![]() ![]() Tom and Judy mess up though, with gas spilled, and the torches they brought to keep the zombies at bay igniting the fuel, killing the young couple. He is steady and confident and a leader when no one else knows what to do.īen creates a plan to get help for Karen by leading some of the group to nearby gas pumps so they can fill up his truck's gas tank. He doesn’t wilt, afraid to be a Black man standing up to a white man. There’s a young couple named Tom and Judy ( Keith Wayne and Judith Ridley) and a middle-aged husband and wife named Harry and Helen ( Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman), who have a young daughter, Karen ( Kyra Schon), who stays down in the cellar because she is sick after having been bitten by one of the zombies.Īs more zombies descend on the farmhouse, Harry reveals himself to be a hothead, complaining that it’s unsafe to stay here and that they should all go to the cellar, rather than helping. Not long after, more people come up from the cellar, where they’ve been hidden this whole time. He hurries to try to board up the house, and fires a rifle and lights fires outside to try to keep back the small trail of zombies who have started to find them. He asks her questions about what’s going on, but she’s no help. That’s proven quickly, as when he comes into the house, he finds Barbara completely out of it, in shock from what she has witnessed. He is strong and smart and quick on his feet. He’s not a sidekick to a white character, and he’s not smiling and cracking jokes. He doesn’t talk a certain way or act a certain way. Outside of Sidney Poitier, Black men weren't portrayed as every day, regular people.īen is not played as a 1960s Black character trope. While there had been many Black people in movies during this time and before, more often than not they were seen as the help, or they played the slave or the friend or the comic relief. Here is where the film starts to become something more than just another monster movie. Soon after, another person running for their life arrives at the farmhouse, a lanky man named Ben ( Duane Jones). ![]() Barbara flees, finding shelter in an abandoned farmhouse nearby. Adult brother and sister, Barbara and Johnny ( Judith O’Dea and Russell Streiner), both white, are at a cemetery to visit the grave of their father when an old man walking with a strange gait attacks them, killing Johnny. ![]() The beginning of the film plays out like your standard horror film of the day. This one film and its new monsters would change the course of horror forever. It was George Romero who created the modern zombie we all know of the dead who rise to walk again and feast on flesh, and who can only be taken down with a bullet to the head. There had been zombie films before Night of the Living Dead, such as White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie in the 1930s, but then zombies were living people under a voodoo spell. What’s more tumultuous than that? How about a zombie outbreak? These days, zombie films and TV series have been done to death, but half a century ago it was a new subgenre. Two months later, on June 6th, Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. was struck down by an assassin’s bullet on April 4th of that year. Before that, the country had to go through two of the most shocking and heartbreaking assassinations. It was also a chaotic Presidential election year, one that ended with violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which sought to ban discrimination, was being felt throughout the country, with Black people still struggling despite the legislation’s best intentions. You don’t have to look hard to find the message that is playing out beside the simple story of zombies attacking people who have boarded themselves up in a farmhouse. Perhaps the most political, socially aware horror film is 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Candyman are just a few over the decades which had a message beneath the mayhem. ![]() Horror films have long been political, however, and not just recently with Get Out or The Purge. In today’s politically divided world, many are quick to say that they don’t want politics in their movies, especially with horror, a genre that is generally seen as escapism, where for 90 minutes you can get scared and forget your real life worries. ![]()
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