate. Barbara is hypnotized instead by a tinkling music box, a genteel reminder of a recent, abruptly smashed past. Ben locates lumber conveniently stashed under the kitchen sink and, working alone, begins boarding up the house. Barbara lends an ineffectual hand in a slow, nearly wordless sequence that again could have bored audiences. By this time, however, most viewers with active pulses are too hooked to fidget; they’re thoroughly fixated on every move, no matter how slight, the screen protagonists make.
While dismantling a table, Ben relates the tale of carnage he’d witnessed at Beekman’s Diner: “I was alone. Fifty or sixty of those things were just standing there.” Once Ben completes his horrific monologue, Barbara begins to tell her story, albeit in the voice of a traumatized child. She trails off, complains of the house’s heat, tugs at her clothes, and again grows hysterical, irrationally insisting they leave and look for Johnny. When Ben opines that Johnny’s dead, Barbara slaps him. In another culturally trailblazing moment, black Ben delivers a solid punch to the white woman’s jaw. He gently places an unconscious Barbara on the couch, then clicks on the radio.
As Ben continues to seal up the house, a newscaster reports an “epidemic of mass murder by a virtual army of unidentified assassins” plaguing the “eastern third of the nation.” Spooky sci-fi theremin music nearly drowns out the announcer’s droning tones.
As people were wont to do concerning the ubiquitous, nerve-numbing news accounts of the latest Vietnam casualty stats, political assassinations, civil unrest, and other routine outrages of the era, Ben only half listens as he dutifully pursues more practical matters. Having discovered the fiends’ fear of fire, he pushes a chair out the door and sets it aflame; the zombies stiffly retreat.
In a hall closet, Ben finds a rifle—and a pair of women’s shoes. He bends down to put the shoes on an awake but frozen Barbara, a gesture that hints of both intimacy and servility; to Ben, the act is purely pragmatic, though we do sense his growing empathy for the terrified girl. The radio reveals that the hordes of unknown slayers are “eating the flesh of the people they kill.” Ben goes upstairs and drags the female corpse down the hallway.
Suddenly, the cellar door swings open. Two men burst forth. Barbara screams. Having assumed the job of Barbara’s protector, Ben rushes downstairs, ready to do battle. He angrily asks the men why they didn’t help them if they knew the two were on the floor above.
The older man, excitable, middle-aged Harry Cooper, responds with equal rancor. Their argument escalates immediately, reflecting the toxic generational discord of the 1960s (where families argued over issues ranging from racism to Vietnam politics to basic life values). Many viewers instantly peg quintessential square Harry, with his bulldozer approach to dissenting opinions, as a petty, bullying know-it-all dad and authority figure. Ben, on the other hand, is a defiant black man, standing in and up for the country’s alienated youth, segregated minorities, disenfranchised poor, and all the oppressed.
Then the Great Basement Debate commences. Should the survivors hole up in the cellar, isolated and blind, as Harry insists, or remain on the first floor, where the enemy’s movements can be monitored and dealt with directly? With Harry representing the Old Right and Ben the New Left, the argument flares with the same intensity that fueled the repetitive political arguments that marked those confrontational times.
The divisive squabble seems to drag on interminably, with each side loudly reiterating its position with no signs of compromise or progress, each more interested in proving its point than coping with a common problem. Tom, meanwhile, plays the role of the undecided youth who listens to both sides and gradually leans toward Ben. That heated discussion is abruptly interrupted by a classic jump scare when, as Ben brushes by, clutching zombie arms suddenly thrust through the boarded window gaps.
Ben and Tom hurriedly beat them back, and then Ben grabs his gun and fires through the window. Bullets, we see, are ineffective against a persistent zombie until Ben drills him through the head. Buoyed by his kill, Ben informs an unhelpful Harry: “You can be the boss down there. I’m boss up here.” Midnight-movie audiences often cheered that moment of underdog defiance.
When her beau summons her from the basement we next meet Tom’s fetching squeeze, Judy. (Like the late Johnny, the two have been lightly touched by slowly spreading ’60s styles, with Tom sporting modest sideburns and Judy bedecked in hip